| Infants find the game peek-a-boo a great time. Give a child a blanket and an adult with a lot of patience and you have given him/her hours of unadulterated fun. Hold the blanket up between you and the baby and the child's undeveloped brain forgets you are there. Drop the blanket, say "peek-a-boo" with a big smile on your face, and the child will laugh and squeal with great joy, because you are a brand new smiling face for them to see. Repeat until the child gets cranky or until you grow bored, whichever comes first.
I bring this all up because I have noticed that the American public has developed the attention span of an infant. Celebrities or politicians who have a problem or public scandal simply slip off the public stage for a couple of weeks and then reappear with a fresh lease on life. Jesse Jackson sleeps with a worker in his office, fathers a child, steps off the world stage for all of a week, and suddenly the American public has forgotten this little incident and we are expected to treat him as a paragon of virtue. Whatever happened to rebuilding your credibility?
The list of people I could list that have done this is huge, but I think the person who best represents this ability is Madonna. She is the queen of "peek-a-boo" (no pun intended). She has redefined herself again and again from tramp to virtuous mother. We are supposed to take each of these chameleon changes in stride and accept her as a new person having shed her past like a snake sheds its skin.
I am not really blaming those in the public eye for taking advatange of this blind spot, but I am more appalled at the American public for having such a short attention span. How can we as a people keep allowing our cultural icons to redefine themselves without remembering who they were before?
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