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Wasn't nothing strange about your daddy

I wish to make something of a Jackson retraction. My post of yesterday was written before I had watched Michael Jackson's memorial in Los Angeles. In hindsight, it was no circus, but a very stately, and mostly classy event. I was particularly moved by Al Sharpton's pulpit rhetoric, and the phrase he coined - surely to go down in American history - "Wasn't nothing strange about your daddy. It was strange what he had to deal with". As a comment on both racism and the hard road of African-Americans to achieve dignity, but also as a comment on the weirdness of ultra-fame, it is superb. But as a gift to the children, it is even more profound and generous. My own father was strange - and what he had to deal with was too; I am not sure it is always best to deny the strangeness of persons.

I suspect Jackson was, all things considered, not mentally well at all times, and had eccentricities and disorders of the personality that, at the least, led him to modify his body needlessly. However, he was also, on the basis of last night's celebration, a one of a kind guy - or, as the head of Motown (himself a legend) put it - the greatest entertainer of all time. Maybe.

There have been other African-American icons - and I think that Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Martin Luther King Jr., and Ali all did as much or more for America, culturally and politically - not to mention the great Jesse Owens, my hero. Prince, also, musically, is a genius. Billy Strayhorn and Ralph Ellison, and Langston Hughes. What of the great black actors and comedians? Pryor, and Cosby?

Jackson - though - was universal - since song and dance reach all of the globe. He was honoured well and truly last night, with distinction. The BBC coverage was disrespectful, and filled with snarky asides - why were comedians involved? Jackson was not first and foremost a spectacle, and the constant urge to make him into one turned his life into a show that could not go on.
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Anonymous said…
Well, I think that is the question: the creative person who allows himself to become a celebrity begs the immediate question: why? Fame wasn't something which happened to Michael Jackson and was out of his hands, it was something he wanted (as far as I can tell). He actively courted it along with the Neverland lifestyle and the fortune which came with it (viz his quite ruthless dealings over the Beatles estate and opportunistic being in places where paparazzi lenses were out and hunting). For all the individual tragedy of his death (and every death is a tragedy, which is something that politicians should possibly be reminded of, at least every now and then... another eight dead in Afghanistan etc etc), the worldwide reaction (whether that be in the form of virtual flowers on virtual graves or cheapo sick jokes on show-off bitchy blogs) has been out of all proportion. That a man who was stupid enough to dangle his child over a balcony is revered while a man who was stupid enough to join the British army and be sent to Afghanistan (and maybe wasn't that stupid but simply had no other choice) to be shot in Helmand Province seems to me to show an ill-judged valuation of human life.
Mon Jul 13, 12:30:00 am 2009
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