Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Enough with Michael Jackson.
The back-breaking straw: yesterday, MSNBC preempted their usual nightly news programming to air yet another celebration-of-the-life/tribute/post-mortem. Enough. Is this really what people want? Is this what jacks up your ratings?
And I can’t get through a grocery store without seeing a half dozen or more images of the man. I am impressed with magazines’ and tabloids’ ability to find countless different photos of Jackson looking sad, lonely, soul-searching, pensive, or wistful. It’s as if they want us to say to ourselves and to each other, “That poor misunderstood man, how horribly the world treated him!” Or, “He was warped by fame — fame he didn’t ask for.”
When it comes to fame and its warped minions, I think of Cintra Wilson, whose book A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-examined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease, dealt with the Jackson Phenomenon, as well as the Jaggers and Chers of the world. Her obit for Jackson? She reprinted the relevant chapter on her blog. Here’s a snip:
Michael loved women, too, but in a strange, slavering, idolatrous way that made it impossible for them to love him back : Liz Taylor, Diana Ross, and later Lisa Marie Presley and Debbie Rowe, the Mother of His Children, all seemed to care very deeply for Jackson while staying at least a six-hour plane trip away from him at all times. He looked wrong with anyone too near his body. When he and Madonna were each other’s dates to an awards ceremony, they looked as uncomfortable sitting next to each other as two morbidly obese people on the bus. There are some auras whose size and radiance requires miles of solitude, like a nuclear accident, and Michael’s seemed to be one of them.
Her take on things might seem mean-spirited, particularly if you’re one of his mourning fans; but I doubt anyone will disagree with Cintra’s prescription, sadly not followed: “Run away, Michael. Go to an island and live out your days in the sunshine. Disappear before we, the world’s mean-spirited publications, kill you with our obsessive, smothering need to know you better.”
D.
While I don’t disagree with Wilson’s commentary/prescription, we have to accept the whole package of what made him the way he was, and first and foremost was his lack of a childhood which really seemed to have an effect on most of the way he lived his adult life. And I definitely agree we’ve had enough tributes/tabloid coverage, but until this whole drug issue is solved, we’ll be hearing about Michael and looking at all his mournful poses in the supermarkets for a very long time.