Uh-oh, he’s about to speak about a dead celebrity. Michael Jackson fans, run, run away! Now! But the thing is – hear me out, here – my fascination and condemnation of the frenzy that follows the death of a celebrity has nothing to do with the actual celebrity. Everybody carries on in this bizarre state of delusion - one that pretends to be about the dead celebrity in question, but is nothing of the kind. And it is no more illustrated as such, as when someone dies who has had, let’s just be real here, as questionable a life as Jackson’s. I pointed it out with Irwin’s death, because he was simply unremarkable and largely unimportant until his death. Ledger’s neared closer, as we all chose to romanticise a damaged Hollywood heart-thob who partied just a little too hard. But now, we have the death of Michel Jackson. It seems bizarre to write it. But he’s dead. And when he was alive - for the longest while now, at very least – he wasn’t the kind of man we rejoiced the merits of. He was one of the most hated celebrities of the last decade – and, beyond that, for the last few years we had basically forgotten him (although it would seem he did not forget us). Every now and then, he would pop up (on places like Australian Idol - of all things!) to be indulged as nothing more than a fleeting symbol of yesteryear – we would consume him with a fondness every bit as self-indulgent and meaningless as symbols of yesteryears are for us. But now, he’s dead. And open up any paper, and you’d think it was one of the most shocking turning points of modern civilisation itself. I mean, really. Michael Jackson, the tortured, fucked up monster that we made – the guy who had all but mutilated his body in a manner that wasn’t anywhere near as amusing as we so viciously exploited him for - died. Go figure. If anything, that he made 50 astonishes me.  

 

And it’s not that his story has no cultural significance, whatsoever. It’s a vivid portrait, the story of Michael Jackson – but it is his life, not his death, that is the tearjerker. It is everything so horrible about modern culture – a brutal irony that shows how unmodern we are. His well-known obsession with The Elephant Man was justified and understandable – as well as evidencing a painful awareness – for he was, indeed, the functional freak in the core of our darkest fears, aggression and sadism. He is the quintessential posterboy for the damage of celebrity, and the way in which it destroys those it moulds for our entertainment. Because we are raised to yearn such celebrity for ourselves means that we justify their destruction; truth be told, it makes us feel better about the insecurities our affection for them is intrinsically bound with. We feel even with them, because even though we will never get to be one of them, at least in our numbers we can break them and enjoy their pain.

We enjoyed the breaking of Michael Jackson. And he was broken from the very minute he was born into the cruel hands of a ShowFather who literally beat his children into celebrities. We thought that was wrong and all, but the inescapable irony was that it did, after all, work. The bruises of that man’s belt did produce, as the media now likes to remind us, one of the “greatest talents who ever lived.” This has all sorts of magical implications about the origin of that talent – that it was a bizarre alignment of some sort, a natural gift from who knows where (maybe God?!). But this is a boy who was shoved on a stage no sooner than he could walk, and beaten with a belt, or with fists, lest he do anything other with his childhood than build himself into such an Amazing Talent™. Sure, he had something about him that clearly left him more talented than his brothers and sisters (though they were produced as talented, themselves), but would Michael Jackson have been Michael Jackson without the brutality and pathology of his crazed father? Highly unlikely, and you and I know it. God knows how many of the world’s great talents slip by, simply because it has never been nurtured by an abusive, psychotic parent!

And we were more than happy to consume those results – it resulted, after all, in an Amazing Talent™. And, sure, who was to know that he was so broken, at first? Nobody knew, after all, that the little boy who danced and sang so magically was doing his gorgeous little dance after pleading with his father to let him do something else with his childhood, and then subsequently being beaten. Nobody ever stopped, mind you, and wondered if maybe it was wrong for children to grow up in such a spotlight; toured around like circus monkeys. Many damaged men and women manifest pathological expressions of infancy and adolescence – as indeed Jackson did – because something has stunted them during their childhood. Part of them never grows beyond it, leading to obvious problems in adulthood. And it’s a long considered factor of pedophilia – that the problem is that they do not psychologically commit the crimes as adults with children, but as inner-children with other children (one of the problems sighted of the way Christianity developmentally stunts its priests and nuns). But Michael Jackson is a bizarre case – an incredibly rare occurrence, really – for his is a different manifestation of infancy, altogether. It’s not that he didn’t move beyond his own; it’s that he never had one to begin with. And he knew it, too. “Have you seen my childhood?” he asked us. Sure we did. We thought it was great! What a bummer he hated it so much!

As it turns out, his adulthood would – oh my God, what a surprise – reveal an incredibly damaged figure. He could still sing. He could still dance. He was, let us not forget, an Amazing Talent™.  We certainly seem to be able to remember that, now. But let us also remember how our love affair with that cute little boy turned so very sour.

