The Nose Dive of Michael Jackson

June 26, 2009
As I came out of the shower on the first morning of my hiking holiday in the Bavarian Forest, my friend turned away from the TV set to impart some item of information he had just heard. I was immediately apprehensive. My friend is the silent type. He doesn’t impart items of information unless it is momentous, like the Sept. 11 attacks he informed me of so many years ago. So my heart fluttered as he inclined slightly towards me.

“Michael Jackson is dead.”

The news did stun me, as he knew it would. It had obviously taken him aback or he wouldn’t have chosen to pass the item on to me. I was also incredulous, but the monotonous electronic incantation hammering in the background forced me to believe. The TV news station was frenetically engaged in spewing forth all and anything found during what would be a month-long dissection of the mind and soul of an entity not genuinely credited with either: a pop star.

Okay, so Michael Jackson was dead. What was that to me? I wasn’t a Michael Jackson fan. But I had never been aware of how aware I was of him, either, much less that I very much liked him, and that acknowledgment came as a surprise. Hearing now that he had gone struck me as a little nasty. I had put up with him all this time, getting him embossed into my brain over the years, and he splits just like that? I mean, it was his scene. So, we’ve got one sequin less in a tacky tuxedo, right? Well, no. Somehow, it was more. Much, much more. But why?

Figuring that out preoccupied me—against my will—for weeks. What surprised me is how very uncomfortable the process got. Had I been squirming about the state of my own soul, it could have been considered a soul-turning period. But it was the state of Michael Jackson’s soul that had me strung up, and that afforded neither pleasure nor profit.

My preoccupation with the singer/dancer shifted into high gear that first evening at dinner when I came out with a truly uncool statement to get a laugh from the couple sharing our table. Over fish and potatoes, I announced to general approbation that ex-president George W. Bush and Michael Jackson were both idiots. The remark immediately inflamed me with a lingering and intensifying regret that I had maligned for petty gain. And make no mistake. I did not regret calling Bush an idiot. I regretted calling Michael Jackson one.

The Matter

However, my holiday had just begun and a week of hiking sufficed to drive thoughts of the man to the sidelines, where they flickered but did not gain the field. Those thoughts surged back and with a vengeance as soon as I arrived home and settled into my solitary, carefully balanced lifestyle of work, exercise, reading, and, when at all possible, sleeping. I was okay during the day. I like my work; I thrive on exercise; reading is my reward at the day’s end. It was the sleeping part that didn’t work. We had a full moon at that time, always a phase of less restful sleep for me. But as the moon waned, my sleeplessness persisted. I was still thinking about Michael Jackson.

Gruesome feelings emerged as I lay there in the dark. This was no tease, no thrill, no electric but safe charge of deep mystery running through me. The feelings severely oppressed me, making me feel a little panicky. They closed down over me, like the searing lid of hell, shutting down neat and tight, trapping me. And there I lay, cheek to cheek, lip to lip, exchanging breath, chuckles, childish jokes—who knows?—with a repulsive, prepubescent succubus. Me! Why me? Michael Jackson was the dead one. I was … well, alive, but that did not reassure. I was left to regret in his stead, and that made me desperate for air, space, mobility, an agency of deliverance—in short, I was being invaded with all the sensations I felt must have tortured Jackson in his last years as he struggled to gain those very things. His failures only whetted the appetite of a voracious public year after gluttonous year.

And so here I was, forced into my own narrow space to discover my own nighttime succubus, slick and scary, bequeathed me by a famous stranger, whose life and poisonous misery I was to ponder, ingest, and digest until when? Would I ever sleep again?

The Sins

The Germans have a word for someone who has a magic touch for making their life work: Lebenskünstler. That is what Michael Jackson was not. The guy was born into a Chinese finger trap: Every twist and turn he made just wedged him deeper into where he didn’t want to be. Unfortunately, exposing his every gyration to a gaping public was worth huge amounts of money. No one wanted him to get out. The fact that Jackson slowly turned himself into a perfect freak—with equal emphasis on perfect and freak—in the process hints at a symbiosis as improbable and complex as it was fascinating. The pelvic thrusts that became one of his signature choreographic flourishes—and which he couldn’t quite get away from during his later performances—took on the significance in my mind of both accusation (that he was being victimized) and confession (of complicity): The symbiosis had given way to a master-slave conjunction and the pop king found himself squirming at the wrong end.

