Free Britney! Or "why women can't be rock stars"

Poor Britters. Almost every vile idea western culture has cultivated about women in the last two centuries has come home to roost on the half-bright pop starlet from a trailer trash town in Louisiana. She was a fried-chicken loving, Bible-believing, pre-pubescent beauty queen once. Now she’s a combination of Ophelia, the mad woman in the attic, Rapunzel, the wicked witch of the west and a plain old hysteric.

I use that word advisedly, in the Victorian sense. A woman driven mad by her womb. Because this, surely, was the catalyst that turned her from your average drinks-too-much-and-takes-her-clothes-off-teeny bopper into a prisoner of someone else’s device. Literally. Not content with taking away her children, the court then took away her personhood – handing the 26-year-old superstar and her estimated $40M fortune to the conservatorship of her oft-estranged father Jamie Spears (himself reportedly an alcoholic).

It was a disturbing and unbelievably sexist decision made – incredibly – by a woman: Reva Goetz. Handing Britney’s estate, temporarily, over to the care of her mother, Lynn, would have made a lot more sense, if parental care was merely the issue. After all, the singer and her mother appear to have a deep and loving, if troubled, relationship. The singer and her father didn’t appear to have a relationship at all, until he suddenly petitioned the court for unhindered control over ever aspect of her life (he has access to her medical records, control over who visits her houses, he can even change the locks on the doors) and her immense fortune. The message couldn’t be clearer: an out of control woman needs a man.

Most people, even if they wouldn’t agree Britney should have been handed over to her father like – literally – a piece of chattel, would probably agree she needed some kind of intervention. In itself a temptingly paternalistic view. Imagine, for a moment, she were a man. No need to imagine, actually, just trawl your memory for the countless stories of male rock’n’roll wildness ingrained in our cultural history:

Britney romped topless in a swimming pool.
Keith Moon drove a car into one, but no one thought to lock him up.

Motley Crue’s Vince Neil killed his friend in a drink driving accident and got 30 days in jail.
Britney once drove briefly with her baby son in her lap, no harm done apart from to her reputation – yet her house arrest has just been extended to six months.

Led Zeppelin made a habit of throwing televisions out of hotel windows and they were hailed as the hottest thing on the planet.
When Britney hit a car with an umbrella the tabloids went into meltdown, tutting over her "out of control" behaviour.

Britney was accused by “insiders” of feeding her kids junk food and trying to get her toddler’s teeth whitened.
No one seems to recall that during the making of Exile On Main Street various Stones’ babies were left to wander through the French farmhouse-come-recording-studio with feeding and nappy-changing done at the random impulse of whatever groupies were hanging around at the time.

Britters, in short, hasn’t been anywhere near as mad or bad as the [male] music stars that have gone before. Yet when she transgressed she was swiftly locked up in the gilt cage of her Beverly Hills mansion. It wouldn’t happen to a man. But then, lacking the appropriate reproductive organs, men can’t be hysterics, I guess.

Interestingly, one of the arguments trotted out to ultimately justify this was her “suicidal” tendencies. Jesus lord. Kurt Cobain had suicidal tendencies. Ian Curtis had suicidal tendencies. Jim Morrison had suicidal tendencies. When a man is driven to despair and kills himself it is poetic, heroic, noble even. When a woman betrays signs of the same despair it must be because she’s crazy, dangerous, unfit to make decisions for herself.

Why? Because ultimately, she is someone’s property. Why should daddy Spears have to give up such a prime piece of stock? Who gives a damn about the feelings of the goose who laid the golden egg?

Your money or your life: US health insurers conspire to commit murder

Some days the little IHT banner in my Gmail makes me want to dance with rage. Most days, in fact. Thanks to headlines like “Patients in U.S. to foot more of the bill for vital drugs”. What fresh hell is this? I wonder. Before I even click through to read the story I feel the foul ripples of some new Social Darwinist experiment poisoning the collective consciousness.

Apparently American health insurance companies, in their infinite wisdom and compassion, have started adjusting their co-payment system (whereby the insured person pays for part of the cost of their prescription drugs) from flat fees – say $20 or $50 a prescription to percentages. Like, 25% or 30%, or more. Not, of course, for cheap, bog standard antibiotics (there’s no money to be made there, they’re in the public domain) but for exorbitantly expensive new drugs “used to treat diseases that may be fairly common, including multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, hemophilia [sic], hepatitis C and some cancers.” Diseases, in other words, that are chronic, devastating and require indefinite treatment.

