Are the kids alright?

You might not guess this at a glance, but somewhere underneath the Hollywood styling, designer accessories and buoyant coiffing is a little girl of ten years old.

... And if that's not scary enough, this photo was actually taken when she was nine. Her name is Willow Smith, and she's widely touted as the Next Big Thing on the pop music scene after the success of her first single, Whip My Hair. She's not the first child in her family to hit the entertainment scene in a big way before she even hits her teens;

Recognise him? That's Jaden Smith, as he appeared opposite Jackie Chan in the remake of The Karate Kid. If the parental penny hasn't dropped yet, here's a family portrait to jog your memory:

Yep, Will Smith's kids are looking to end up as famous and successful as their Mum and Dad. And not everyone's happy about it.

Author Terry McMillan recently tweeted that:

The Smith children already act like child stars. There's an arrogance in their demeanor and behavior. I find it incredibly sad. It feels like the Smith children are being pimped and exploited. Or, they're hungry for fame. What about 4th grade?

She further hit out against the gushing descriptions of the children in public media - often from the children's parents - describing their prodigal talent and enthusiasm:

These kids don't already know what they "love". Total bullshit. They're not prodigies. They think Hollywood is real.

And it was in this comment that she tapped the vein of the issue. The coverage of the Smith children has always been carried out with a considered, kid-glove professionalism that ensures a message of their empowerment and stomps upon the merest suggestion of exploitation. The army of managers, choreographers, songwriters, agents, stylists and make-up artists behind the scenes are played down as far as possible, and the resulting efforts touted merely as each child's "individual style", as though it was arrived at in the usual course of nine year-old experimentation, during an afternoon with Mum's pilfered makeup and jewellery.

Not pictured: realistic styling by a 9 year old.

In September 2009, then aged 9, Willow Smith told radio host Ryan Seacrest, "just be an individual, you can't be afraid to be yourself... and you can't let anybody tell you that's wrong". Neat, both in the sense that it would seem to both prove the child's utter commitment to their public image, and absolve any adult stakeholders in Willow's career should things go down the proverbial shitter. Listen to the child, people! She's not being exploited or marketed, she's a talented child, expressing her individuality!

Now, naturally the world is full of little girls and boys who would love to be actors, singers, rappers or the like. In fact, this trend is so common that in a recent survey of British schoolchildren, the most frequent answer to "what do you want to be when you grow up?" was simply; "Famous". Many of us remember our abortive childhood fantasies of rock stardom or Oscar acceptance speeches, and dreamed feverishly of "real" parents who would pick us up one day and turn out to be rich and famous, paving our way to the red carpets and superdomes of the glamorous people.

No doubt, offered the deal that the Smith children have been born into (mega-star parents, unlimited access to the gears of fame creation) we would have jumped at the chance as well. We would have recorded the singles, we would have starred in the movies. We would probably have loved it - and we probably would have said so just as enthusiastically as Willow and Jaden.

We probably would have thought pretty highly of ourselves, too. Not in our scene, the busboy actors and taxi-driving musicians looking for a break in an industry where it's always been about who you know. Not for us, the cattle-call auditions where children are seen and dismissed in their hundreds per hour. Not for us, the agony of forging a new brand in an industry already splitting at the seams; the talented rubbing elbows with the mediocre, the beautiful frantically exercising their advantage over the ordinary, the rejects by their thousands lining the exit corridor, bitterly stroking the fantasy of a big break that never came.

I can imagine any of us, styled to perfection and adopting our image as our individual style, sitting on a couch with Jay Leno, saying how we were "born to do this", speaking of our love and passion for our work. I can imagine us believing in the adoration, in the money, in the fame, perhaps even until it became integral to who we were. Would we ever be able to be happy without the flash of the cameras and screams of the fans? Would we ever know another desire for our future lives?

So is this exploitation? Or, as McMillan would have it, pimping? Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith didn't respond publicly to McMillan's tweet, but it's clear that their intention is to give their children the best possible foothold in the slippery Hollywood market. Talented though the children undoubtedly are, it is understandable to criticize the way that coveted movie roles and recording contracts have fallen to them as a birthright, and at an age where they will be more likely to internalise their success as the deserved recognition of serious talent than to recognise it as a lucky side effect of their parentage.

