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Jonas Brothers The 3D Concert Experience

Remember Mary Kay Letourneau? She was the 34-year-old elementary school teacher who cruised the playground for love and found a boyfriend and future father to two of her children who loved juice boxes and Chutes and Ladders. Next to the creepiness of whispering sweet nothings into the ear of someone wearing Superman Underoos and pajamas with feet, the thing that is most interesting to me are the connections between Mary’s problems and her parents. This was never emphasized. In fact, in the media feeding frenzy that followed, the names of her mother and father were rarely mentioned. She was the daughter of conservative, family values, nut job Congressman John G. Schmitz out of Orange County, California, a man that was so right wing that the John Birch Society expelled him for extremism. He was so outraged that President Richard Nixon went to Communist China that he decided to run for President in 1972 and even garnered 10 percent of the vote in Idaho. His wife, Mary, was a homemaker raising their seven children and in her spare time attacking liberals of all stripes, especially feminists. This rosy-cheeked family was featured in numerous articles as the paradigm of Christian perfection. Like a majority of those saving us from the barbarians at the gate, the real people John should have been trying to save us from is John and Mary themselves.

John’s political career effectively came to an end when an unwed mother of two children and a Republican Party volunteer took their infant boy to an Orange County emergency room because someone had tied a piece of hair around his…, just do me a favor and look it up on the Internet. When police were called into the case, they grilled the 43-year-old Swedish woman and threatened to remove the child from her home unless the woman coughed up the father’s name. You already know this one. It was John. Sixteen years later, living out of the house once owned by his political hero Senator Joseph McCarthy, living up to his family values mantra, he worked furiously behind the scenes trying to find a loophole in one of the Untied States’ treaties with Samoa that might get Mary Kay excused from having to stand trail for playing slap and tickle and peek-a-boo with a child. (The kid had Samoan heritage.)

It is the way it is, a story as old as time itself. Ted Haggard, Amy Grant, Sandi Patti, Larry Craig, Gary Bauer, Jimmy Swaggart, Mark Foley, David Vitter, Bob Allen, Britney Spears (how soon we forget that she was proudly announcing to the world that she was going to wait until marriage and then lied about it for a couple of years), Jim Bakker, Bob Barr, John Bolton, Ken Calvert, Neil Bush, Newt Gringrich, Helen Chenoweth, Rush Limbaugh, Joe Scarborough, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Randall Terry, Jim West, Pat Robertson, Michael W. Smith, John Edwards, the names might change but the moral stink of their hypocrisy remains the same.

I know what you are thinking, it is all nice and good that you are climbing up on your soap box but what has that got to do with a movie starring the squeaky clean Jonas Brothers, Kevin, Joe and Nick? Simply this, when God and manna are put in a bag together and shaken, Jesus usually exits stage left for coffee. Power, materialism, money and celebrity, these are our gods that we kneel down in front of and nothing spoils a kid faster than these drugs. That being said, I am sure that the Jonas Brothers are wonderful kids, as are Miley Cyrus, Jessica Simpson, Michael Jackson, Lindsay Lohen, Britney Spears, the Olsen Twins, and the couple of dozen other kids who become the public face for a multibillion dollar corporation. Companies exist to make money, that is their sole and only purpose, and if they are selling a product to children and more importantly their parents, they like a nice, clean message to sell their product. The problem is teenagers are messy. Hormones are bubbling like a lava lamp. Your ego makes you truly wonder how the world got by without you. While at the same time not having the experience to know that the answer is just fine.

The Walt Disney organization has an image to maintain in order to make sure the cash register continues to ring. If you don’t believe me, just ask yourself what comes to your mind when you hear the words “Walt Disney” and these children are just tools to maintain the image of this brand name. In turn, Disney enjoyed these pint-sized mouth pieces upholding traditional family values as log as mom and dad keep writing checks and the Jonas Brothers parents who have been marketing their children in gospel arena for years. Homeschooled, kind of like those Prussian Blue girls, they wear purity rings on their left hands as a symbol that they will not give in to having premarital sex. As Joe, one of the brothers, stated that the rings symbolize “a promise to ourselves and to God that we will stay pure ‘till marriage.” His brother Nick stated, ‘it’s pretty awesome, and the rings are just one of our ways of kind of like being different than everybody else out there.” With both statements, amazingly, you did not see their father’s lips move. Still, it is a wonderful sentiment and I am all in favor of kids not engaging in sex, drugs, tobacco or alcohol because all four of these things are grown up things that most grown ups do not handle all that well. Still, I am a realist and if Las Vegas was offering odds I would be betting those rings will be turning green in a few years. Again, nothing against these kids and their love of Jesus, but when you’re a pimply-faced teenage boy and some girl (and maybe her mother and a couple of friends) treat you like a rock god you have to be Superman to resist. There are kids out there who do but most of those pure hearts are not doing such in the boiling caldron of celebrity. (Although Michael Jackson did.) The only sure fired way of keeping your child pure is when they are about ten years old to introduce the kid to the wonderful world of Marvel Comics, Dungeons and Dragons, rocketry, and Star Trek marathons, and that is only going to work if the child is a boy. A teenage daughter? I don’t have a clue, maybe a chastity belt and to make sure that there is not a set of bolt cutters in about a ten mile radius.

Children should never be used by corporations, politicians, or their parents as moral paradigms for others. To me it is just as abusive as the little league dad who is screaming at his crying, bat-totting child to get a hit. The Jonas brothers in their personal life should be allowed to fail or succeed morally on their own terms, far away from the public eye. Maybe that is a foolish notion in this world of MySpace and Facebook where kids tell everything on-line and a p.r. glossy magazine culture. Still, the failure rate, Vanessa Hughes, the Olsen twins, Britney, Lindsay, the drunk redhead chick in Spider-man, and Miley Cyrus in a few years, is incredibly high. Don’t look to Hollywood or Disney outside of the stories they tell in their shows and movies for morality. At the end of the day they are only interested in making money and the kids they use are just props to do such. Politicians are primarily interested in getting elected and maintaining power. The best you can do is show your children what kind of morality you want them to have by how you live your life and how you treat them, sit down and talk with them in the most honest terms you can, and then just hold on for dear life because whatever will happen will happen. Most of the time the Mary Kay Letourneau apples don’t fall far from the John G. Schmitz tree.

…Wait a minute, what about the movie? What did you think of it? What was it about? Please, it is a Jonas Brothers movie straight out of the Disney factory. Unless you have a kid, you need to take a gun and kill yourself if you care about this film. If you have a kid, you know what these movies are like and you could use the hour-and-a-half of peace and quiet to close your eyes and remember what it was like when you had a life.