Usually with drugs which, as the IHT blandly reports for which“[there are] no cheaper equivalents… so patients are forced to pay the price or do without.” Think about that for a minute. This isn’t your usual, boring petty larceny on the part of the insurance companies. This is blackmail on a ferociously ambitious scale. It’s conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm. It’s attempted manslaughter (if you, the jury, are feeling generous).

They’re not just randomly jacking up the prices for everyone. The insurance companies, surely in collusion with the pharmaceutical companies, are methodically working out what drugs people literally cannot live without and which – because the pharmaceutical companies have cowed the government into ridiculously favourable intellectual property laws – there is no alterative supply for, and unapologetically telling them: your money or your life.

It would be more honest, and probably kinder, if they went round a cancer patient’s house and held a gun to their head. At least then if they couldn’t afford to pay out the end would be quick and painless.

The insurance companies are trying to use the paper-thin justification that by making the sickest people pay the most they are “holding down premiums” for people who aren’t sick – in itself, a breathtaking display of doublethink. People who aren’t sick aren’t going to be paying for prescription drugs anyway, so whether they pay a fixed fee out of zero dollars or 30% out of zero dollars it makes no odds.

Effectively, this new system benefits no-one (except the insurance companies) and flattens already struggling, vulnerable people with the financial equivalent of a cartoon anvil. Only there’s nothing funny about this. There’s nothing funny about having to choose between paying your rent or taking the drugs that will stop you bleeding to death from a bad cut, or having your muscles waste away.

The best bit? Private health insurance companies can “legally change their coverage to one in which some drugs are Tier 4 [the new, percentage co-payment] with no advance notice.” If Kafka were writing today he’d be a reporter, not a novelist.

81%

As an expat, I’m not quite sure how to take the news that 81% of Americans believe “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track.” Part of me chortles: no shit, Sherlock! Why the hell do you think I grabbed my suitcase and ran, six years ago, to the first country that would give me a visa? And then hung on by my fingernails till I was finally granted citizenship, forever absolving me of the need/obligation to return to the land of my fathers?

On the other hand, even a callous, no-regrets expat like me has to admit that a lot of the shitstorm currently hovering over the lower 48 is the work of a relatively small cadre of uber-villains. I mean, the majority of Americans in the last two elections voted for the guy who didn’t end up in the White House. When that shit happens in Africa or Eastern Europe the US of A is all for sending in the cavalry to ensure free and fair elections. Which, come to think of it, may explain why the cavalry was notably absent when America was getting stitched up by a vicious oligarchy of moneyed morons with bloodlust in their eyes. Having voted for the winning candidate in the last two elections I sympathise with the millions who didn’t have a passport in hand when the bad news blew down from the top of Mount Sinai.

Living on the safe side of the Atlantic for a few years had considerably dulled my empathy, until I went back to spend thanksgiving with my family last year. The first clue something was wrong: the better-than-two-to-one dollar to pound exchange which meant I could shop like Paris Hilton on a measly freelance writer’s wage. More alarming was my ex-boyfriend telling me how his (23-year-old) friend died of complications of treatable diabetes because his call-centre job didn’t come with health insurance. That’s the sort of shit that makes you sit up, pay attention, and stop playing footsie over your scrambled eggs. Especially when you hear the same story again and again… from your sister who can’t quit work even though she’s in constant, debilitating pain because – if she did – she’d lose any medical benefits; when the woman next to you on the flight home tells you she spends over $800 per month on health coverage; when you wake up struggling for breath and pray it’s not an asthma attack coming on because in the Land Of The Free you can’t afford to be sick.

The second thing that blew my “fuck ‘em” cynicism to high heavens was the casually dispensed news item in The Oregonian that noted over 10% of Oregonians are “food insecure” – a fancy phrase for “don’t know where their next meal is coming from.” I read this between making four-cheese macaroni and bourbon orange cake for thanksgiving dinner. Clearly, not everyone is suffering. But a lot of people are. Journalistic curiosity piqued I wound up taking a very long, wet walk around industrial southeast Portland to the Oregon Food Bank, which tries to stave off the worst effects of America’s non-existent social support network. A plump, smiley blonde PR girl showed me around. The OFB is a private charity so I had to ask, “What resources would be available for people who need food if you weren’t here?” She smiled more, shook her head, didn’t understand the question. “What government programmes are there to help feed people?” I asked.

She smiled at me gently, like I’d just asked for the Tooth Fairy’s home address. “There aren’t any.”

I left the food bank and walked through the rainy dusk, simmering with anger, trying to come to terms with the inexplicable: how the richest nation on earth casually shrugs its shoulders and looks away when its own citizens don’t have enough to eat. In a way it explains America’s crude disinterest in human suffering around the globe. Fuck, if they can’t pick themselves up to feed their own population (despite spending billions creating “biofuels” to pump into the ridiculously over-sized, over-priced cars of the privileged) why should they give a damn if kids are dying in Africa?