But yet, the sheer volume of tickets and albums sold seems to speak for itself in that, for now, the Smith children are at the top of their games, and we are happily spending plenty of money to see them play. Perhaps someone is being exploited, and perhaps it is us.

What do you think?

Uluru: To Climb or Not To Climb

Sorry for the recent lack of posts. I've taken a bit of a sebbatical over the last few weeks. Ok, to be honest, I collapsed with exhaustion under an enormous workload, then buggered off to the desert for a while. Leaving aside the horrifying details of embarking upon a desert road trip in a Kia Rio, with my non-English speaking mother-in-law; being fleeced by every sole trader in the Northern Territory, and encountering "Dinky, the Singing Dingo", I'll merely mention that we visited Uluru, then came home to find it at the centre of a cultural stoush about land rights, and whether or not it is acceptable for non-indigenous Australians to climb the rock.

The Northern Territory is, in many ways, a confusing place. Laws exist that actively discriminate between indigenous and non-indigenous Australias. White people find that there are wide tracts of land which they cannot enter without a permit from local elders, whilst in other areas, Aboriginal people may find that they (and they alone) are not allowed to purchase alcohol due to tribal edicts. Tourists at Uluru are faced with a complicated and subtle consideration when they discover that, although a clearly marked climb exists, with requisite safety rails, an array of signs at the bottom of the rock ask that "you respect the wishes of the Anangu people, and do not climb Uluru".

The reason isn't (entirely) one of whether "white" people should be on "black" land - the Anangu people are clear in stating that they are concerned for the safety of climbers, and that deaths or injuries sustained at Uluru cause the local people to experience "great sadness", and a feeling of responsibility for the casualties. Yet, the locals are also angry that the track exists in what is considered to be a sacred place of great spiritual significance. Recent calls have been made that the track be closed, and that visitors be banned from climbing Uluru out of respect for local customs.

I didn't climb Uluru, but it wasn't out of cultural sensitivity (frankly, it looked like a death wish, and before I'd gone fifty metres up, my shoes were slipping against the sheer rock in an alarming fashion). However, it's something that tens of thousands of people, from around the world, do every year. The question of whether they should be allowed to continue to do so is often, falsely, posed as a clear-cut one, by boths sides of the debate. Anti-climbers shrilly insist that cultural sensitivity is paramount, and frequently throw in, for good measure, a reference to the Stolen Generations, Invasion Day, or any other of the numerous and grave injustices against Aborigines over the last two centuries, to back up the point that concessions must be made in the name of reconciliation and cultural respect.

Pro-climbers often fallaciously argue that land cannot be owned, (as it pre-exists its owners, and isn't man made),and claim that the rock is a "national treasure" which all Australians (and foreigners) should be able to access, and decide whether or not to climb. An Editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald described the move to ban climbers from Uluru as "insular", whilst Prime Minister Kevin Rudd opposed the move, claiming that it would be "very sad if... Australians and... our guests from abroad weren't able to enjoy that experience". And whilst nobody is saying it too loudly, closing the climb could have serious effects upon the local tourism industry.

A good part of the argument boils down to whether it is appropriate or fair for the government to make one law for one ethnic group, and another law for the rest. Some Australians have already argued that the permit system of "closed communities" reinforces ethnic and cultural segregation, as well as effectively disenfranchising non-indigenous Australians (about 97.5% of the population) from entering large areas of their home country*. The permit system is often justified on the basis that "we took their land to start with", and therefore non-indigenous people have only a vicarious and fragile right to live in Australia, whilst indigenous groups have an inviolate historical right. For many non-indigenous Australians, this begs the question of where we should be living, as this is the only home we have known. If this country is somebody's sacred, ancestral land, then where on Earth is my sacred, ancestral land? Those of mixed heritage (like myself) don't seem to have much recourse to claim the right to live anywhere, if the right to do so is determined by belonging to a distinct ethnic, cultural and linguistic group.

Considering the extremely long odds on the fact that non-indigenous groups are going to abandon living in Australia**, it doesn't seem useful to perpetuate the idea that some of us have more rights to the land, or are more Australian than others. Being a citizen should be a consideration which trumps all others, including race and culture. True reconciliation can only be achieved when indigenous and non-indigenous people stand together as friends, instead of self-segregating in distrust and misunderstanding. True cultural respect can never be forced by means of a ban.