First, there was his pathological racial self-loathing. Tres American. Oh, that’s right, that Amazing Talent™ is black – we almost forgot, because it’s okay to be black when you’re an Amazing Talent™. Then, you get to be treated white. And you can’t say he didn’t try to accommodate that, the best he could. I mean, he did literally turn himself the best colour. He did it for us, of course – because, as he would later admit, he felt a great resentment – real or projected – from the entire concept of his own people, because he had been so logically disconnected by the experience of being so unfathomably famous in the white world.

And boy, wasn’t that good as a resource for an entire decade of comedy?! Cheers, Michael, that’s… kinda funny that you would be so self-loathing and culturally dispossessed in a surreal white world that you would start to medically destroy yourself in order to be like us! ROFL!!!

But Michael didn’t stop entertaining us there, heavens no. The white jokes would be nothing in comparison to the cultural comedic icon that would become Michael Jackson’s Nose™. Wow, look at that fucked up amazingly talented black boy go! Now he’s addicted to mutilating himself beyond recognition! He must really hate himself, that fucked up amazingly talented black boy. ROFL!! ROFL to tha max!!

And then, well, it took a decidedly dark twist. Self-mutilation is all very amusing, but Michael wanted to test our limits of sadism, I suppose, because boy did he pull a rabbit out of his hat, next. Just when you think the fucked up amazingly talented black boy couldn’t possibly get any more fucked up, it turns out he might be… drumroll… a kiddy-fiddler.

At first, we didn’t find that so funny. Okay, Michael, the joke’s gone far enough. If you could just stick to entertaining us with your Amazing Talent™, far out dance moves, funky songs, and self-mutilation, that’d be great.

But he didn’t stick to that, of course. The momentum rolled on, and before we knew it, we were lynching Michael Jackson for being a pedophile.

Was he? That’s the question that will probably never be answered. In the end, we never actually found that out. And it should be noted that the lynching of Michael Jackson, in the legal courts of our most official kind of lynching, was ultimately proven to be a flawed process. Whether there was a real case or not, the case that was made turned out to be not only shallow, but corrupt. We decided he was guilty, but there was never, it tuned out, any real basis for that. It was just conjecture. It still is.

The potential validity of that conjecture is a little obvious. You can’t say he didn’t, but, well, you’d be hard pushed to say with much certainty that there wasn’t a chance. That damage, as he grew, just became so increasingly obvious, and it was always quite clearly connected to that childhood the beaten little monkey was never given. Peter Pan’s a charming little fairy tale – but it’s rather… well… off, as a real apparition in a grown man. And here was a grown man, mutilated beyond recognition – so fucked up that even his voice somehow froze in time (unless that was helped by the darker side of the medical industry, too) – strolling through his personal fairground, Neverland, in his pyjamas, surrounded by the sick and helpless children he was clearly obsessed with. It aint a pretty picture, let’s face it.

I, for one, always believed there was a strong chance that the exact symptoms of that damage – as very damaged as he was – did not include sexual impulses or behaviours towards or with children. I’m not saying that with 100% certainty, don’t get me wrong. I don’t know, at the end of the day – I’m left with conjecture, as much as the next person is. But my belief is not because I’m such a Jacko fan (we all know it's the Queen of Pop who has my heart, and not the King!), or because I just can’t tarnish the function of Jackson as a symbol to myself, with the hard reality of the real manchild. It’s because I think his damage originates in a place so very young, sexuality of any kind wasn’t even part of the picture.

 

That’s different if he was sexually abused as a child – but from what we know, he was simply a victim of physical violence without any sex. He was fairly honest, I think, by admitting that he was beaten but not molested, and I personally believe that story. The only one who has ever negated it is Latoya – but it’s quite possible that with Mr Jackson being, as far as we know, a red blooded heterosexual, that while one gender was beaten, the other was treated to a very different kind of experience. I also felt sorry for Latoya, too – for she was treated even worse by us, than her brother was – because we simply shrugged her off as a lunatic, without ever acknowledging that far from this invalidating her accusations, perhaps they explained her lunacy. It’s chicken and the egg stuff, and we tend to fuck that up all the time (because we don’t really grasp human psychology). I suspected that she was, however, projecting upon Michael, by announcing that he was molested also. I think she was. But I think he was only beaten. It’s conjecture; but it’s my personal analysis, anyway. 

Michael himself would state his case – the case that while he was obviously a damaged man in some ways (he said he would become so terrified of his father, he would literally vomit at the thought of him), it had not manifested sexually – in his infamous interview by Martin Bashir. Fresh from the courthouse circus, Jackson foolishly fell for Bashir’s journalistic aspirations disguised as sincere understanding. Bashir spent months convincing Jackson he was an admirer who felt moved to help him right the wrongs done against him by a naïve and unforgiving society. He offered Jackson an interview special, to supposedly give him a vehicle to explain himself to us. But he was lying. He wanted the golden moment of his career – nothing more – and he knew he wasn’t going to get that by providing the peanut gallery a portrait of Jackson with a halo above his head. No, no, we wanted blood. Bashir was going to sell it to us. Uh-oh, fucked up amazingly talented black boy – you’re about to get fucked over, once again.

