Katy Perry is in a bad place. Really bad. As in, even for her bad.

I’ve never been a fan. I don’t listen to her songs. I don’t think you could torture any prisoner worse than letting them have meals and a bed but never turning off her songs.

That said, I really don’t like doing this. I don’t want to flame people, because God probably judges those who flame others more harshly than the ones being flamed. I’m not doing this out of malice or for views. As bloggers go, I’m a little guy. I’ve written awful stuff in my pursuit of God, coping with mental illness and the crushing loss of my children.

But I’ve hidden nothing. I’m brutal about it and I leave comments off because nobody really wants to comment anyway, or I’m just going to get harassed. Men like myself don’t need that. It’s the opposite of why I’m here.

Let me add, please, that the title of my site is not parody or humorous. I’m an asshole and I don’t pretend not to be.

Now then: what is all this about Katy Perry being so thoroughly raked over the coals because she “went to space?”

First of all, this. And what’s in the link above.

All of it is “cringe,” a modern expression that covers secondhand embarrassment for a person or persons who do especially stupid things. They should be embarrassed, but they seldom are. Whatever they did was deliberate and they now own it. They may incur a blemish on their reputation or lose a job. They may get sued in court. They can even end up in jail. None of it is pretty.

Ask Mel Gibson. A domestically violent, anti semitic bore. Except of course, he doesn’t care. Asking someone how it feels to self-immolate implies that they have feelings aside from rage.

Katy Perry has just poured gasoline all over herself and lit the fire. Her upcoming tour is ill-advised now. She’s going to take heat, and that’s even from former fans who just want to see her end her career with a dismal box office showing. Like NASCAR “fans” who only go so they can see the crashes (you’re better off watching those on TV so you can see replays).

Want to see a pop star crash? It’s happened before.

Who can forget the devil’s triad of Perry, Taylor Swift and Madonna doing shows with satanic themes? Which one was on a cross? I guess it doesn’t matter, really. But all of them took heat. Rightfully so.

In show business, people are often chewed up and spit out. Even the classic stars were damaged. Marilyn Monroe comes to mind, but so does Tippi Hedren, one of Hitchcock’s victims. He was a sadistic director who, when shooting the picture “The Birds,” tied a bird to her so it would appear genuine that she was frantic and terrified. And being clawed to pieces.

Even in the Golden Age, drugs and alcohol often became staples of the actor or singer or both. The parties even then were attended by the depraved. Good against evil was a fine theme for a movie or a musical, but they blended very well after hours. Suspicious deaths occurred. To read or hear those stories is to feel cold, hopeless and in a darkness difficult to forget.

Anyone with empathy can feel those things, but what about those people who don’t have the capacity for love, empathy or guilt? They never apologize unless they are pressured. They are stuck on themselves and can’t hide it. Adoring audiences and fans remain in awe of them, looking past anything they do. They follow them on social media and comment, hoping that the god they worship will deign to engage them with a reply. Scandals? Nah, the fans ravenously defend their god or goddess with a ruthless viciousness that will knock you on your heels.

Perhaps this is why I cannot allow this to pass without piling on. I’ve never been a Katy Perry fan. No singer after the 70s or very early 80s is on my radar, though the occasional song may catch my attention. But a singer from back then was harshly judged quickly and lost popularity far more often than anyone since.

Back then it wasn’t all that difficult to tank one’s career. Boomers had parents who condemned Elvis for his onstage moves being suggestive or even obscene. In his Ed Sullivan Show appearance, the first one, as I recall, network censors would allow only shots of him from the waist up to be taped.

The Smothers Brothers often took heat. Those who recorded the first antiwar songs during the Vietnam War were hanged in effigy. There was a hilarious case of a woman swooning and then “speaking in tongues.”

Remember when they began, the networks, that is, to test the waters of nudity, and they showed some guy getting out of bed naked, baring his glutes? One of them was David Caruso. If you had a good TV you could see the freckles on his ass. Freezing the frame, if you connected them, they formed a map of Silent Hill.

But in the 60s…

Guys with crewcuts who wore suits whenever in public carried baseball bats in case anyone spoke ill of the senseless deaths in Southeast Asia.

Compared to all of that mess back there, it seems mild when I think of what goes on today. Katy Perry isn’t a standout; she’s rather lukewarm. Most people are not shocked by much anymore. As for nudity on TV, some series that are on streaming services require it. It’s all normal now.

But Katy Perry seems to have broken some unwritten rule, and now it’s getting nasty. And her critics aren’t misogynistic alpha males: vocal standouts include big names. Women.

Her shamelessness at a time when public opinion outstrips anything I saw during Watergate is the definition of crass; perhaps elevating the word to a new level, one of immediacy and added harshness.

She’s drawn serious heat, and it’s still coming.

Of course, she now says she regrets the publicity stunt, but it’s too late to do damage control.

The planet is becoming less and less able to support most life as we know it. It’s a mess headed for some cataclysm we should never have been this close to. Stupid rocket trips can’t help. And she wasn’t in space. NASA defined space as within the atmosphere. Even science fiction fans know that’s not space.

When William Shatner went up, he was begged to go. But he came back not boasting that he had been in space, but profoundly sad at what we had done to our own planet. His view of the world was one of awe mixed with sorrow. We should learn from him. They used him, and he came back with emotional words they didn’t expect to hear.

People here in the U.S. are scared. Terrified, to be honest. We have a crisis that seems to have no sign of being subject to control. Yes, what she did (and I’m not excusing Gayle King or the others) was stupid, selfish and proved only that she doesn’t care about anything she claims to care for.

She may not deserve to be called names, nor take personal abuse, as those things are unchristian. But her fall to earth is deserved, if not somewhat amusing. We should stop worshipping stupid people and definitely stop investing our interest in stupidity itself. The situation around the world is too grim for that nonsense.

We are running out of time.