*Of course, claims to white victimhood in the debate over access to land are generally dismissed as being ridiculous, naive, and ignorant of historical facts - but on the other hand, it's easy to see the way that the policy may be depicted if it were reversed, in that it was white people telling Aboriginal people where they could and could not visit.

** I'd rate this as just slightly more likely than Paris Hilton ever winning an Oscar.

The Good-Enough Samaritan

"Have you got a jacket you don't need?", gasped Christine as she tried to catch her breath at my front door; "Or maybe a blanket? There's a girl out here with a ripped shirt... it looks complicated."

About the age of twenty, the girl on the street was very beautiful, and very drugged. She was struggling to pull the shreds of her top far enough together to cover her breasts, muttering to herself and crying inconsolably.

"What happened here?" I asked my friend, seizing a jacket.

"I'm not sure," said Christine. "I was just heading to the station when a guy pulled up and pushed this girl out of his car." Christine's voice lowered. "One of the guys up at the station said he reckoned she had just turned a trick - her first trick. It's awful."

"Christ, I just fucking love my neighborhood, don't you?" I growled, as we emerged onto the street and towards the girl, who was now slumped on the ground with her head in her hands. As she raised her face, I could see blood coagulating around her nose and mouth. Her pupils were pin-pricks, her eyes running into little rivers of black mascara. She sat mutely as we draped the jacket around her shoulders. When we asked what we could do, she murmured "ciggie" without meeting our eyes.

Christine and I helped the girl, "Mia" into my flat, feeling that we couldn't leave her out in the literal cold and rain. Our enquiries were fairly pointless - Mia didn't want to talk, let alone about what awful experience she had just been through. After Christine went on her way, I did what I could for Mia- but beyond a steady supply of cigarettes, that didn't turn out to be much. She ate only a little of the food I heated up, and refused the offer of a shower or clean clothes. I offered to take her to the hospital, or the police station, and nearly sent her flying out the door in terror. I soon ascertained that she had nobody she could call, and nowhere she could safely go.

I started calling women's shelters. Youth shelters. Family assistance centres. I called every number listed in the phone book under Crisis Accomodation, but there was no room at the inn. And, with each phone call that I made, and each time I was told that there were no beds for Mia, the little voice in my head grew louder; Why don't you let her stay here?

I have a spare bed. My fridge is full of food and my cupboard full of spare linen. I have more clothes than I really need. There's more than enough room here to support Mia - but I didn't offer. I was afraid that she would rob me. I was afraid she might trash my house. I was afraid that when she came off whatever she was on, she might punch my lights out. I was afraid for all the reasons that prejudice against her situation dictated. She came from the street.

In the end, that's where she returned. That is, for all I know. After about two hours, she announced her intention of going to the Cross. All I could do was to give her a bag of food and beg her to be careful. I never saw or heard from her again.

Christine tried to cheer me up the following day. "You did enough" she said. "You can't save the world, you know. You did what you could." But I doubted it. I hadn't offered Christine a bed. I'd never turned my back on her for a moment while she was in my house. Even the jacket I gave her was a tatty old thing that I didn't want.

Every day, I walk down my street and see more people like Mia, who need the sort of basic, practical help I could provide, like a hot meal or a bed for the night. But instead, I toss some change, or a piece of fruit from my grocery shopping. Like so many of us, too selfish to risk what is mine in order to give another their rightful due. And, like so many of us, pretending that what I do is good enough.

How far should we go to help someone in need?

Jim and the Indians

Picture this: your name is Jim, and you're a botanist exploring the South American jungles. You get horribly lost, spend days walking around in circles, and finally emerge into a tiny village, where you are horrified to see a group of twenty indigenous villagers tied up and facing a firing squad of guerilla soldiers. Then, the soldiers spot you.

You're afraid for your life, but soon it becomes evident that the head guerilla, Paco, has taken a shine to you. He likes you, he says. He likes scientists. He likes foreigners. And he's in a good mood today. So, he'll cut you a deal. He was about to summarily shoot these twenty locals as a warning to the rest of the population, who he claims have been a bit hard to control during the guerilla takeover. But, and here he hands you a pistol - if YOU would like to shoot one, you know, to show your support for the cause, he'll let the rest of them go as a show of goodwill. You look at Paco, then the terrified villagers, and then the gun in your hand. What do you do?

