So why don’t you write something about Michael Jackson, someone asked. So why not, and just what should I say?
It’s not that I have especially fond or powerful memories of the man / boy / victim / abuser, as I do about the Beatles, for example (for whom my generation swooned when they performed and wept when they broke up). My son, born 15 years after Jackson, might have identified with him more, and certainly listened to him and saw his moves on MTV in Jackson’s heyday of the early to mid-‘80s.
Pathetic testimony on CNN just now (we’re waiting at the Mpls.-St. Paul airport for a flight to Houston and from there to Guadalajara, Mexico) from a weeping nurse about how Jackson begged her just four days before his death for some heavy-duty pain killers, whether Demerol or whatever.
Yet we can yearn, we who are deadened and desensitized to pain so much that it takes a mega-jolt of celebrity pain to wake us, overexposed as we are to such flattering and flatulent “news,” merely to escape the noise.
I shall try not to contribute much, then, to the din, except to add that the fruits of celebrity are far more ponderous and poisonous than is commonly allowed.
