On Michael.

A short yet furious dissent from the Din of praise for him and the upcoming bio pics

Toward the end of The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O’Neill’s play about broken people and the dreams they need to hold, Theodore” Hickey” Hickman has a moment of conscience that frightens him out of his mind. After shaming the starlit, proofed delusions of troubled, poor working stiffs, and creating his own by recasting his late wife as a suffering saint because of his infidelities, he breaks in the emotions that come from his tremendous guilt over killing her. The result is that Hickey lets out the truth-that he murdered her because of her stoicism about his abuse-comes out of his mouth….but only for a while. After the confession, he catches himself, he smiles, and says he was crazy. It was all a joke. It didn’t happen, and he wouldn’t do something like that in his right mind, for he was everybody at the bar’s drinking pal.

I’m 100 percent sure Michael didn’t kill any of the couple hundred pre pubescent boys that he is pictured with topless or in bed; Yet the comparison between Michael and O’neil’s darkest anti-hero seems pretty apt. And no, it isn’t because I don’t think he’s a genius. More than that, it is his genius-on-a-level-of-Stalin that has made him a pop fixture after he couldn’t command the globe when his musical ideas ran out, as afterward he would command it as a monster-victim god. Like the imagined Hickey, the real Jackson found appealing to damaged people’s sense of victimhood as a way to get out of trouble, and a movie + a child porn defense of a proposed sequel will ensure his popularity with a mass of people.

The Jackson who created Thriller and Off The Wall is an Unfettered Genius. The Jackson of the proposed sequel, the one dancing and leading children down the streets of Sao Paulo in “They Don’t Really Care About Us” is Caesar Augustsus come to life, not a broken, addicted hinvalid that most of the Debarge family( Jackson’s Closest life comparison) are, but a shrewd man following a formula of dance, resuscitation of grievance, and child fetization, with a dollop of black nationalist poison on his account on blaming his arrest for a mountain of child porn and sexual abuse charges on….the jews? ( “Jew me/Kike me”).

Joe didn’t bedevil this Michael. This Michael was a stone-cold demagogue who prayed to him on an altar higher than the stature of Jesus on “Care about Us”. This secular huckster knew that there was no way the world would accept his pathology if not packaging it as whole and pure, with its critics enemies of all that is true and good. The result is that like the shape shifting capitalist in Mao’s rhethoic, and the probing socialism of Nkrumma that Mobutu Sese Seko looked to destroy, the pop culture enemy of the true and innocent in Michael and Michael Jackson’s life were those in his chld porn, those who he has settled with( 160 million dollars worth); and those who, like Michael, went through it in their childhood but know the only way to live with it is through therapy, cycle breaking and compassion through agency; and who sees Michael as somone who only emboldened monsters and led a lor of deeply damaged people to hell.