britney, paris hilton, bennifer, and the fall of Afghanistan
It’s a joke.
A big fat joke.
Towers, I’ve been told, fell over on fire.
Smoke rose from the soot-filled faces of New Yorkers.
I flipped through the channels looking for The Simpsons.
My evening cartoons were nowhere to be found.
I was one of those people that found Britney Spears to be crazy.
She was ruined and would be gone like the rest of her hair.
I remember the magazine covers, the umbrella in her hand, the wide earth in her eyes, how she towered over a car window, breakage.
2021, reentry.
The Taliban have taken over Afghanistan.
There is a picture of them in the presidential palace, a place of newborn democracy, but there are men with rifles, and one man with his feet propped up on the desk. Dirt on the desk.
I wonder who will clean the desk.
If the desk will ever be cleaned.
There was a Britney poster on my cousin’s wall, from the Baby One More Time era. She kneels, leans in, up front and intimate, blown out above the bed. She was 16 at the time.
Her school uniform was short and tight, on purpose.
Did she know she was a sex symbol? For men much older than her?
The Taliban deny women’s education past the age of 12.
Wives, like shimmering coins, are offered as bait to lure militants to join the Taliban. A body as bait.
For men much older than her, Britney’s body was bait for dollar bills.
“LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!” Chris Crocker proclaimed.
This wasn’t a voice ahead of its time.
It was a voice that was recording history at the moment.
Do today’s teenagers watch this video and wonder if it’s staged?
Do nieces and nephews understand that early 2000’s Youtube was a place much different than what it is today? It was meant to be private. Little video logs showcasing the things we do when no one is looking, funny and sad, incredibly unbearable, but human.
I imagine Adsense dollars in Crocker’s tears.
I imagine sponsors supporting a platform for Crocker’s voice.
I imagine a world where women can walk down streets at night without having to look behind them.
That world is painfully fiction.
There was a man who stormed Capitol Hill to put his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk.
Who cleaned the boot prints from that desk? Were legal documents stained? Reprinted?
“Before I’m an American, I’m a Britney fan,” Chris Crocker said.
Why does it take years for history to listen?
I’ve always listened to my history teachers until I went to university. I felt cheated of my education, indigineous and minority lives glossed over in place of celebrating white skin.
Are they listening to history now?
Legal conservatorship is the appointment of a guardian or protector by a judge to manage the affairs of another person due to physical or mental limitations.
I remember the picture wrong. A Taliban fighter did not have his feet propped up on the table. It is a rifle, with his reflection underneath.
If you look long enough, it looks like his reflection is holding up the rifle.
I can’t believe my democracy is different from yours.
“[Boys] are mean,” Britney said, at ten years old.
It’s funny that men involved in war are actually boys in hissy fits because they can’t get what they want, they don’t know how to be happy with what they have.
Do Taliban militants have mothers? Do they love them?
When I was a boy-
Well, I’m still a boy. My mother knows this.
I hear there are lush green lands in Afghanistan. Beauty and kindness, peace. The United States doesn’t think so, ignores all of this, forgets that there are lives, big and small, families there, living.
Even when the 2008 financial crisis ruined lives, mental health wasn’t a talking point.
Why did we ignore Britney’s wellbeing?
2002 was the height of tabloid media, obsessing over celebrities.
Bennifer. Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck. A-listers at fresh heights of their careers. Good Will Hunting, 25 with an oscar. Self-titled J-Lo. A wedding to be had, but called off because of the media’s weight.
Public versus private. Press versus public.
Do we build people up just to watch them burn? Like towers?
The pandemic has made us crave familiar things.
At the beginning, when Covid cut everyone from their jobs, I called people from high school that I didn’t talk to anymore. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with this reaching, but I did it anyway. I reached until they told me they were well. We were well.
In Korea, in a group show, Collective Collection in the heart of Euljiro, a place known for its 40–50 year businesses in tiles, lighting, and printing factories, C Enter Gallery has a piece by Dongjun Kim, A More Comfortable Position, Lift and Blow, which features photo prints of rocks laid to rest on the floor by wooden beams, suspended by fluorescent lights.
Photography is usually hung on the wall. But here, they are floor level, as if on their knees, begging to be seen.
Photography means nothing. Paparazzi-ism is such a strange art. The photographers, mostly unknown, but the pictures, completely known. They end up on feeds and newspapers, magazines and TV screens. But there is no artist. An invisible artist.
The rocks in the pictures are brought back to their natural form, in the concrete of the gallery space, floor-level, terranean.
For the most part, the show is about the working class. When you reach the top of the gallery, there is a big window where you can see where the working class works, which directly looks at the gallery itself. It’s art about place and the current sentiments.
It’s a direct reflection, a mirror you can reach through.
It’s what art should be. Reaching.
Immediate and urgent conversations with the current world.
Somewhere when I was in university, Paris Hilton would DJ in Ibiza. She sped up Aqua’s Barbie Girl.
Affleck would put adverts in Variety to profess his love for Jenny from the Block.
Paris Hilton has a Netflix show where she cooks with celebrities. In the first episode, she makes breakfast with her childhood friend Kim Kardashian.
It’s just like old times.
We used to laugh at Paris, and now she has made a career off of it. I wonder if she is laughing, what kind of jokes she likes.
Memory. Re-memory. I’m taken back to the itchy rug where I repeatedly watched the twin towers fall. This wasn’t even about Afghanistan.
This was not the simple life. The stars are blind.
An unmournable senselessness washes over me, the last two decades a blank space. $2 trillion gone. 2,300 American lives lost. Another empty war.
I think of Saigon, and I wonder if my father does too. He’s not here right now. My mother says he’s somewhere up above because on his last days on earth, he spent them as a Catholic. A carved candle of Mother Mary sat beside his hospital bed. Her waxy blue veil glowed in the dark, as if to protect night with a whisper. She made sure he passed early in the morning, a close enough time when he would usually wake up to go to work.
My mother came to me, 5 in the morning, arms outreached. I entered her arms with tears that could not comprehend instantaneous loss. A phone call, bound heartbeats, cancer.
Kabul. Saigon.
Are the Vietnamese looking into mirrors? I am and I hate what I see.
We are in a psychotic loop backwards, a Willy Wonka tunnel where VHS has to be rewound in order to play from the beginning, myth of Sisyphus.
It’s history as Jordan Peele’s Get Out.
Tragedy and farce, hand in hand, pooping back and forth forever.
For the self-absorbed late millennials, paralysis by history’s hysterical insistence is forcing us back to the boot cut jean era, Y2K, a political statement louder than ever.
Everything is burning once again, even in my fingers.
At 6 AM, I write. So when the day begins, I begin, and I am engulfed in flames.
This is how I enter the world.
