In 1999 I wrote two short, topical essays a month for the Web site FEED. I thought, then, that I'd re-examine these pieces a year later to see what had been on my mind and to see if I still agreed with what I'd written. Here they are. Take a look at my 1999 Journal for this month, below, and join me in the Wicked Pavilion to discuss it.

Editor's note: Josh Glenn was so devastated by the death of actress Dana Plato that he sunk into a deep depression and was unable to write a second piece for FEED in May.

14 May, 1999

When freckle-faced Diff'rent Strokes alumna Dana Plato died of a drug overdose on Saturday, the media trotted out their usual, workhorse clichés. Her 1991 arrest for armed robbery was just a sad ploy to get back in the spotlight. Her battles with substance abuse (she was caught forging Valium prescriptions) were unheeded cries for help. Indeed, from low-brow '70s fare like The Exorcist II to low-budget '90s schlock like Bikini Beach Race and a spread in Playboy, Dana Plato seemed to offer the Ideal Form against which all other Child Stars Gone Bad would thereafter be measured. But for those of us whose unhappy childhoods were brightened by half-hour-long weekly visits with Plato as Kimberly Drummond, it's preferable to believe that, like her philosophical namesake, she was in fact always seeking the Good.

Let's face it: working on Diff'rent Strokes (1978-1986) must have been a morally challenging experience. Ostensibly a light-hearted show about two insuppressible ghetto kids (Arnold and Willis) who move in with a wealthy white mogul (Mr. Drummond) and his daughter, the program was actually a Reagan-era exercise in what cultural theorist Barbara Herrnstein Smith calls "fatuous egalitarianism." In fact, Smith's classic text, Contingencies of Value (1988), seems at times to have this particular rags-to-riches sitcom in mind. According to Smith, the normative mechanisms of a community (e.g., the Drummond household, the United States) help maintain an illusion of consensus by suppressing any divergence from those norms on the part of the "inadequately acculturated" (usually young, poor non-whites) by adopting a genial "folk relativism." In other words, "Diff'rent Strokes for diff'rent folks" is a smiley-face way of saying that minor infractions of the dominant norms are tolerated as long as the dissenters remain lovably eccentric and capricious.

Kimberly, who served as a mediator between her father and her (lovably eccentric and capricious) adopted brothers in each episode, was forced into the role of that community's philosopher—unburdened by any biases, indeed by any values of her own. A natural and gifted comedienne, Dana Plato taught the post-Boomer generation that where difference emerges, it must be continuously negotiated by finding humor in the clash of value-systems—otherwise difference will be continuously suppressed. Yet the events of her later "career" seem to indicate that in the end she'd come to agree with the sociologist/pornographer George Bataille, who insisted that the very idea of "diff'rent strokes" was an opiate of the people, one which narcotized them into a complicitous participation in a degenerate system. Like the anti-heroine of one of Bataille's novels, then, Dana paid the price for escaping the paralysis of what Smith calls a "torpid che-serà-seràism," basking in the glory of absolute degradation.

Although reading Plato may not help us understand Dana, understanding Dana may help us read Plato. Has anyone ever really figured out what that philosopher means, in his Symposium, when he writes that the first task of the person seeking the Good is to pass from love of "one instance of physical beauty to two and from two to all"? Perhaps Dana Plato's starring role in the 1997 soft-core flick Different Strokes: A Story of Jack and Jill... and Jill is an answer, of sorts. Love, Plato writes, is a mediatory link between the material world and the world of Absolute Beauty; our mistake, it seems, has been to think of this Love as something chaste and dignified. Dana Plato, ever the mediator, has shown us how wrong we've been.