I first came across a version of this classic ethics vignette some years ago, in an undergraduate philosophy class. And it genuinely seemed a no-brainer. I'd shoot one of the Indians to save the other nineteen. I would have thought that almost everyone would agree with me on the point that it was unacceptable to let nineteen people die, just to keep your hands clean. How wrong I was.

A couple of girls from the Campus Bible Study group countered me that killing a person, any person, under any circumstances was murder, against the ten commandments, against God, and merited eternal suffering in hell. Other people, who didn't invoke the will of God, said that they would not be able to live with themselves after killing a person - however they seemed to have no problem with their inaction leading to nineteen further deaths. Jim would apparently show a great deal of moral backbone by refusing to lend ideological support, and watch twenty Indians be shot to death rather than only one.

It largely comes down to how you weigh up sins of commission vs. sins of omission - whether you weigh up things you didn't do as being as morally weighty as the things you did. For me, the consequences of commission were less than the consequences of omission, so I could not fail to act. For others, the actual action of firing the gun made them murderers in a way that walking away and leaving twenty people to die could never make them.

My consistent standpoint that I would shoot one of the Indians led to further questions. Which Indian I would shoot? The nearest one? The oldest one? The one who looked the bravest? And then, the question of whether the remaining Indians would view me as a saviour or a murderer. Would they understand that I committed an awful crime to prevent further awful crimes, or pillion me as a guerilla sympathiser?

This vignette is strikingly similar to one that is often posed to vegetarians; namely, would you eat a chicken if it would save the lives of five other chickens? I once posed both vignettes to a vegetarian flatmate, who paradoxically put it to me that he would shoot a person to save the other nineteen, but would never, ever, under any circumstances consider eating an animal. He preferred blood on his hands, as it were, to blood in his mouth.

Each person has their own feelings about sins of omission, but in my view, no matter what Jim does, he is complicit in murder. His choice is whether the screams of one person keep him awake at night, or the screams of twenty.

What would you do in Jim's place and why?

(And, for the vegetarians out there, would you eat a chicken to save another chicken's life?)

Sweet Charity

"Outrageous" repeats Clever Lawyer, her wedding-ring flashing in the sun as she flicked her chocolate locks out of her face. "Just outrageous. It was my word of the day."

"So what did they say?"

"They told me that, if that was my attitude, I shouldn't bother coming to the next meeting." Her face hints at the world of frustration she is feeling. At the moment, my friend Clever Lawyer is in a world of shit at her high-end law firm. And it all comes down to the question of charity. HighEnd LawFirm is having a charity gig, and has appointed a committee to allocate the funds to deserving recipients. There are so many of these out there that several long meetings have been neccessary in order to whittle down the list to something manageable. For the most part, the committee agreed on the merits of charities coming their way - until this one.

"It was a charity that organises wheelchair sports", says Clever Lawyer, "and I didn't have a problem until I read what $50 will buy."

Fifty dollars, it turns out, will buy one player, from one team, bottled water for an entire sporting season. This is where Clever Lawyer got her back up. In front of her were brochures from charities that feed the starving, house the homeless, provide basic medical supplies for women giving birth in villages without running water. Here were horrible diseases that needed a cure, here were political prisoners being tortured and disappeared. And here were a bunch of people who needed bottled water in order to play sport ?

In a fatigued aside, Clever Lawyer sarcastically mutters, "And it's not as though bottled water is one of the biggest rorts of our time, is it?" She has a point - we are lucky enough to live in a place where potable water comes out of the tap, with the added bonus that it is cheap and doesn't hamper the world with yet another disposable plastic bottle. Clever Lawyer asks the charity committee if it wouldn't perhaps be reasonable for sports players to refill drink bottles from the tap, rather than drinking $50 worth of charity-funded bottled water in a season.

Deadly silence descends. One committee member, high on her own self-righteousness, asks:

"So - because they're disabled, they don't deserve bottled water?"

