Cher has done a lot of things. She scored her first Hot 100 chart-topper in 1965 and her last in 1999. (At 52, Cher was the oldest woman to land a #1 hit until last week, when Brenda Lee broke the record.) Cher sang backup on “Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.” She helped modernize the variety show in the ’70s and defied expectations in the ’80s. She won an Oscar for Best Actress. The ubiquitous robotic Auto-Tune effect? Cher did that first. But Cher is not in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, and she thinks that’s some bullshit.
You know, that interview isn’t as bad a proof that he’s a douche as people make it out to be.
I’m not saying he isn’t douche, he is. I’m just saying that specific interview wasn’t damning the way it’s been made out to be. What that interview points out and proves is that he’s old and arrogant and doesn’t bother to think.
It’s his actions in the rest of his life that damn him as a douche.
I wouldn’t necessarily disagree. For me, it’s more that the article merely signaled the existence the vast and cumulative douchebaggery of a massively privileged, narcissistic, casually prejudiced and tone-deaf life than attempted to contain it.
Oh yeah. But it was constant douche, daily, from the late 60s to this day: a word from him could make or break a career (and did) and he used it freely. People hung on his every word, his every whim, and so did he. That’s over a full half-century of constant and uninterrupted doucheness, not counting whatever normal and expected childhood douching he got up to. So much douche, in fact, that if he were a Francophone, he’d be in the running for cleanest man alive, and not just a highly-placed misogynist/racist – yet still fairly mediocre – rich and powerful English-speaking American douche.
There’s a thing Martin Luther King Jr said, that’s partially quotedHere, and I apologize for the source, but I’m a busy bee this morning and that’s the first link I could find that covered it.
Anyway, the point being is that this guy personifies exactly what MLK was saying. Outwardly an American liberal (which isn’t really the same thing that everyone everywhere uses the word liberal for, hence the specification). On the surface, he’s all for the typical ideas of equality and humanity that the word liberal is supposed to cover. But underneath, he convinces himself he’s not racist or sexist because he’s willing to vote and speak around those ideas.
But, in practice, he’s internalized the same patriarchal, bigoted fallacies as many other people do. Mind you, it is difficult to abandon the sense of superiority that thinking you’re open minded gives you long enough to actually examine yourself. And it’s his arrogance that makes it unlikely he’ll ever do the kind of self examination necessary to police himself enough to try and change.
That arrogance was reinforced by the power he held.
I mean, I don’t hate the guy. For one, hating some random stranger is a waste of energy. But he isn’t unique in his failings. Damn near every human on the planet fails at the kind of self examination necessary to see themselves as flawed. Even the best efforts can fail because it’s just so damn hard to look at yourself and divorce that view from your own inner thoughts and motivations. Being objective about the self is hard. Even when someone knows all of that, actually pulling off that objectivity is a long road filled with potholes. I know I sure as fuck fail at it often.
I just wish he be an outlier than a norm.
P.S. That NYT article was excellent, and a perfect example of the point you were making. Thank you for sharing it; I had not read it before and it was a good read.
Not to make light of a very serious subject, but Jungian shadow work is a thing, and not rare. I don’t want to talk much about this publicly or with any specific detail, but as universal human truth, we only see what we want to see. That is why perfect self-objectivity will always fail, because the self is still the self, both observer and observed – and the gatekeeper to both. If a person were instead to shift their introspective goals to complete self-acceptance and self-love, those are far better at opening the inner doors to seeing oneself as one is. Objectivity is indeed hard, especially when it is intellectual and clinical and cold and self-distancing, and you already believe somewhere deep down that you have every reason to accept that the peripheries are the whole.
Jann Wenner is a perfect example of a person who has these inner demons, and a great deal of not-love toward the self, as if he has come to accept what he is as an openly gay man, for example, but still resents himself for making him fight that battle. Underneath narcissism you will always find profound wounds, and the longer someone doesn’t deal with them, or makes a habit of outsourcing their inner life (like mistreating others out of self-loathing) the more entrenched and immutable they become.
However, in terms of his statements and actions, the far more important point is that he has, and has always had, choices. It is the choices he has made in regard to other people that I really just can’t stand.
If you are interested in introspection, the kind that truly opens your inner doors to yourself, you will only ever dance around the periphery until you decide (not feel, decide) actively and as a goal, to love and accept yourself exactly as you are. No one likes to be met with anger, hatred, criticism, and contempt, but that is often what we have in ourselves for ourselves. Looking into self as the strangers we are to it and expecting clarity and openness with that level of disdain and contempt just doesn’t work.
But looking into self with the active determination to accept, understand, and love whatever you find there DOES work, and there are many of us who do that work daily. If you can do that too, your entire world will change, because the ugliness and the darkness you see – whatever it is – will be met with love and compassion, and it is that compassionate understanding which will embrace it as the solution or misapplied trait it started off as in life, and make it pliant and open to transformation.
On the other hand, your inner self well knows its own self-loathing even if your cognitive mind does not, and without accepting the fact and even the need for that self-loathing, your less known self “parts” will slam those introspective doors in your cognitive mind before you’ve ever even had a chance to open them. The human brain has an amazing facility for redirection and obfuscation: to see it clearly, to get past your own gatekeeping, you first have to accept and understand why you hate and hide what you do, and in time, love even that.
If you want to continue this via pm feel free; I’ve been at it for decades. But in the meantime, no, I don’t hate Jann Wenner, just his actions. Having met many like him I dislike the idea of his character intensely. He is absolutely a complete prick – but a prick who now, having been freed from his heavy RRHoF duties, has time to reflect on how he got to this place of opprobrium he has achieved in life, at the point of what was supposed to be the pinnacle of his success. How’d that happen, Jann?