WATCHING MICHAEL JACKSON

Sorry, but I couldn’t stop myself. What to say of that horrifying documentary? I feel about Jackson the same deeply conflicted feelings I have about most disturbed people. Half of me feels a terrible sympathy for him, for the brutalized childhood, the clearly arrested psychological development, his desperate loneliness and sociopathic tendencies. The other half feels nothing but horror – not just at the damage he has done to his once beautiful face and body, but to the children he surrounds himself with and to the children he has allegedly spawned. Watching his complete self-absorption while his children are clearly traumatized by crowds of fans and photographers was almost too painful to endure. I dont buy the notion that he’s sexually abusing children. But abuse need not be sexual to be abuse, as Jackson’s own vile father showed. Man hands on misery to man, I guess. It deepens like a coastal shelf. But there is something also compelling about a man clearly determined to defy nature itself, to alter his physical appearance as one would change clothes, to insist that age is arbitrary, to see happiness as indistinguishable from denial and escapism, to see death as a choice as well. In all these, he is perhaps just an extreme incarnation of tendencies almost endemic in our culture. Which is why we cannot keep our eyes off his rapidly crumbling face. He is the man in our mirror.