Another long, awkward elevator ride?

Comments

1. Anonymous says:

   December 13, 2007 at 10:19 am

   Yesterday all the global English-language headline news channels I caught in Europe, CNN included, ran the tag line running along the lower banner section of the screen, that just stated something akin to: “Ike Turner, wife beater, dies”… It’s one hell of a cautionary tale, to see how a single film and autobiography tags a person. Despite his early importance in the music field, Turner gets reduced to being just another abusive black man at home… even in his death. Regardless that Tina’s autobio is true, and he was such a person to her, there should be something different if she says it in a personal frame, or if such words are just tagged and uttered by, say a corporate news group’s text for an obit on someone, an African-American male, and just introduce him as a wife-beater? It’s like every white, male CEO’s belief made palpable and legible, and able to be uttered because a celeb said so first… Color washes out by “celebrity” status, as bizarre as Tina’s role model in Jackie O. Forget that, concerning death this is hardly “christian” values at work, Fox News et al., but how many obits did not get the same reductive treatment… some names do come to mind. I’m really looking forward to “Henry Kissinger, architect of mass-murder, dies”; or let’s look back to what could have been for celebs, to “Rock Hudson, early, sexually irresponsible AIDS denier” and so many more, like G.W.Bush…

   • Todd says:

     December 13, 2007 at 11:24 am

     This is why I don’t watch television.

     Why single out Ike Turner as a “wife-beater?” Plenty of artists, bigger and smaller than Mr. Turner, have been abusive and violent toward women. Miles Davis, John Lennon, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, the list goes on and on. I don’t know why the media sticks Turner with “wife-beater,” but to put it on his obit tag-line makes it look like he did it for a living. Which, I would say, in the end, the opposite is true.

     A few years ago I wrote a play where two men discuss this phenomenon of some men getting away with murder and others being inexplicably held to account for everything. The last line was “All I know is, when Frank Sinatra died, the headlines did not read “ALCOHOLIC WIFE-BEATING PSYCHOPATH DEAD AT LAST.”

     I say again, rest in peace Mr. Turner.

     • Anonymous says:

       December 13, 2007 at 3:18 pm

       The difference lies in the status of the women beaten.
       –Ed.

2. mcboing_boing says:

   December 14, 2007 at 6:17 am

   separated at birth?