I'm glad to see Whitney Houston has found her way back to the music, but I was troubled by the lack of personal accountability in her recent turn on Oprah's show. Oprah Winfrey has rocks for brains and is generally anti-male, anti-marriage, anti-family and anti-common sense, so there were no surprises, really, when Whitney got on the show and blamed all the bad in her life on her no-good ex-husband and her insistence to stay true to her marital vows. Oprah — who knows nothing of marriage — concurs. This, I expected.
But I kept waiting for the part where Whitney admits to making some bad choices — choices that didn't involve Bobby. I kept waiting for her to talk about any interventions she sought out or counseling she procured for her family. Instead, I heard how her husband strung her out on drugs. He turned her out, you see. Whitney doesn't once suggest that they were co-dependent enablers who fed each other's sickness. Marriage was the culprit. Her vows are to blame, so sayeth Oprah. She wanted to be a good wife, so she took up all her husband's interests: gardening … foosball … smoking crack cocaine.
Uh-huh. Something about that explanation doesn't jibe.
She makes excuses for bad behavior, but doesn't answer for her public low-rent fling with Ray J. Doesn't answer for why her daughter Bobbi Kristina — aka "Nympho Baby"— had pictures of herself smoking dope up on her MySpace page. Oprah doesn't ask, and we have no clue. No sense in making anyone else accountable.
Every song Whitney sings on Oprah sounds like "Its All Bobby's Fault," and she for part two, she gets the daughter on the chorus, a most disgusting display of ugly celebrity parenting. We can never quite know why people stay in relationships, and it's true, like I said today in The Shop, that Bobby Brown is not the most sympathetic character in the world. But I bet his side of the story is at least as compelling as hers. He was caught up in a cycle of drug abuse and fame addiction. He admits to this.
But he wasn't alone.
Single Father, Author, Screenwriter, Award-Winning Journalist, NPR Moderator, Lecturer and College Professor. Habitual Line-Stepper