Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Sean Combs: The Reckoning streamed to a huge audience on Netflix. What Reckoning doesn’t say or show is how and why Sean Combs represents a piece of many of us. That starts with why his story is even a story and why he is so well-known and in a perverse way still fawned over. The starting point is celebrity. Millions are intoxicated by it.
Mention even the most insignificant. trivial, even downright silly, antics of a celebrity, and much of the media and public are off to the races. It’s headline news and the topic of endless gossip and debate. The term “star struck” doesn’t do justice to this phenomenon.
The better term is “mesmerized.” It’s a form of escapist voyeurism when we get a peep into their often-disjointed lives. A part of us desperately wants to identify with them—their fame, their glitter, their crowd drawing capacity. They are our Bourbon Kings and Queens. Every appearance is cause for open mouthed gaping and a gathering of endless crowds.
They fulfill the often empty and aimless, smallness, and impotence in our lives. Combs typified the prototype of the celebrity attention getter and gossip subject. He had a storybook rise to the top. Almost literally from rags to riches. He was front and center for years in a business—the rap industry—that is loaded with bad boys, controversy, and violence. That only added to his allure.
Then there’s wealth and the aura of power. Combs can’t be mentioned with out this word being stitched in front of it “Mogul.” That instantly conjures up the image of wealth, status, and power, with the added allure and fascination of violence. This reinforces fantasies and, in the process, identification with those who possess riches. Maybe, as the thinking goes, it could be me and even if the reality says it won’t or can’t be me, nonetheless there’s the next best thing–vicarious identification.
Then there’s the ultimate draw. That’s sex. Many of the rich and famous for millennia have used their wealth, fame, and allure to outrageously harass, abuse, exploit, and control women.
Until recent years, they were secure in the knowledge that they could get away with it. The chance of them being outted, let alone arrested and prosecuted, was almost non-existent. That changed—somewhat. I say somewhat because many of the old rules still apply to wealthy, famous guys, especially in the entertainment business.
Legions of women still are viewed as easy pickings for the sexual taking. The abusers are also secure in the knowledge that they have a troupe of attorneys, high powered and well-connected friends and associates, and packs of enablers that will duck, dodge, deny and shield them from any untoward exposure for their sexual abuse.
That protective bubble was glaringly exposed in the Bill Cosby sordid saga and confirmed again in the Epstein even more sordid saga. In Combs’ case one can tell from the lengthy list of individuals who knew, worked with, or just hung out with him, that many knew of his deviant sexual misdeeds but dutifully kept their mouths shut.
They knew the kind of things that he engaged in– sexual trafficking, violence, conspiracy, abuse, and the long litany of sexual mayhem. They too were mesmerized by the celebrity cult, celebrity wealth, celebrity fame, celebrity slavishness, anything celebrities particularly athletes and entertainers with the name do.
Combs had a virtual open license to do what he wanted to do, secure in the knowledge that they’re entitled to because they know they have a backup, the greatest backup of all. That’s the legions who will condone, will look the other way, even revel in their sexual mayhem and even criminality.
Combs conviction and his imprisonment is in no way the end of the story. The Netflix series producers noted that many high-profile entertainment industry performers either refused to be interviewed or made it clear that they did not want their names used for their interviews. They claimed fear. That fear is probably justified since a Combs, or any other celebrity miscreant, still has friends in high places who might hurt their careers. He will continue to be the subject of attention while behind bars in a federal prison.
That reluctance to be a part of the series tell-all didn’t stop there. Except for two of the jurors that voted to convict, the others pointedly declined to be interviewed even though there was no prohibition against them publicly having their say. Combs will be release probably sooner than later. He claims that he is a changed man and that he will do good to all. He might mean what he says.
However, that doesn’t alter one bit that we, society, enable the Sean Diddy Combs with our slavish enrapture even worship of them. As long as we continue to place them on that high pedestal of untouchability we too must shoulder some of the blame for them. In that sense Combs reckoning is our reckoning.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book is White-Supremacist-In-Chief (Middle Passage Press) He is the publisher of thehutchinsonreport.net