The Age of Jackson [John Derbyshire]
I heartily applaud Jonah’s nicely balanced, commendably sour refusal to celebrate Michael Jackson’s peculiar life in the same gushing spirit the media has displayed. Sourpuss refusals to go along with gushy media enthusiasms are a part of what we’re about here at NRO, and long may that remain so.
Working up my Radio Derb transcript here, I find I’ve been chastened by the concurrent death of Farrah Fawcett, who was only twenty months younger than me. I hear footsteps coming up the driveway, and shall keep perfectly still till they’ve gone, as I hope and trust they will. In that spirit, I’m trying hard to find something positive to say about the guy the media were calling “the Gloved One” the last time I paid any attention, which I see was a decade or two ago.
All I could come up with was that Jackson, like Fawcett, was a relic of the time when we were a single nation, listening to the same pop songs, going to the same movies, sticking the same babe posters on our bedroom walls, laughing at the same jokes, even giving our kids names from a common stock. Whether Jackson should be extravagantly mourned or not, I leave to you to decide; but that era of national-cultural unity surely should be. Requiescat in pace.
On the subject of national unity: In the 1980s, Jackson was extremely popular behind the Iron Curtain. His albums were among the most prized bootleg items in Eastern Europe. He represented a very positive image of America...an ideal of optimism and individual achievement that cut across class and ethnic boundaries. It’s part of the spirit that sold the West to the peoples who overthrew communism just seven years after Thriller came out.