The Passion of Michael Jackson
Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad.
Euripides (485-406 B.C.)
Honk if you've heard enough about Michael Jackson and his misadventures with prepubescent boys at Neverland. For several weeks now, around the clock, TV "news" has been showing us installments of the Michael Jackson saga as it unfolds. His face - and what a face! - is in our face.
Why is the media lavishing so much time on the Michael Jackson child molestation trial? Are these just slow news days? Are we going to find out something we don't already know about Jackson - something that might help us feed the hungry of the planet, say, or improve literacy rates in the developing world?
Or is it plain old morbid curiosity that keeps Michael on our TV sets day and night? Americans have always been enthralled by the sight of the rich and famous crashing down from the heights. Celebrities may be indispensable to our culture, but they are also inherently undemocratic.
Consider this: we might be frittering away so much time wallowing in the Michael Jackson trial because, in some strange way, he is us. We may recognize in him, our National Freak, many of the psychoses that now define our culture.
Psychotic disorders in people include severe mental conditions characterized by extreme impairment in the ability to think clearly, respond emotionally, communicate effectively, understand reality, and behave appropriately. Psychotic symptoms include delusions and hallucinations. A delusion is a false, fixed, odd, or unusual belief firmly held by people suffering from psychoses. For instance, there are delusions of paranoia (others are plotting against them) and grandiose delusions (exaggerated ideas of one's importance or identity).
These descriptions fit Michael Jackson, surely. His version of "reality" doesn't seem to correspond with any reality we live in. His behavior - eccentric, to be charitable - follows upon his delusions. They appear to issue from both paranoia and what the Jungians call "inflation," or overstated self-importance. If Michael isn't certifiably "mental," he certainly acts the part.
Psychotic symptoms also may be haunting our collective state of mind at the moment. Our culture seems to be stuck in a Neverland of its own - a place where we can avoid indefinitely the hard realities of adult responsibility. Are we not suffering from delusions of paranoia? If you have any doubts about it, find out the color today's fear alert from the Office of Homeland Security or listen to our media commentators describing possible terrorist plots and places. Are we not living under the influence of a most insidious and isolating ego-inflation? Recall how many times this week you have heard the grandiose boast that we are the world's only superpower.
Looked at from outside our mainstream culture, our American character bears an uncanny resemblance to the 13-year-old males who both attracted and mirrored Michael's own Peter Pan personality: willful, materialistic, obsessed with toys, reckless, using money to gain power over others, entitled, fascinated with firearms, disrespectful to the opposite gender but fixated on sex, superficial, refusing to grow up.
Add to all this our preoccupation with shallow entertainments - the Michael Jackson trial primary among them - and we have all the makings of a culture in psychosis.
We connect with the tribulations of Michael Jackson on a profound level. He is our culture's icon - and its scapegoat. We not only identify with him enough to make him the poster boy of our present anguish and strutting, but unconsciously we may believe that if we lay all our transgressions of adult responsibilities on his back, we will be home free. If we watch him being crucified long enough, maybe we will be delivered of our sins.
It doesn't work that way, of course. Each of us needs to be responsible to the degree of impeccability - especially at this crazy time of gigantic shifts in our species self-identity. This is not the time to be doing all the nutty things we have been doing - overeating, overspending, warring, diverting and distracting ourselves, mindlessly consuming, plundering our environment, numbing ourselves with trite religions and empty philosophies. If we are ever to transform ourselves up to the next level in the human adventure, we will have to grow up. This is a time to get serious, to get 'adult.'
Adulthood is a bitter pill for our culture to swallow. There are only few precedents for it - the Age of the Founding Fathers was one, the World War II generation, maybe, another. But we are far from the inspired times of the Bill of Rights or the moral struggle against the Nazis. And there are precious few role models for us to follow. It's hard to name five people in our culture who are leading the way for us to grow out of a bratty adolescence and start taking on true adult responsibilities in the world.
In the absence of a blueprint for growing up emotionally and spiritually, we have, at least, the negative example. Not just Michael Jackson, but also all the corporations that get away with murder, all the purveyors of entertainment that keep us in arrested development, all the government leaders who paralyze us with fear to push their various agendas.
Maybe having Michael Jackson in our face so much at this time is a kind of wake-up call. Looked at that way, the King of Neverland could be more than merely our scapegoat. As peculiar as the thought sounds, Michael may be the savior we have been waiting for.
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