Jackson had shot from celebrity to notoriety to alleged infamy and had been struggling to chip out a niche for himself in hagiology as perhaps patron saint of children. What forces were at work to bring him down?

• He was a wizard on stage, as lithe and scintillating as a flame, next to which the beloved Cher could only shuffle and bob like an oversized klutz. (If you don’t believe that, check out www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sUn-COebd4.)
• His face was a source of anguish to him. He kept having it changed. Each change either just made it worse or was one step in a much grander scheme. The process came not to a conclusion, but to an end when the context of his features had been turned into a perfect mask, i.e., when there was no more any doctor would dare do to it.
• Naïve hardly describes Jackson’s handling of money. He wrangled the music rights deal that became his greatest bonanza, yet after a prolonged stay as guest in Saudi Arabia, got slapped with a multimillion dollar lawsuit by a very angry host who testified that that’s what he was owed. Jackson protested that it had all been a gift. How can anyone once so shrewd and far-sighted so badly misunderstand matters of the ledger?
• He liked children, but if you really like children, you don’t wind up in child molestation cases. I maintain a respectful distance to other people’s children, fully aware that any display of natural affection may not seem right, and I’m a middle-aged lady. Heavens, in Germany, people don’t like when you pet their unleashed dogs.

The Apologies

July 6–17, 2009
My nighttime cogitations produced the following explanations for Jackson’s inexplicable behavior, based on no evidence whatsoever, mind you.

Wizard: He was a fabulous dancer and choreographer with a meticulous sense of staging and costume, which became a very effective, although eerie backdrop for his increasingly bizarre face. He said at various times that his talent was a gift from God and that he sang every song like he meant it. The only objection anyone can raise against him is the magnetic attraction he generated; it was hard to rip yourself away once you started watching him.

Face: Published opinion has it that Jackson hated his body, a conclusion drawn from the fact that he kept having his face changed. A question: Can you hate your body and not hate yourself? In any case, I, myself, don’t consider hating either your body or yourself as so extraordinary. I would rather say it is sadly common. Yet for the hoi polloi, life is sadly common as well, and we are hurled into its daily blast of activity and necessity, which soon melts down even self-hatred and refines us into normal human beings, i.e., we’re okay with ourselves, it’s life we hate.

Jackson had the misfortune of escaping the daily torrent of housekeeping, business, and random accidents that scars, bores, tortures, drives to distraction, and otherwise diverts the attention of the rest of us away from ourselves to acknowledge that a force greater than ourselves requires reckoning with. Jackson’s success afforded the leisure and wealth that cracked this pincer-grip, allowing him to remain unaware that any force greater than himself existed; he had the power to escape it, ergo, it was not more powerful than he. The result was he could focus on himself and whatever self-hatred he might be lashed to. What clinched Jackson’s fate was that the rest of the world was focused on him, too. If he suffered from self-hatred or, more likely, if it developed as a cynical, but honest reaction to the lifelong urgency to exhibit perfection on stage, then all that attention may have exposed him to a force no one could withstand. Solitary confinement is putatively the worst torture that can be inflicted on human beings. So what’s it like to be locked into what I consider the opposite of that: finding yourself the unwavering and obsessive focus of millions of minds? We’re all familiar with the image of a beetle crawling along on a sidewalk on a hot day with a giant magnifying glass trained, of all creatures in the world, on that one laboring beetle. But that is solitary confinement, isn’t it? Of a different sort. That beetle is very alone and weighing in very scantily in opposition to all that attention.

So something flared inside Jackson that actuated his face-engineering operations, but was it self-hatred, a positive albeit insane aspiration to look like a diva, or an overpowering desire to escape? Whatever motivated him, his maneuvering only intensified the attention trained on him, now laced with opprobrium and the strange thrill of revulsion. And this from the public he wanted to please. He did achieve a kind of success: he ended up with a mask for a face. He had performed the wizardry of escaping into himself while we all watched.