This was in November, 2007. Things have only gotten/are only going to get worse. And yeah, hell, I can’t believe it took Americans this long to realise what a fucking raw deal they’re getting. But more than ever I feel sorry for them. The way I feel sorry for the poor bastards trying to vote themselves out of hell in Zimbabwe, or the monks in Tibet trying to have their say in the face of a tyrannical government prone to violently, inexplicably incarcerating people who have the front to disagree with their “policies.” Mostly, I guess, because – like any other escapee of a corrupt, despicable regime – I worry for those I left behind. For my fiercely smart, articulate, intractable siblings; for my mum; for that ex-boyfriend, who isn’t going to know what hit him…. Maybe, even, for the tiny part of me that wishes the door hadn’t slammed so firmly shut behind me.

Citius, Altius, Cynicus…

I’d like to the think the story running beneath the headline Olympic Athletes Struggle With Protest On Darfur would involve, say, athletes risking life and limb to hang banners of protest from the nearest sports arena. Or putting their physical talents to high-risk use by personally sprinting across a Sudanese no-man’s land to deliver food aid, or something…. What I don’t want to discover is a meek, three-page apology for a bunch of cosseted, nutritionally-enhanced, massaged, over-funded, elite athletes who are currently simpering into their sports drinks because they’re afraid – poor, docile little lambs – that suggesting genocide is a bad thing might cost them a buck.

The opening two paragraphs of the story set a heart-rending scene. Not a refugee camp in the Sudan where women face the choice between risking rape to find fuel to cook for their families or watching their children go hungry, but an oh-so-much-more-poignant dilemma: that of a young American softball player, Jessica Mendoza, torn between banking her Nike payoff or going on record saying ethnic cleansing is wrong.

“Whether speaking to a group of young softball players or plying her teammates with literature, Jessica Mendoza… does not hesitate to speak her mind about the killings in Darfur,” it says breathlessly (brave, brave Mendoza! Giving leaflets to her buddies in the changing room! It’s nothing short of heroic!)“But Mendoza stops short of publicly condemning China… because one of her sponsors, Nike, has a major marketing presence in China.”

Suddenly all is dramatically clear. The unreasonable demands of conscience balanced against the perfectly understandable need to look after her fiscal self-interest. Still, poor Mendoza is doing everything she can. The article continues with the uplifting news that “When she is not in uniform competing, Mendoza plans to wear her Team Darfur wristbands around Beijing.” Whew. There I was thinking for a second that she was just another opportunistic do-gooder, paying lip service to good causes without making any sacrifices. But oh no, not our intrepid Mendoza – she’s going to wear a wristband around Beijing. I bet the militias are disarming as we speak.

To be fair, it seems Mendoza isn’t the only athlete who’s offloaded all unnecessary baggage in the pursuit of success – including morality and a functioning cerebral cortex. Basketball player LeBron James has refused to criticize China over Darfur for fear of endangering a $90M Nike contract. Oh, and apparently it’s okay for lesser-known athletes to cop out of taking a stand because the Olympics are “their one time every four years to make money.”

God forbid anyone should be so narrow minded, so unresponsive to the needs of badminton players or synchronized swimmers or whatever as to suggest that human lives might be a little more valuable than them getting a water-bottle endorsement contract.

The moral monstrosity of this pitiful “discussion” is eye-watering. Pathetic equivocations like “There's a time and place for the issues and causes… the Olympic Games and politics don't go together,” make me want to shriek. What the fuck is wrong with these people? Have their iron-rich diets so hopelessly warped their moral compasses that they really don’t see anything wrong with sitting back in their paid-for Olympic Village suite swigging protein shakes while people are being slaughtered in Sudan? Would they be so fucking complacent if it were their families living precariously in refuge camps as the world disintegrated into hell on earth around them? Would they be so complacent if it were white people suffering? Hell no.

The only person who comes out of this article looking like he has a soul is Angolan basketball player Emanuel Neto who says, “It doesn't matter… what will happen to me. What matters… is that something has to be done.”

Too fucking right something has to be done. For starters, how ‘bout we call off the quadrennial orgy of smug jingoism and homage to steroid use that is the Olympics and spend a few of the billions poured into it feeding some of the children who are dying at a rate of 70 per day in Darfur? Or is that a little too radical for those nice, wristband sporting athletes and their “struggle”? Lord knows, no child’s life is worth losing your supply of free sneakers over.