Going On The Account: More Heartless Than Blackbeard?

So word comes in today from two different articles on the Gawker sites regarding Dara Lynn-Weiss, a socialite who wrote an article in  Vogue about how she put her seven-year-old daughter on a diet in the worst possible way:

* Berating her daughter for her choice of foods, in public before her friends

* Keeping her from social activities based around food

* Screaming at her kid for accepting snacks and treats offered by other kids’ parents

* Belittling and berating her at every turn

 

Nope, no potential  long term psychological scarring here;, no negative body issue reinforcement coming out of this, no sir…

And after a year of doing this to her child, she not only gets an article in Vogue but a book deal at Ballantine.

A book deal, for being a complete out-and-out so-n-so.  What the fu…?

Sure, there are plenty of heartless folks who get the chance to write books, but usually for showing  depraved indifference in a position that affects whole populations.  In order to understand why such leaders showed depraved indifference at the helm, and in the hope of preventing this from happening again, we give these folks a chance to speak (what passes for) their mind to learn from that.  So it makes perfect sense that we’d give, say, Dick Cheney a book deal to understand how that all went down.

Giving him a new heart, on the other hand, not so much sense.  Some folks might ask when they read the news, “He had a heart to replace?”  but well…

An abusive parent, however, I can’t see rewarding with a book deal.  Did she get her daughter to lose weight?  Sure she did.  So too did Carlotta Brett-Pierce, who starved her four-year-old daughter Marchella in 2010 to death.  She’s facing a murder charge for the death of her daughter, though I doubt that if Marchella had lived that her mother would be getting a book deal.  Likewise, if Bea Lynn-Weiss had not survived her mother Dara’s bullying, it would be hoped that Vogue and Ballantine would not have been that quick to offer her ink and paper.  We can thank David Berkowitz for something, all said…

Still, how is it all right to laud  some truly horrible behavior like this?  What parent would give complexes to such young children, and how do we keep such bad parenting from being rewarded with a book advance?  If she met our expectations and did things the way they have always been done, then Dara Lynn-Weiss could not be given a forum unless she’d starved every child in Darfur (which is sadly no joke); the fact that she can now get published for only abusing her own kid is a development I’m not sure we really want to see in our bookstores.

Excuse me for a moment while I make sure my son’s OK…