Judging Michael Jackson ~ by Michelle Malkin
Posted on 11/23/2002 2:49:43 AM PST by 2sheep
Michael Jackson's bizarre behaviour is more than
just a freak show. It begs serious questions about
exactly what this man is doing as a parent to boys
At the zenith of his career, when Michael Jackson sang "I could scare you more than any ghoul could ever dare try," who would have fathomed that The Prince of Pop was anticipating his baroque period, which recently has reached a very different apex.
Over the past week or so, Jackson has appeared in a California courtroom looking so frightening that his appearance elicited gasps from the gallery; dangled his third child, Prince Michael II, from a Berlin balcony before a throng of fans; and paraded his three children through the Berlin zoo, each attired in a cherry red veil. Jackson has since apologized for endangering his child, claiming he was "caught up in the excitement of the moment." Yesterday, German authorities said there would be no charges filed.
Jackson was excited by a member of his fan club, Marcel Reinhardt, who got his attention by holding out a sign that said: "We wanna SHOUT throw our hands up and SHOUT. BURN ALL TABLOIDS."
"Michael doesn't work with the press and, therefore, the press tries to take revenge on him," said Reinhardt. It's a conspiracy theory that ranks, in terms of logic, with the O.J. Simpson jury's calculation of a well-fitting glove.
When Jackson's image began appearing on the Net and across newspapers, his face -- a dead ringer for Joan Crawford in Berserk -- was somehow more disquieting than the image of the towel-covered, endangered child.
Michael Jackson, is, to use P.T. Barnum's polite locution, a "living curiosity."
I have attended freak shows, before carnivals were replaced by theme parks, and once sent away for a freak book, the centrefold of which was a close-up of John Merrick's face, with a series of caveats, including: "Do not look at this if you are pregnant, have a heart condition, or are prone to nightmares."
None of these freaks scared me in the slightest, and I think Merrick, or The Elephant Man'sbiography's subtitle, A Study in Human Dignity, is perfectly apt.
Yet, every time I feel the compulsion both to look at and away from the face of Michael Jackson, I am very afraid, as his decaying, self-mutilated face and crazed attire seem to reflect a much larger deformity -- a soul, to use Saul Bellow's restrained idiom, "that is not well."
Jackson's freakishness is not without precedent, yet other infamous monstrosities tend to elicit sympathy or polite revulsion, since they appear only to be hurting themselves. Consider Elvis Presley's poignant decline into Falstaffian ruins, or Howard Hughes in his paranoia-driven shambles. While recklessly skin-popping Dilaudid or collecting one's urine in vials is distressing, neither practice conceals anything but a mind intent on destroying itself, in solitude and pathos.
Jackson's penchant for wearing masks is as telling as is his fascination with his brethren: He lobbied frantically to acquire the remains of John Merrick and married, in a conjugal farce worse than Liza Minnelli's last trip to the altar, Elvis's Morticia-like daughter.
The very existence of Jackson's Neverland Valley estate is a kind of psychic testimony to the way in which the artist likes, teasingly, to signify his past and present. Jackson has testified that he is a victim of abuse at his father's hand, a trauma that has in his estimation led him to pursue, perpetually, the childhood he never had.
That he was abused is entirely plausible and pitiable: That he has chosen, like Peter Pan, to amass and seduce lost boys is unconscionable.
Surprisingly, Jackson has never displayed an interest in the Pinocchio tale, which must appeal to a man whose nose is, inversely, falling off; whose little boy-littered estate bears less of a likeness to Never Never Land than Gepetto's workshop.
No one knows who Prince Michael II is: His mother or father have never been identified, and it defies all legal and common sense that a suspected chicken-hawk would be allowed to adopt. Yet, the rich have always been able to acquire babies as easily as ordering a latte or borrowing a tiara from Harry Winston.
I suspect that Neverland is a place that Robin Cook or Michael Crichton could not begin to imagine in their worse nightmares, a baby-cloning laboratory that is incubating a dynasty of little princes for Jackson's nefarious purposes; a high-tech version of Ed Gein's country cottage or the otherworld of the Matrix.
This may sound mad, but Jackson breeds this type of speculation because he has demonstrated time and time again that he lives above the law; because he flaunts, with impunity, his love affair with aberrant behaviours; and because, as he did after his notorious Diane Sawyer interview, he dances in the face of our outrage and incredulity.
A right-minded culture would hound Jackson through the streets, like the village people did with Peter Lorre in M, like the torch-carrying throngs in Frankenstein,and exile him forever.
As Howard Stern said so succinctly of Jackson's standard defence of his penchant for stockpiling boys at his ranch: If he likes children so much, "where are the little girls?"
If Jackson were to appear in the film Freaks,the pinheads would surely chant "Not one of us!" The pop prince's crown may lie uneasily, but until his own baby-Bastille is stormed, we are all complicit in his actions: We are the crowd that stands below the balcony, holding out our hands in ignorance and in fear.
requiem (rèk´wê-em, rê´kwê-) noun
1. Requiem Roman Catholic Church. a. A mass for a deceased person. b. A musical composition for such a mass.
2. A hymn, composition, or service for the dead.
[Middle English, from Latin, accusative of requiês, rest, the first word of the mass for the dead : re-, re- + quiês, quiet.]
Just wondering how much MJ and Joycelyne Wildenstein have influenced the present trend of body modification. She is even freakier looking than MJ after her plastic surgeries.
With one arm around the baby, you'd think he would wrap that one arm firmly around the waist. He's not...he's holding that child by the neck!!!
While he waves to his fans....
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