You are unbelievable.

Normally, I do not comment about the verbal barf that comes out of pop stars or indeed the entire world that the pop trash have built around themselves.

But every once in a while, pop rubbish pushers step outside of that little world they have constructed around themselves and take a look into the real one. The results are rarely pretty, but the absolute and utter fukkhead that I like to derisively refer to as Justin Baby has outdone both himself and the pack in terms of sheer self-absorption.

Apparently, on the night of April 13, 2013, Baby and a pack of hangers-on paid an after-hours visit to the Anne Frank House that is located in Amsterdam. This house is so named because it was the last place in the world that Anne and most of her family were allowed any semblance of the freedom to even exist. It was the last place they had any refuge before someone revealed their location to the Nazis, who were promptly taken to the Westerbork transit camp, from there deported to Auschwitz. Edith Frank remained there until she died of starvation. Anne and Margot Frank lived long enough to be transported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Both are believed to have died in a typhus epidemic that spread through the camp in March of 1945. According to witnesses, Margot Frank was so weakened that she fell out of her bunk and was killed by the resulting shock. A few days later, Anne died of typhus.

I want you to stop and think about that for a minute. History has it that Anne Frank suffered numerous infections during her time in Nazi captivity. At some point in September or October of 1944, Anne‘s skin was infected with scabies. Scabies is a contagious skin infection caused by a mite (Sarcoptes scabiei) burrowing under the skin. Among its symptoms is intense allergic itching.

If you are fifteen to nineteen years old as of April 2013, stop and imagine for a second living in a hole in the ground where everyone around you is either dying or intent on leaving you to die, and having to live with intense itching in your skin for every second of what will be the last six or seven months of your life. Just try to imagine how it would feel to be in this position. Well, Anne Frank did not have to imagine it at all. That was the last seven months of her life.

So when Justin Baby and his hangers-on decided to go and annoy the good folks who maintain the Anne Frank House, one kind of has to wonder what the hell they were thinking. The little dingus apparently wrote one thing in the guestbook. I feel disgusting and dirty having to copy and paste it here (from the writings of Anne Frank House on Fudgebook). But if I am going to do my job properly, I need to make sure the context is properly understood. What Anne Frank House says Justin Baby wrote in their guestbook is:

Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber.

Really. Words fail me.

It should not come as any surprise to people who know me in person or have read any of my work that I have a singular, powerful emotion towards the perpetuation of “innocence” or childhood. They are best expressed in the words Satyr sings during Satyricon‘s song Fuel For Hatred:

Fuel for Hatred, air raid siren to mankind

Now, getting back to the Baby quote for a second, it is important to understand one thing. Apparently “belieber” is a made-up word to describe the little pubescent girls whom Justin Baby’s management aims their marketing at. You know, little girls so sheltered that they have no idea what kind of world they have been born into, and have yet to experience the shock of finding that out the hard way.

Which is probably the most pernicious thing about people like Justin Baby and their marketing, if you ask me. I doubt I will ever forget the first time that I actually heard this little dipstick’s voice aloud. It was a quote from a trailer for a film featuring him. I forget what he was saying, but from the sound of his voice, I had presumed I was listening to a boy who was twelve years old at the most. When I commented about this fact on my Fudgebook page, imagine my horror at being told that he was approximately seventeen. Granted, I sound somewhere between Michael Ironside and Peter Steele, and have done since I was about fourteen years old, but that is just the point. Pretty much all Human males sound more masculine than that when they are eleven years old.

Which got me to thinking. Well, thinking more than usual, anyway. When trying to understand what is, and the deficit from what should be, it is important to ask two specific questions. In the case of babification, it is important to ask these questions:

• Who wants today’s adolescents to think that a legal adult sounding like a five year old boy is normal?
• Why do these people want today’s adolescents to think that a legal adult sounding like a five year old boy is normal?

In answering the first question, it is important to remember that while there are several differently-named companies creating media for consumption today, there is no true competition between them. Especially not in terms of the message they want the audience to receive. If one company wants seventeen year olds to have the mentality of a child, all do. Odin only knows who the asshole behind the desk making decisions like this is, but you can bet that they make the choice and all of the companies must follow. Including whomever plucked Justin Baby up out of the upper middle class gutter, so to speak.

