SMITH: Bieber’s Biggest Fan

Belieber is not a real word. It’s a made up term for describing fans of Canadian … artist … and serial cultural arsonist Justin Bieber.

But despite being made up the term was everywhere on Sunday, displacing such irrelevant issues as the gun control debate and the war in Afghanistan, all due to Justin’s recent visit to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam. As we all know, Anne Frank was a young Jewish teenager hiding in Nazi-occupied Holland whose vivid journal descriptions have captivated multiple generations.

Add one more to the list, I guess.

Bieber wrote in the museum’s guest book after he visited that he was “truly inspired” by his visit, going on to add that Anne was “a great girl” and, of course, “hopefully would have been a Belieber”.

Let’s forget for a moment that Justin Bieber is a talentless empty shell of an almost-person whose repetitive manufactured pop melodies will be turned on very soon by his prepubescent and unevolving fan base and then forgotten by history. Except for me. I will always hate him and all his failed pathetic attempts to ingratiate himself to hip-hop artists and moguls who don’t like him (and hopefully have a really mean email chain going about him.) Let’s forget for a second that probably even his farts are auto-tuned.

Who the hell can be that self-absorbed five seconds after visiting the Anne Frank house?

Honestly it seems like the primary motivation for people doing anything these days, including basic survival functions such as going to the grocery store and driving a car, is to let people know about it and receive praise. I’m slowly coming to accept this reality and the notion that I deserve some type of societal reward in the form of a like or a re-tweet every time I do literally anything. However, I really thought Holocaust memorials would be the last bastion. I really thought the Anne Frank house would be the last thing people could manage to squeeze through a personal lens. I was wrong.

The fact that Bieber would have the indecency, the pretension, to take an experience that has touched so many on such a deep, personal level and filter it through his own superficial and commercial perspective is shocking. I guess it’s to be expected that someone who has been given anything they want for a long time for no discernable reason might be a little jaded and corrupted, but this is bad even for Bieber.

The action pales in comparison to the content. The message is not just self-centered. It is monumentally, astronomically self-centered. It’s like the Mona Lisa of self-centeredness. I was angry at it, and then I was just amazed and vaguely jealous from an English major perspective that so much nuanced self-righteousness and self-appreciation could be packed into so few words. It’s actually kind of a grammatical feat in an odd way.

Anyway, putting aside for a moment that Anne Frank would never be a Justin Bieber fan because her journal indicates she was a literate, free-thinking person, isn’t it just a little irrelevant what her musical tastes actually were? It’s been a few years since I’ve read Anne Frank’s diary, but I seem to remember it being about something like hope and perseverance and faith in humanity, and with no particular mention at all of any obsession with androgynous feathery-haired Canadian egomaniacs. Perhaps it’s in an abridged version. But I somehow doubt it.

Justin Bieber’s gross self-obsession is representative of a growing and alarming trend — a tendency of young people to restructure any given experience they are in until they are the main character of that experience. If Anne Frank’s diary shows anythingthing, doesn’t it show the nobility of accepting yourself as only part of a global and eternal experience separate from a superficial reality? I thought so.

Anne Frank’s diary may be a document of fading relevance, sadly. It’s entirely devoid of hashtags, emoticons or pop culture references. It’s fairly conservative in its use of exclamation points. It doesn’t even have any pictures. All these things make it a document written in a language increasingly difficult for young people to understand, regardless of which one it’s translated into. That’s the way it is with everything now. If you have a point to make, or a profound truth, if you want something to never ever be forgotten, you had better encase it in one hundred and forty characters or less.

But Justin Bieber has done one thing that’s remarkable. He’s taken an experience that advocates for total, complete acceptance of all human beings, regardless of race, religion or social standing, and made me hate one totally based on something as silly as musical ability.

And that’s unbeliebable.

Colin Smith is a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences, and a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. He can be reached at colin1@bu.edu.