Clever Lawyer, a handful of charity fliers in each hand, desperately tries to explain that she thinks they could find a charity with a more pressing need for the money. Maybe it's her use of the word "outrageous" - or maybe not, but she is shot down from every angle. Political correctness reigns supreme, and she leaves the meeting feeling demoralised, her head pounding from the lashings of political correctness which doesn't allow her to admit that feeding a famine victim, providing childhood vaccinations, housing a homeless person or saving an endangered species is more important than supporting sporting endeavours (complete with bottled water) for a group of wheelchair-bound Australians who, despite their disabilites, have homes to go to, food to eat, clean water to drink, and healthcare provided by the state.

Now, neither she, I, or anyone else I know would claim that disabled athletes don't deserve support. Their experiences of marginalisation from society are probably at least as painful as the conditions which rendered them disabled, and any scheme which assists them to participate in a team sport is laudable. But it's a question of priorities. Charity funds are finite, and the fact remains that they are urgently required for more pressing problems both here and overseas. All the politically-correct posturing in the world won't change the fact that spending $50 on bottled water for one player, in one team, during one season, is money that is, quite literally, being pissed away for no actual benefit.

And, in answer to Clever Lawyer's query - $50 constitutes about one-twentieth of the money required to dig a well in a developing country, supplying an entire village with clean water. Stack that up against 20 team-sports players drinking expensive water that they could get for free out of a tap, and the contrast is exactly what Clever Lawyer dubbed it: outrageous.

Are some charities more deserving than others?
Do you think it is in bad-taste to spend charity funds on bottled water for sport?
What is the best/worst use of charitable funds you know of?

Vengeance Is Mine Inc.

Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.
-- Paul Gaugain

Just recently, I came across a short story by Roald Dahl entitled "Vengeance Is Mine, Inc.". The story centres around a couple of guys who think they can make a quick buck by carrying out revenge on behalf of third parties. You even get your choice of vengeance - with options ranging from a punch in the nose to letting a de-venomed rattlesnake loose in the car of the person who wronged you. Even though the scheme ultimately fails and drives the guys out of town, I couldn't help but think it was a bloody good idea for a business. It's probably a sad indictment of my personality that when Clever Boyfriend asked me if I had any New Year's Resolutions, I immediately thought of revenging myself upon an ex-boss who ruined my finances and self-esteem in 2008.

I've been warned that revenge is unsatisfying, but then again it can't be universally unsatisfying thanks to the numerous immortal quotes on the subject. For example, the Japanese say that revenge is a dish best served cold. The Talmud says that living well is the best revenge, and even JFK said "don't get mad, get even". Many others disagree, including Juvenal, who stated that revenge is for fools - but did express his belief that "noone rejoices in revenge more than woman".

Oh, snap.

Clever Father usually pledges the Eastern solution - don't fuck your karma up with hate, and forgive your enemies. In theory. He got the best quick revenge I've ever seen done - and enjoyed it enough to cast some serious doubt upon Juvenal's little theory of gender disparity.

Years ago, when I was a teenager, my parents lived in a semi-rural area, where you have to go up a long bush driveway to the house. It also happens to be near a church, so on Sundays the quiet little street is packed with cars. And one Sunday night there was a vicious thunderstorm. I had driven my old banger back from uni, squinting through the rain, only to find that someone had parked across our driveway, blocking access in and out as completely as if the road didn't exist. I swore and cursed a lot as I tried to rain-proof myself and my textbooks for the long walk up the driveway.

I needn't have bothered. I was soaked before I was halfway up. It was pitch dark, and impossible to avoid the ankle-deep puddles snaking through the mud driveway, which was half demolished with rain. By the time I got to the house, my books were stuck together. Clever Father opened the door for me with a bemused smile.

"Dad. Some complete prick has parked across our driveway."

"I know," he says, continuing to smile. "Did you get a look at his tyres?"

Dad hadn't gone so far as slashing them, but it turns out he had let them all down. We had a great laugh over that as I wrung the rain out of my hair and spread my notes in front of the heater to dry. Revenge can be extremely satisfying. Just watch Kill Bill. In this case though, revenge was best served smokin' hot.

So, would you be tempted to use a service such as Vengeance Is Mine Inc.?

And is Juvenal correct when he says that women enjoy vengeance more than men?