Unfortunately, this brings up a major, major conflict between the people who want all of the seventeen year old population to think perpetual babyhood is normal, and those who know better. People like myself, and more specifically, people who really do understand Anne Frank‘s life story.

The conflict is probably better understood if one bears in mind a few things about the era in which I grew. During the 1980s and early 1990s, there was a clearly marked and understood delineation between entertainment intended for children of varying ages, adolescents, and adults. And some entertainers, the legendary Jim Henson being among them, made a big name for themselves by being able to play to multiple groups at once. But something happened during the 1990s that did not bode well for then or now. Not only was there a loss of distinction between audiences, there was also a loss of any awareness that four year olds and fourteen year olds do not respond to the same stimuli in the same way.

All of this gets back to what people like Justin Baby and the like represent in today’s media. As Carter G. Woodson wrote, if you can control a man’s thoughts, you need not worry about his actions. And if you can make sixteen year old boys think it is normal to sound like they are ten years old at that age, or make sixteen year old girls think the same, you need not worry about them feeling they have bricks chained to their feet pulling them down into perpetual infancy.

Which brings me to the kind of sick mentality that would write such a thing in the Anne Frank House guestbook. If Anne Frank had survived the second World War, she would be seventy-three years old today. She would have seen, and likely written about, so many changes in the world around her that the emergence of yet another pop star whose balls have not dropped in spite of them being old enough to vote in some countries would barely even get a look-in. One can only wonder what the seventy-three year old Anne Frank would have made of the Internet and the attempts to turn it into just another TV. Or the Suez Canal crisis. Or the manner in which America has behaved after the second World War. Or a myriad of things. To say that she would give Baby the time of day is not merely incredibly arrogant and insulting to her memory. It is incredibly arrogant and insulting to the entire world’s memory.

But it is also a grave insult to the memory of the fifteen year old Anne Frank. I have not read the Anne Frank Diary in its (translated) entirety yet. I have read some (translated) excerpts, however, and to say that they show a remarkable insight into the society and time around her is a bit redundant.

Which is a remarkable contrast to what Justin Baby and his worked is aimed at. I like to be very precise when insulting people, but here I must resort to generalism. If I were to meet a fifteen year old girl who gave Justin Baby the time of day and at the same time displayed half of the intelligence that radiates from Anne Frank‘s writings, the shock would take thirty years off my life. Hell, I would be genuinely surprised to find a fifteen year old Justin Baby drone who would be able to write with half of the intelligence evident in my writings. Which is a natural outgrowth of how pop is marketed. It is not about creativity or expression. The dumbest buy the mostest.

However, as Baby has evidenced recently, things start to come undone, and in a big way, when the salesman is as dumb as the audience. From the photos in one posting on the subject, we can clearly see that this is the case here. Justin Baby probably has not the slightest comprehension of what Anne Frank went through. Hell, I am a thirty-something autistic mental patient with multiple physical difficulties, and even I cannot pretend I fully understand, leave alone grok, how alone, frightened, and despaired Anne Frank must have felt.

And that is just the point. As I commented on one friend’s Fudgebook posting about the matter, I have no doubt that Justin Baby really believes Anne Frank died quickly and quietly, in her sleep, or even was beamed up by aliens. He really does appear to be that far out of touch with reality.

During the process of writing this article, it occurred to me to write all kinds of things to try and say what I think Anne Frank would have thought of this matter. But then I decided against it. Trying to guess what a person who has been dead for nearly seventy years would think of today’s world is like guessing what lifeforms on the planets of Proxima Centaurii would think of us. And trying to imagine what a person who was murdered by a government gone mad nearly seventy years ago would think of a present-day situation has a strong risk of becoming crass. Exactly like what Justin Baby’s words have done.

So on behalf of people who understand why trivialising the Holocaust or trying to exploit the memory of a young girl who died in the Holocaust for publicity is a bad thing, I have one thing to ask. Write. Write about what Justin Baby’s grand display of idiocy makes you think or feel, and why. Not just for the memory of Anne Frank, but also for every person who has died at the hands of a society gone mad since 1945.

And if enough of us all pitch in and do that, then maybe this latest farce will have been worth it.

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