Three magazine covers. One from 1971, one from 1987, one which was scheduled to appear a few months later this year. The beginning, the middle, the end. A life lived under incessant media glare. Today's The Daily Telegraph's headline is "Jackson, death by show business." If show business were such a brutal killer, there'd be a lot more fatalities. I don't think show business should be declared solely guilty of Jackson's death. His death was caused by an overdetermined set of circumstances over which he had tried to but had lost all control. At the heart of the Jackson tragedy was his foolhardy desperation to buy the childhood he never had. Perhaps nobody told him that while his childhood may not have been the one of any breakfast cereal commercial, but there were people in this world with childhoods infinitely more traumatic than his. While these people with damaged childhoods carry the scars inside them all their life, they learn to accept whatever has happened and they move on. Luckily for them, they are not cursed with wealth enough that they can think money can buy a redesigned, air-brushed past. MJ was cursed with wealth. He was cursed with "friends" who weren't perhaps firm with him when he decided to have a childhood at thirty! In a way, MJ is an intensification, a lurid caricature of the infantilism which marks the culture of his country. Disneyland was MJ's reality. Paul McCartney's referring to MJ as "boy-man" is appropriate. He was more boy than man. His dangling of his child from a hotel window could very well be a child dangling a toy. It is to this child, this boy in MJ that the world fell. He was that odd pop star. The word "sexy" could never be applied to him. He was asexual, like a child. He was that in the beginning, that in the middle, that in the end. Nobody ever took any of his marriages seriously. They expected them to end soon. They did. And now he is gone too.
Dear Micheal, if you are reading this somewhere, I'm happy that your painful, unhappy, lonely life has finally ended. Now you can be the child that you always wanted to be. Nobody will call you Wacko anymore. You will not be 'weird' anymore. God's sympathetic, kind eyes will cast a gentle light on your new childhood. May you be a child for as long as you want to be. But thanks for the songs. Thanks for "Ben", "She's Out of My Life", "Gone Too Soon" and the absolutely incomparable "Human Nature". You'll be the thriller as long as any human being has any ability to thrill to great music.
