Please be aware this is not intended to make anyone uncomfortable and I certainly don’t expect a particular reaction. To begin, it is important that everyone understand my taste in music does not include country. Maybe my love of classical music and ’60s pop music was a rebellion against the constant theme of trouble - beer, wine, heart break and divorce - so frequently recorded in country music.
Even when I try to listen to radio stations claiming to be country stations, I don’t understand the music. I don’t know the names of any of the top recording artists in the last 20 years and when I read of the tragic death of country music artist Mindy McCready, hers was not a familiar name. The newspaper article in the Northwest Arkansas section of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2013, was very graphic in reporting her personal problems. It reinforced the problems that come with fame and fortune in too many entertainers’ lives. This seems to be a prevalent condition for those coming from “humble beginnings” and achieving some degree of fame.
According to the article, in January of 2012 she posted an entry on her website’s “blog,” (quote) “Ihaven’t had a hit in almost a decade. I’ve spent my fortune, tarnished my public view and made myself the brunt of punch line after punch line. I’ve been beaten, sued, robbed, arrested, jailed and evicted. But, I’m still here. With a handful of people I know and trust, a revived determination and both middle fingers up in the air, I’m ready. I’ve been here before. I’m a fighter.
I’m, down, but I’ll never be out.”
The report of her suicide at the age of 37 moved me as if she were a close friend and not the total stranger she really was. There is a sadness about suicide which is sadder still when it is a self-inflicted gunshot. I couldn’t help wondering where the handful of friends mentioned in her January 2012 blog were when she needed them most. To me personally, there is a great difference between dying alone without the benefit of caring friends or family and the physician-assisted suicide, or euthanasia, as proposed by Dr. Kervorkian. This is generally associated with terminal illness, but the situation which led Mindy McCready to take her own life is equally serious in my way of understanding it, because she apparently saw no hope in the future.
During the ’60s, EdAmes recorded a song titled “Who Will Answer.” This was a trying period in our history with the cold war and people marching for numerous causes.
The words of one verse came to mind when I read about successful people who reach a degree of fame beyond their wildest expectations and then fall into a downward spiral brought about by the unfulfilled expectations of their success. The verse of the song about the man on the building ledge - “high upon a building ledge a man teeters near the edge” - asks the question, “Who will ask what led him to his private day of doom, and who will answer?” The chorus continues, “If the soul is darkened by a fear it cannot name, if the mind is baffled when the rules don’t fit the game, who will answer?” When are we going to face the question, because we, society, must answer?
It is increasingly apparent that in my 70s, I no longer can expect the social restraints of my teen years to effect the younger generations today. When I listened to my granddaughter talk about Lady Gaga, I honestly did not know if she was idolizing her or making fun of her.
The entertainment industry - television, movies, professional sports and music - demands constant exposure, sought through specialists called publicity agents yet never accounts for the frailty of them being humans,having feelings and a life outside the limelight. The loss of Whitney Houston is far too similar to this situation even if a gun, rather than drugs, was involved in Mindy McCready’s case and she was not in the same career level. We put a lot of pressure on the person we set up as our idol, or idols.
Are we as a society so engrossed in our own immediate emotional satisfaction that we are allowing our insatiable appetite for more of their success to drown out the effect it is having on both the entertainer and us? Whether it is a professional athlete using performance enhancing drugs or an entertainer from the television circuit, isn’t it time for us to help our next generation look deeply into the lifestyle of our “idols” and determine if we are contributing to their problems? In what form are we going to answer? It can’t be through paying enormous percentages of our income to watch them perform.
Maybe it is time to dig a lot deeper into our own innermost feelings and see if WE have become too dependent on them in our search for our own personal fulfillment.
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Editor’s note: Leo Lynch is an award-winning columnist. He is a native of Benton County has deep roots in northwest Arkansas. He is a retired industrial engineer and former Justice of the Peace. He can be contacted at [email protected].
Opinion, Pages 4 on 02/27/2013