The Lesson I Learned From Marilyn Manson
I don’t know Marilyn Manson personally.
So I don’t know the nuances of his life.
I know he labels himself a villain. But words are just words.
I understand he is an easy target for the masses because he labels himself a villain. But whether that is a cover for something more nefarious on his part, I don’t know. Again, I don’t know the guy.
But I, Joe Camerota, do inherently know something interesting, which he was the first person that I saw publicly acknowledge.
I, myself, have one rule. I’m anti-sports. As a child, surrounded by a competition/sports-dominated world, I simply grew an apathy towards all things sports and competition.
But it was through Marilyn Manson that I began to figure the wording of my feelings out.
When I was a child, Marilyn Manson went on the David Letterman show and said something publicly that blew my mind. He said to David Letterman, “My only moral is I don’t believe in sports.”
You can see the interview here.
I realized at that moment that Marilyn Manson had discovered a great secret in his journey as an artist that he had been able to put into words.
You see, you can play life in two ways, you can play life like a sports game, meaning your success necessitates a “loser”. Or like a musician, you can play life like a musical instrument, meaning you can play just to play.
When you play a song, it’s different than when you play a sports game in one way. Playing a song doesn’t necessitate the concept of a “loser”.
Again, I don’t know the nuances of Marilyn Manson’s life and genius. I don’t know if there is a real malevolent dark side to him. But I do know that in that statement of his on The Late Show, he inspired me to live a better way. A way I had wanted to live.
It appears that a lot of Marilyn Manson’s Late Show interviews have been scrubbed from YouTube. I had to find this interview on Daily Motion. That’s odd, as I used to watch it on YouTube. It for sure feels like someone wants that message scrubbed.