Sex: (Subtopic of Face). Although sexual scandal in the form of allegations of pederastyplagued the man, running neck and neck with the attention he was awarded for his facial transformations, I myself was always struck by how sexless the man seemed. During the “Bad” phase, he was looking girlish in a very comely way, with the jaw-length curls; later on with his fluffy, shoulder-length hair he was looking like something else, but sex appeal is not what he radiated, either masculine or feminine. He was the opposite of epicene—having characteristics of both sexes. He had characteristics of neither. He was not effete, not macho, not effeminate, not unlovely. He certainly figured tall and straight and impressive, but even when he danced, even when he strode about the stage, even as he led pop gang fights, he came on like a turbo-robot and, let me emphasize, a very impressive one, but not sexy. That’s one reason I found the pelvic gyrations, not lewd, well, yes, lewd, terribly lewd, but an awkward mime of a movement he had heard much about but did not understand. I could easily stand corrected on this one; it was my impression nonetheless.

Money: Michael Jackson was simply too valuable a commodity; he brought in too muchmoney, in life and in death.

There was too much money involved for him to remain just a pop star with a genius for dancing, risqué composition, provocative content, and titillating innuendos, becoming engulfed in a hazardous dazzle and spark he himself generated. This is the reason, by the way, that I find it hard to believe his father would visit too much abuse on the son, realizing, as he surely did, that little Michael was his magic carpet ride outta there.

There was too much money for Michael Jackson to staunch his compulsion for designing his face, through which scalpings and accretions he did indeed attain a certain horrific beauty.

There was too much money for him not to be able to find doctors to substantiate whatever he wished to believe about his mind and body. There was also too much money involved for the public to believe whatever the doctors said.

There was, sadly, too much money involved for a mother not to be very keen on Michael Jackson’s interest in her little boy—for whatever reason. There was also too much money involved for the boy to be able to provide the unselfconscious childish companionship Jackson ostensibly craved. And there was too much money involved for the child not to know what to do if anything else was wanted, especially if the mother was so keen on vague liberties.

After the notoriety of Jackson’s life had passed a critical threshold, there was too much money involved for him to be able to tell the truth, or, horror of horrors, to be believed when he did. He seemed to be one of the few who didn’t know this, and it marks his passage into the dimension of pure commodity; masses of people were still very eager to hear whatever he mouthed, and he complied. He kept coming out as if to finally tell all; clear the record; explain himself in words that rang too clearly of a plea for exoneration; become reunited with his adoring public; regain acceptance, but as a saint and a martyr.

It couldn’t work. I certainly don’t believe anything the man said, say, in the shallow, laudatory interview with Oprah Winfrey. In that showcase shoebox, Jackson at one point got very upset about the lies that had circulated about his sleeping in an oxygen box, only to dismiss his fans’ very understandable concern about whether he was bleaching his skin, criticizing them for dwelling on something so trivial. Obviously the converse represents reality: how easily he could have laughed off the oxygen box, but quake at endeavors to delve into his psyche to second guess the cause of the very visible effects of his efforts to cope with a private runaway phobia. Jackson’s reaction was predictable; it was false none the less.

And, finally, there’s too much money involved for us know anything approaching the truth about this tragic man at this time. Nothing can be said for or against him that I would believe. I certainly believe nothing any of his family members has or might say about him. The statement his young daughter burst out with at her father’s memorial service which has been so highly praised was, I believe, simply a product of coaching. It’s still show time and Jackson’s coterie bob and sway as the curtain very slowly descends. As slowly as possible please; there’re still handsome fees to be collected for each statement and gesture made until it is finally down.

