Levi Johnston: A Hollywood Cautionary Tale

Fame is that place where character is rarely able to sustain itself. I don’t know how much character Levi Johnston had as a boy, but as a young man in the grips of the Hollywood culture machine he’s lost it all.

Levi’s story is one that plays out hundreds of times each year in Hollywood. The young either come to La La Land seeking fame, or have the opportunity for it laid in their lap due to circumstances they often times never sought. The wreckage of most rarely see the light of day, much less the pages of Playgirl magazine, they only end up chasing a dream that never comes, in rehab, jail or worse.

When one unknowingly trades character for fame the recipient has only one recourse, attack the catalyst that brought them the opportunity in the first place, in Levi Johnston case it’s Sarah Palin and the mother of his child.

When young men lack positive role models at home, often times they go astray in that long stretch towards manhood, only to end up a tool for whatever hungry machine is in their path, gangs, a White House intern, or the exploitative elements of Hollywood. When a young man’s character fails him, good parents are needed to right the course. Levi Johnston didn’t have that growing up in Alaska.

Levi was born in 1990 and raised by Sherry and Keith Johnston along with a younger sister. In 2008 his mother Sherry L. Johnston was charged with six felony counts of misconduct involving a controlled substance and was sentenced to Alaska’s only woman’s prison and later released to serve her three year sentence under home confinement. A Google search for his father Keith brings up only a few sporadic mentions of him and no photos. After dropping out of Wasilla High School in his junior year, Johnston began working full-time for the Alaska North Slope oil fields as an apprentice electrician, but quit his job in January 2009 because he saw an opportunity, something I’m sure even now he thinks is better than being and electrician in Alaska.

Getting your high school girlfriend pregnant is hardly worthy of fame, that is unless her mother is the Governor of your state, a vice-presidential candidate and conservative woman. Only then do the leftist vampires of Hollywood come out of their dark corners and offer you the glowing flame of fame. But what they didn’t tell Levi is that he’s just another one of their moths and the moment he’s served their purpose they’ll push him into the flame and exterminate him.

Levi’s now what Hollywood calls an actor and model, surrounded by the illusionist of Tinsel Town, an agent, a lawyer, a publicist. They prop him up on Tyra and Larry King for painful interviews of which reveals only a young man being nudged towards the embers. They set him up on public dates at children’s events with despicable bottom feeders like Kathy Griffin, get him to hock pistachios on TV and take his clothes off in magazines, all while taking 10, 15 and 5% of his gross respectively. When he’s done with the rounds in Hollywood they set him a blaze by dragging his child into the circus with a court battle because they tell him having custody would be good for his image. And when the media showers the public with the car crash that is Levi Johnston they are filled with glee because somehow they believe they are helping their liberal cause by destroying a young man, smearing a young mother and mocking a conservative woman who rose to power by her own boot straps.

There are worse things in life than ending up an electrician in Alaska and a present, active father in child’s life. I hope that’s where Levi ends up; it’s a far nobler and more lasting life. Cause if he stays on the path of the hungry machine that is Hollywood, just another moth reaching for the fame flame, you’ll see him years from now on “Celebrity Boxing,” “Tool Academy” or “I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here” and he won’t be the handsome young man with so much potential that he is today.

When Levi is older I hope he’s able look back at this time in his life and feel a sense of shame, only then will he know that he’s begun to rebuild his character.