----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com>
nathanne at nathannewman.org wrote:
>We can care about thousands of things at a time-- I just think there are
>thousands of folks railroaded into jail who should have more attention
>than Martha.
-That's not "our" choice, really. She's the one getting all the column -inches in the papers and precious minutes on TV. I thought I could -work a critique into the slip-stream of her fame.
Fair enough, but there's always the balance of opportunistically using cultural celebrity focus versus just reinforcing it. Lots of folks say they are just using such cultural events to analyze broader social concerns-- OJ and race and so on-- but in many cases, they distort the connections far more than they illuminate. They are often so aberrant precisely because of their fame that they end up being misleading about what really goes on for non-celebrity folks. Martha for example may be being prosecuted more harshly because of her fame, just as she has greater cultural resources to fight back-- so both ends of prosecution and defense are atypical and representative of very little.
Nathan