Madonna: “I’m saving the earth…one tiny, exotic baby at a time.”
Sunday, April 5th, 2009
The Madonna adoption debate rages on. Exhibit A: This clip from last night’s “Saturday Night Live,” in which Angelina Jolie (Amy Elliot) taunts Madge (Kristin Wiig) about her strenuous, failed efforts to adopt “a fancy, spicy, brown baby” from Malawi. The two supermoms then compete to name the most exotic place in the universe to find stray, adoptable babies. (Note Madonna’s anguish, upon hearing about “Baby Island,” at 1:30.)
Exhibit B: Muriel Gray’s denouncement, in Scotland’s Sunday Herald, of such rude portrayals of Madonna: “Undistinguished, talentless hacks have long since decided that anyone in the public eye who can do things better than they can…should suffer…..” She provides an example:
Alison Pearson, “writing” in the Daily Mail, apologizes for having supported Madonna in the past, with a staggering vanity that assumes anyone cares, and tells us that she now finds the singer’s adoption ambitions to be a “disgusting spectacle”. Pearson also informs us that: “Madonna chooses to wrench another child out of their environment to act as a prop in her ongoing mid-life crisis and to make herself look good.”
Gray’s criticisms of her fellow journalist strike me as the ravings of someone who, at one point, received a nice gift basket from Madonna. I may be right. She continues:
Pearson is asking us to believe that she has remarkable inside knowledge of both Madonna’s parenting skills and her mental health. I find this quite impressive. I’ve met Madonna several times, and have absolutely no [illuminating] knowledge of her whatsoever to impart to you. She’s a bit short. She’s American. She likes art but thinks she’s rubbish at it, has lovely skin and pretends to remember having met you before because she has nice manners. That’s it. See, I told you it wasn’t very interesting. Therefore I would not presume to guess anything about her private life.”
But Gray would presume, with staggering vanity, that we care about her chummy, not-at-all-insightful relationship with Madonna when the real question is: How do we get to Baby Island?