Bob Rossney: June 2009 Archives

The key phrase - it's buried in the penultimate paragraph, so my bad - is "in my mind." Of course Jackson was human. But he also appeared to be so utterly out of phase with ordinary human existence that he couldn't interact with it in any normal way. His response to the world, in general, seemed like it was intended to lessen his connection with what for want of a better word I'll call "humanity." But he was certainly human, for all that he appeared to be something else. Saying that he was "no longer really being human in any meaningful sense" is hyperbolic, to say the least. It's because he was human that what happened to him seemed so terrible. 

On to the issue of molestation: I used the word "probable" for a reason. I have uncertainty about what actually happened. But at the same time it seems likely to me that if someone's attorneys let him pay millions of dollars to settle a civil suit, they have some reason for not thinking that he's not going to win it. Hence, "probable." But I don't know the truth, and I don't pretend to. 

This brings us to the most important point about all: There is no way, no way in the world, that I know what Michael Jackson was really like. And not in the "we can never really know another human being" sense of not knowing what he was really like, either. Our word "fame" comes from the Latin fama, which originally meant "rumor". Virgil described Fama (the Romans' goddess/personification of rumor) as a hideous feathered creature who had as many eyes, ears, and tongues as she had feathers. 

That's who told me everything I know about Michael Jackson. 

My knowledge of Jackson is not only imperfect, it is also, almost certainly, fundamentally wrong. It's based on the crazy-quilt of public relations, gossip, art, and parody that hung between me and the real Michael Jackson. But even though it's fundamentally wrong, it's also all I have. And even though there's a crazy-quilt of myth hanging between me and the real Michael Jackson, there was a real Michael Jackson, a real person whose real outlines could be perceived through it. 

So why bother? Two reasons. 

First, he was literally inescapable. It was practically impossible to be a normal American growing up in the 1970s and 1980s and not be confronted with the idea of Michael Jackson. This idea was originally crafted with great care. It was the work of many hands. The idea's central objective was to be as known by as many people as possible. The people whose handiwork this idea was (including, it's essential to recognize, Michael Jackson himself) were extremely successful. I have ideas about who Michael Jackson was because it is close to impossible for me not to. 

The second reason is that there was, at the core of this idea, a real person. That real person, what I could make out of him, seemed to be in misery for a very long time. 

The understanding I've fashioned for myself about what caused that misery is, at the very best, contingent. I recognize that. But its contingency is not something to apologize for.  It can't be helped.  As Joan Didion pointed out thirty years ago, we tell ourselves stories to live. This is a strength, in that it lets us endure what she called "the shifting phantasmagoria" of our actual experience. It's also a weakness, because in constructing narratives, we impose an order on the real world that is not necessarily accurate or even present, and it is that distorted order, and not the real world, that we actually understand. The best I can do - the best anyone can do, really - is to remain aware of this process whenever I can, to remain aware that the stories I'm telling myself are, at best, only based on truth, and not the truth themselves.

I think the people who've called this posting "wonderful" (hi Cory!) and "smart" (hi Patrick!) are moved to do so because the narrative I've constructed for myself about Michael Jackson resonates, in some significant way, with the narrative that they've constructed for themselves.  It's not because I'm in touch with the truth about Michael Jackson.  If I'm in touch with any truth, it's the truth of what the emotional and intellectual experience of coping with the idea of Michael Jackson is like.

tl;dr:  It's all shadows on the cave wall.

I'm not really any sadder about Michael Jackson's death than I already was about his life.

It was clear that this was a guy whose Maslovian pyramid took a sharp turn somewhere above "safety needs" and ended up with its tip pointing in a direction nobody else has ever been interested in going.  It's always uncomfortable to see someone who's been ruined by fame; what was distressing about Jackson was that even though he was ruined by fame before his 20th birthday, he kept pressing the lever, and getting rewarded with still more fame, and still more ruination.  Fame ruined him as an artist and it ruined him as a person, and then it kept on ruining him.

In one sense, Neverland is just a point on the same curve that connects Iranistan, San Simeon, and Graceland.  But unlike its predecessors, the overarching sense that I got from everything I ever heard or saw about Neverland is not "this is what happens when you marry too much money to too little taste" but rather "this is an inarticulate expression of uncontained misery."  Also, Barnum and Hearst and Presley held their citadels of damaged self-expression till the day they died:  Jackson lost his.  And he didn't seem too unhappy about losing it, either.

The saddest thing about Jackson was not just that his fame ruined him, it's that it continued ruining him even after he was essentially finished as an artist.  In the last decade of his life he was no longer a great singer or a talented composer or a brilliant choreographer; he was someone who had once been all those things and was now Michael Jackson.  Here was a guy whose entire existence from early childhood had been wrapped up with what happened when he did things that made other people happy and excited. And that was unavailable to him.  He still could make people happy and excited by showing up and having his picture taken, but that's all he had left.

Someone on the WELL used a word about Jackson's probable history as a child molester that made me stop and think:  "unforgiveable."  It strikes me that it never even occurred to me whether or not to forgive Michael Jackson.  In my mind, he was so far away from normative that the question of forgiveness seems totally irrelevant.  Not that his no longer really being human in any meaningful sense justified his actions, or mitigated the harm he did, but that it makes no more sense to judge the morality of his actions than it would to judge Henry Darger's.  Their creepiness, sure. But this was a man (it's a mark of how profoundly damaged Michael Jackson was that it feels strange to call him "a man", just as it feels strange to recognize that when he died he was older than the President of the United States) who spent every day of his life embedded in a matrix of perverse incentives.  The terrain of his personal landscape was unrecognizable. I can understand the choices that my cat makes more deeply than I could understand the ones Jackson made.

His death has made me stop and think, but it hasn't made me mourn a loss. We lost Michael Jackson fifteen years ago.