We Are All a Bit Wacko Jacko So Cut the Late Guy a Break

I was talking to a priest friend about Michael Jackson. Yep, I guess nobody is immune from observation of the celebrity condition. But really, the celebrity condition is everyone's human condition, just one under a kleig light. What did I think, he asked. I said, "It's a tragedy." He said, "No, not a tragedy." Why? Because, he said, Jackson made "choices", it wasn't about external forces, calamity striking him. I didn't argue. My priest friend is a lot smarter than I am. But I did not, and I don't, agree.

Truly one definition of "tragedy" involves things from the outside affecting, impacting us due to no action or disposition of our own. But Greek Tragedy, the tragedy of myths, involves the fatal flaw in a particular human being, such that circumstances begin to be attracted to that soul, that flawed soul, in a way that leaves us shaking heads, "Why?" "Why, when he had all that before him, did he let it slip away, did he let it destroy him?"

Our society looks for simple answers that can be expressed in sound and computer bytes. But human nature overpowers the possibility of the simple.

That young boy in 1960 something, auditioning for Barry Gordy, or appearing, short and energetic in an early Jackson Five appearance. His face is beautiful. But we know, looking from today to then, that he doesn't think so.

I remember. 1979. I am working in downtown New York at the Community Development Agency or some such place around Chambers Street. Every morning, then and now, a cup of coffee. As I am going into the local coffee shop (nothing like Starbuck's which no one could possibly have conceived at that point), I hear a cut from "Off the Wall". I am getting my cream and lots of sugar cup, you know, the little one with the Greek colums, and I am thinking that I have got to have that album. And when I do, every song is entrancing. I had not been that big a fan before that album. And I like the look of the now grown, but young man, on the cover. Good to know, he's okay. He's not going to be one of those former child stars of one genre or another, who goes down the road to destruction.

But after that, it starts. His nose starts to be unduly narrowed and his skin begins to lighten. His handlers lie about the cause. But maybe it'll be ok. 1983. He moon walks for the first time at the Motown 25. I am with some friends and colleagues, now in Los Angeles, at a little "health food" place on Wilshire, right by the then blue building, 5455. The special, which I had missed the night before is being replayed. I have never seen anyone move like that. He seems so comfortable with his body, even if he is not comfortable with the man in that skin.

What happened? Was it that his father beat him into the performer that he became? Was it that his mother did not protect him from that that made relationships with women so transient, and strange? Was it that he had a skewed view of love? Was it that he had no childhood so he was the puer aeternis? Did he molest children? Between you and me, I don't think he did, despite the assumption that being with a child as he was, in the same bed, raises that immediate conclusion. There are people that don't, who can't have sex. If anybody was turned off by intimate human relations, he had all the earmarks.

I think tragedy is really a mix of the external forces that effect and affect the internal ones. The perfect storm, if you will. He had it all. He had nothing. Maybe we all are like him. Some of us know it. Some of us don't. Some of us fall somewhere in the middle, and live longer than he did.

But one thing, for all of our moralizing and joking, we are no better than him. We all have our dark secrets and motivations. But we are not being watched by the world when we live, and even as we are wrapped in a shroud at the end of our days.

My priest friend said, "Pray for him." Pray for ourselves. Pray for each other.