Michael Jackson: Fall of a Demigod

China has ethnic riots. Sarah Palin has had enough already. Putin looked like an atheist in church as Obama rattled on about how much common ground there is between Russia and the US. Bombs are blowing up in Iraq. Major auto parts manufacturer Lear just went into Chapter 11.
For the moment everything takes a back seat to Michael Jackson’s memorial service. A politician raised the ugly point that he may have been, after all, a pedophile (you don’t hand out millions to some kid’s dad because you were merely tousling his cute blond hair). Everybody is mad at him for saying it out loud. Who is this spoilsport ruining our national catharsis?
The Reverend Mr. Jesse Jackson reminded us that Michael came from a tiny house that held nine kids and a mom and dad. Dad held two day jobs and taught music at night. The good reverend rhapsodized that Michael was a role model for anyone who was born poor but had a dream.
Michael represented all that was good about “rags to riches” America. See, Jesse told the camera, what having a dream and lots of discipline can bring to pass. He was asked by the moderator if Jackson had “invented popular music”.
Even Jesse demurred at that. “No …, but he took it to a whole new level.” I’ll buy that—I do remember there was some music around in the 1940s and 50s before Michael Jackson was born. Guys like Fats Domino, Elvis, and the like.
But he was a phenomenon—a seven year old kid taking the world by storm. Yasha Heifetz started the violin at three, but he didn’t debut in Carnegie Hall until he was seventeen. And while he, too, may have the best at what he did—he had scarcely a thousandth of the impact.
Jackson was certainly not the first to die of drugs, if that’s what he died of. No official cause of death has yet been given. Doctors, friends, visitors, staff—all face police interrogation. The LAPD apparently pulled enough little pills and vials out of his house to stock a hospital pharmacy.
We remember Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. There was Marilyn Monroe and Jim Belushi. The list could go on and on. All the way from the night when Alexander the Great got so drunk he choked to death on his own vomit. These are sad and ugly pictures.
Alexander had reached the end of his worlds to conquer. Jackson was about to launch a fifty concert tour to try to conquer still more of his worlds. Both men started young, took the world by storm and left a vast cultural heritage. Both men somehow lost their way and destroyed themselves.
We need heroes. If they don’t come riding on a magnificent charger, we create them. We’re sometimes willing to put ourselves under the surface of the celebrity pond so that they can appear to be walking on water as they step on the hands and heads we hold up to them.
We do this to singers, entertainers, clergymen, politicians, business tycoons—and often we make them believe their own press. Almost. (Inside they know they are only human, and the fear of a misstep that could shatter the image they have built must tear at the insides. That’s when the pharmacopeia comes into play. It numbs the terror.)
It isn’t only baseball players and deer hunters who choke and can’t hit or aim. The Romans tried to protect their heroes by putting a slave in the chariot as the hero of the moment rode in triumph. The slave’s job was to remind the latest demigod that he was, after all, merely mortal.
“Sic transit gloria mundi”. “Thus passes the glory of man”. It was his job to keep repeating the refrain to the conqueror of the moment.
It was meant to keep the hero from feeling he could walk on water. We make our heroes and entertainers feel not only that they CAN walk on water—but that they MUST. That was a load the Monroe’s, the Bulushi’s and Hendrex’s couldn’t carry. Very possibly Michael Jackon—who spent so much of his huge fortune on a fantasy hideaway just for himself—couldn’t either.
He came out of nowhere as a tiny child. He remade MTV. He spread his new style, his manic dances all over the world. And then he went and hid. He became a grotesque caricature of what he had once been.
They followed the boy-man into his fantasy world and created total ugliness with charges that shattered much of his image even if they were never proven. Always there was something appealing about him—he kept many friends. Mostly they were people in the business who understood what his life was like and why he built fantasy worlds.
I recall that a New York publisher who wanted to do a piece on him sent Jackie Kennedy Onassis to interview him—knowing that she understood what it was to both need and fear public adulation.
People who have no idea—of what his life became like (he once said, “I only feel natural when I’m on stage”) and who he really was will line the streets. They will light candles. They will cry. They will turn on his music and his videos. Once again he will be the conquering hero.
And then the explosions in Iraq, the riots in China, the belligerence of Russia, the swelling rolls of the unemployed will come back to haunt us. Real life will again impinge upon our fantasies.
But for one day, we dreamt of another Camelot. I suppose we should thank Michael for giving us that. Fifty concerts probably couldn’t have done as much.