Icarus

A twelve year old girl was raped, and her life, we surmise from experience, is forever altered and made more difficult. We don't know who raped her. It's not our business to know, but we all hope dearly that the rapist is brought to justice by the authorities, and that the girl is given every chance to lead a happy life.

Inexplicably though, two years after the rape, her own mother catapualted this horrible crime into the mainstream by taking her daughter on to a popular radio program, hooking her up to a polygraph machine, and broadcasting the event across the airwaves.

Knowing what transpired seconds later, this poor fourteen year old's comment, "I'm scared... it's not fair," sends chills to my bones.

She was questioned about her sexual experience, by both the hosts and her own mother, and confessed to being raped, something which her mother already knew. In shock, the radio host, stupidly, for a second, tried to carry on the skit, something which he now regrets.

His pathetic defence of people 'using this to get at him' is beyond my tolerance, and he is a pathetic knob of the highest order, but he is not the rapist. He is a fuckwit, but not the rapist.

The mother has failed, too. We innately understand a mother's role in human society and, hell, in the animal kingdom, and she has failed. She has failed to 'mother' her daughter properly. But she is not a rapist.

Somewhere, there's a rapist, who raped a twelve year old girl. The police have said the only thing that has made sense to me in this whole sorry affair thus far: That they will investigate the rape claims.

The angry mob have lit their torches and armed themselves with pitchforks and are marching on 2Day FM's offices to call for Sandilands' blood.

This is what it has come to. The spotlight. The glare. The celebrity. We make them, we take them down.

I think, personally, the world is better than it used to be. I have an old aunt who was raped at 14, at rifle point, and she had a baby - she adopted it out. The rapist was a local boy. He became the local butcher. She bought her meat from him, for years. He'd occasionally throw some extra snags in. There was no police action, there was no counselling. But at age 70, she confessed that it has 'troubled' her throughout her life. I bet.

Go back to the cavemen. They allegedly clubbed women over the heads to get sex.

I think, generally, the world, the western world in particular, is getting better. People are coming to trial. Rape is no longer 'boys being boys' (it never was, but it was often brushed off as that). We're not standing for what used to be swept under the carpet.

But where the modern world is failing is what's commonly known as the 'cult of celebrity'. There was always an obsession with celebrity - read Plato's 'Last Days Of Socrates' and you'll see it plain as day, all the obsession with the famous guy and how he had his fans as well as those who wanted to bring him down (and ultimately succeeded).

But back then, and now, this obsession with the celebrity is shooting the messenger. The celebrity is just a messenger. It's all he/she ever has been, and we shoot at them - a lot quicker these days, given the speed of information flow.

The cult is here to stay. There's got to be something in our wiring that not only creates supernatural gods to cling to, but also the Icarus's, the mortals approaching godliness, ie: the celebrities. And just like Icarus, the story is best when he falls to the ground. Whether it be Socrates, Kurt Cobain or Kyle Sandilands, it's the crash to the ground that we somewhat yearn for. Unless we include this yearning, we are missing a large slice of our understanding of any event.

Icarus fell from the sky not just because he flew too close to the sun, but because we were shooting at him.

Make no mistake, the 2DayFM story is now more about Kyle Sandilands than the girl, her mother, or even the rapist.

On some weird, fucked up level, I feel sorry for the cunt.