Children: Jackson was credited (or debited) with having lost his childhood to work in the attempt to explain why he identified so strongly with Peter Pan, purchased and developed Neverland Valley Ranch, and craved the company of children. My first thought is: How many children have “lost” their childhoods to entertainment careers or, perish the thought, carpet factories? Although Jackson was not alone in what he lost, he certainly was unique in trying to recoup it, if—the big if—that’s what he was trying to do. On the other hand, the lost childhood saga could have been a convenient pretence fed him by others, onto which he latched and whereby he hung like a twitching fish.

Instead of bemoaning his lost childhood, he could with equal credibility simply have wished to recapture it. Listen:

Jackson’s childhood—which did exist—was full of close family contact. He was lavished with family attention, and his participation in ongoing collaborative efforts was hugely acknowledged. Moreover, the fraternity of those early days was evidently a source of intense pleasure for the boy star: He once remarked in a nontelevised interview that he found sleeping with lots of people all bundled together in a bed the most pleasant way to sleep. Only a child could.

A friend of mine, now nearly 70, speaks with radiant wistfulness about the time his family crossed Silesia after World War II to return to their homeland Germany. The war’s aftermath was all around, humiliation was suppurating in the minds of the German folk; they faced hard times, worries about the future, and anguished memories of loved ones killed or missing. Adult heads were filled with horror, remorse, and anxiety. But for this fellow, who was about seven at the time, it was the greatest time of his life because, in his own words, they were all together. They may have been making their way home across war-torn Europe, but they always stayed in one room, they all slept in one room, they were all together. The seven-year-old thrived on that unity, experiencing it as being one of a litter of healthy, plump puppies—cozy, nuzzling, friendly fun. I feel sure his parents and much older sisters did not.

Apparently, Jackson’s experience while on the road with his family, was similar. Being together, living together, working together, sleeping together may have created lasting sensations of security, strength, comfort, and love. Who’s to say it didn’t? And later, sleeping with children, if not in the same bed, then at least in the same room (as unhappy compromise to public opinion and acknowledgement of his last child molestation case) may still have imparted to a yearning Jackson all those wonderful feelings; like the smell of wood smoke does for me, conjuring without fail the pervasive feeling of the peaceful evenings on the, at that time, lonely Lake Erie shore.

Who’s to say it didn’t? But I doubt it.

In the face of universal opprobrium, Jackson defended himself to an interviewer, saying that of course it was all right for a grown man to share his bed with children not related to him. The statement alone could get the man institutionalized, especially as he delivered it with the beatitude of a saint. No one else in the country feels the same way, so it is patently not okay. But Jackson was only espousing this opinion because he was forced to; that’s what he was doing, sort of, and no one approved.

I don’t say here that it isn’t okay to have children sleep in your bed while you watch them, although it smacks of a creepy kind of voyeurism, or, as Jackson apparently did, sleep on the floor while the child slept in his bed, the pop star’s tacit admission that there was something wrong with actually sleeping with the child. However, the only thing that would make this scenario even thinkable is if it simply meant huge amounts of fun for Jackson—I don’t say it didn’t—and the little boy. Yet, although Jackson may have identified with the boy as a little boy himself, the boy would certainly not mistake the fact that Jackson was a potent, powerful adult, and there the game would end. In respecting that, Jackson should have withdrawn. At the very least, he should have had competent counsel telling him to desist. The shame is that Jackson persisted in the weird play until he was slammed back and reduced to making mincing, blithe, vapid statements promoting the behavior after the fact.

Cogitations Concluded

My nocturnal contemplation of Michael Jackson ran its course in about two weeks. Not that I learned any more about the man during that time. All I did was examine what I thought about him—a surprisingly painful process, and look at lousily inadequate clips of him on YouTube, which brought home to me that that’s all I had of the man: what was left behind on YouTube.

So what are we wee ones supposed to feel when, after getting waterboarded by a megastar’s PR campaign for decades, we are suddenly abandoned to peace and quiet while the star gets absorbed into infinity? We quake a bit, which only exposes us to criticism: He couldn’t possibly have meant anything to us; we didn’t know the man. Greater the regret to find him gone. What I can say is I do detect a gap about the size of a sequin in a very impressive array spangles, which ain’t hay. Most of us leave no gap at all.