That, it would seem, was the final straw for Jackson, who quickly retreated from the world; Peter Pan now seeming more like Willy Wonka. And slowly but surely, we started to forget about him.

Until, somewhat ironically, quite recently, when out of nowhere it was announced that Jackson would return to the stage, after all these years, to give us one final blast of his Amazing Talent™. It was consciously designed as his farewell to us. Jackson had already decided that he was about to leave our horrible white world of celebrity. He actually wanted us to know it, too. He needed to.

I think that’s because, underneath, the most horrible irony of all was that Jackson, as hard as he tried, could never be anything other than a product of that white world of celerity and the belt of his father who fashioned him for it. He was raised for our affection - he existed only as a product we consumed. Without it, who the fuck was Michael Jackson? In the last few months, it appeared he was somewhat of a hypocrite, for the contradiction is obvious: if you wanted to leave our world, and our minds, and everything, and just be left alone and forgotten about, then why oh why, Michael Jackson, did you need to mount the most expensive world tour ever planned? We’d pretty much forgotten about you, as it was. I had no idea where he was, or what he was doing, before the press conference announcing The Last Time Tour. Did you? I doubt it. 

He didn’t want us to forget about him. He wanted us to remember him. He couldn’t let our love go. He couldn’t live, knowing that he was ultimately destroyed and tossed aside by us – by our culture, by history. Like the little boy he ultimately remained, he cried, “I don’t care what you think”, when, naturally, he cared very much. You can’t blame him for that, I suppose. I’m sure all of us have experienced the nagging lack of resolution, from a situation where the people who think so poorly or wrongly of you never end up realising their error and repenting and asking for your forgiveness. I’ve no doubt it was hard for Michael Jackson to – no pun intended – fade to such a black as his recent obscurity. He wanted his happy ending. Don't we all?

“I just want to be left alone,” he said, only weeks ago, in what would be his final interview. “Why is that so hard to understand?”

I understand it. And it’s not that I think that’s a complete lie. I just think his need for resolution with us was so strong, he could not properly fulfill his other desire to retreat, without first having known that resolution. It was stopping him from moving on. I wonder if he had have actually received it, if he would have then been able to let go as planned; or if the temptation would have been too great, not to simply resume his place in the spotlight and hang on for dear life?

We’ll never know. The fact of the matter – so obvious – was that Michael Jackson was clearly in no state to perform at the level required for those kinds of shows. He was not Madonna. He was a frail man drowning in a sea of pharmaceuticals: thin (now under 10 st), gaunt, weak and sedated. The thought of him spending 50 nights in a row on those amazing dancing legs was… well… completely implausible. Everyone around the tour – from the crew, to the directors, to the publicity agents – are now happy to admit to press that Jackson was clearly in trouble. But nobody said anything before, of course – they rolled off their PR copy, as expected, and were no doubt happy to be paid so highly to witness what must have clearly looked like the train wreck it would ultimately be. This week, a few hours after a grueling rehearsal, his frail body gave in. It’s anything but surprising.

Nor is it a surprise that we are intoxicated with the self-indulgence of our very selective sentimentality. And those who are not in the throws of this, are mostly still in the enthrall of his enabling of sadism. One of my colleagues received a viral text, no more than three hours after his death, with the first of what will be many, many jokes to come:

 

 

Boom boom! But the media, needless to say, is taking a different route, by milking the sudden affection (albeit, with the occasional sordid twist, to emphasise the Tragedy™ of it all). We talk about what an Amazing Talent™ the world has lost. Poor world!!
 

But I think, instead, of poor Michael Jackson. Not because he left our world in a physical, literal sense; but because the brutal plot-twist of all this is that, on the verge of his planned escape of that spotlight, he would never get to leave it. Not psychologically, at least. He died in the throws of that spotlight, as the fucked up amazingly talented black boy - as our fucked up amazingly talented black boy. We never got to give him his resolution. He never got to experience the release some anguished part of him must have so desperately yearned for. He was never free.

 

It is one of the more confronting facets of life, that not everyone escapes their damage. Despite our seemingly innate concepts of justice, or "fate", etc, etc, not everyone’s a winner, baby - that’s the truth. Certainly not Michael Jackson. He was, from the very beginning, to the very end, an unfathomably damaged soul who was nothing more than our (at times, vicious) consumption of him. And boy, are we consuming him now. We won’t stop, I imagine, til we get enough.

 

Goodbye, Michael Jackson. You'll certainly be remembered, now.