http://www.opednews.com/articles/I-Saw-The-News-On-Televisi-by-David-Michael-Gree-090710-482.html
by David Michael Green
7/10/09
I caught all of about ten minutes worth of televised coverage of the
Michael Jackson memorial service this week (I was in a pizza parlor,
waiting for my slice to heat up) which, as it turned out, was about
eleven minutes too many for my taste.
I don't mean to sound like somebody's craggy old grandpa, incessantly
whining about how "it was better in our day", but I couldn't help
thinking about the degree to which Jackson in life and death
personified the utter shallowness of the culture we now endure.
And I certainly don't mean to play the game of My Dead Rock Star Is
Better Than Your Dead Rock Star, but I also couldn't help being
thrown back upon my memories and grief at the loss thirty years ago
of a cultural figure who really did matter, John Lennon.
The two individuals, their contributions and contexts, our reactions
to them, and even their deaths, say everything about America then and now.
The fact that some commentators have exposed the worst excesses of
the Jackson media death-bacchanalia suggests there may be a shred of
hope for us as a society yet. But stack those lonely voices up
against the tidal wave of televised coverage of this non-event, and
the grim visage of our unbearable lightness as beings comes into an
altogether too clear focus.
Despite being twenty years past his prime at the moment of his death,
Michael Jackson personified that lack of seriousness that has become
to this society what water is to fish. As an entertainer and that is
the operative term he struck me as a profound regression to an era
whose then apparent demise I surely did not lament. Like, say, Sammy
Davis Jr., Jackson could sing and dance, and was a black man
successful at penetrating the white man's world. But like the entire
milieu from which Davis emanated, Jackson's work (as opposed to art)
was careful to demand little from its customers again, this being the
operative term. (Not for nothing was the song-writing machine that
penned the Jackson Five's early hits known as "The Corporation".)
Hence the silliness that has been attendant to his death, and in
particular the Academy Awards-like public ceremony featuring Mariah
Carey and all the usual sultans of smarm. It would be most unpleasant
to admit to ourselves that one of our greatest cultural icons lacked
depth. That could only mean, ergo, that the fellow in the mirror is
the proud owner of a substantial and uncomfortable absence of there
there. And so we desperately try to append qualities to Michael
Jackson in death that he never possessed in life, the better to
explain away our own vacuousness.
Jackson himself strikes me as a sort of tragic figure, according to
the most gracious rendering I can put together, in honor of speaking
as charitably about the dead as one can. His father appears to have
been a success-obsessed sadist who may own the lion's share of
responsibility for what his seventh child became, both good and bad.
And what that was more than anything, it seems to me, was a boy
locked forever in the body of a man. I certainly don't begrudge
anyone that, if that's how they choose to live their lives (sans the
penchant for pedophilia, of course, or the use of one's own child as
a daredevil photo-op prop). What I wonder about is what it says about
us that we elevate such an individual to the highest ranks of those
we adore as a society.
Yes, I know Michael Jackson gave money to charities. And that he was
honored by Ronald and Nancy Reagan for his work in fighting drug
addiction. Gosh, I feel better already.
In so many ways, Jackson like his contemporary, Madonna represented
the emptying of content from the great flowering of popular culture
that preceded him. Once the substance had been entirely sucked out,
all that was left was the bogus symbolism of
anti-establishmentarianism and the hollow tropes of faux danger and
commercialized dissent.
When John Carlos and Tommy Smith held up their single gloved hands at
the Olympics in 1968, it took guts, you knew what they were saying,
and it was in your face. By the time Michael Jackson did it fifteen
years later the glove was now covered with sequins, it was part of a
dance costume, and what exactly did it mean...? Wrong question,
sucka. Meaning was by then already so dated a concept. It was enough
that is just seemed "Bad" a real "Thriller".
Where Lennon had the stones to put his celebrity to work in dissing
religion or composing a gutsy feminist screed like "Woman Is The
Nigger Of The World", Jackson gave us insidious fluff and candy,
complete with tricky dance moves. I can't think of a single
substantive contribution he made toward advancing this culture during
his lifetime, a period which fairly screamed out for all the help it
could get from anyone with a microphone. No, sorry, the moonwalk did
not make us a better, more moral people. Even in Jackson's most
obvious potential arena for political leadership the question of race
his preeminent contribution seems to have been reminding people
across the globe that black is not beautiful, and that those who can
afford to should follow his lead in trying to become more white.
Ostensibly, both Lennon's "Imagine" and Jackson's "We Are The World"
have a common theme. In reality, they couldn't be further apart.
Where Lennon offered a work of beautiful simplicity that called for
the eradication of tribalism and superstition, Jackson's sing-along
is really a paternalistic paean to self-reverence, clothed in the
garb of a charity benefit.
Worse still, it's pablum, and it worships the very superstitions that
Lennon sought to eradicate. In Jackson's anthem to the starving
children of the world, we get this line: "We can't go on pretending
day by day that someone, somewhere will soon make a change", directly
followed without the slightest sense of irony by this one: "We are
all a part of God's great big family and the truth, you know love is
all we need".
Sorry. I guess I do sound like an old geezer, after all,
romanticizing how it was so much better back in my day.
But, you know what? Take a look around.
It was so much better then.
--
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra
University in New York.
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