is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Michael Jackson: Reportage as Metaphor
This whole Michael Jackson media thing is a metaphor for the dangers of needing to come to one quick and sure conclusion� or the problem of needing an inert certainty rather than allowing thought to breathe in the contradictions that describe any real human life.
By which I mean, some like to talk about him as if he were a great humanitarian who did a lot to help other people. Others like to reduce him to a pedophile. Some think he was just one of the most talented people ever to grace the earth at precisely the moment the earth was ready for him (in other words, unlike Nietzsche, his meditations have not been untimely). Others focus in on how strange he became, carving up his face, sleeping in an oxygen tent, hiding his children under veils, dangling babies out of windows, and so on (where there are probably endless possible examples to confirm the hypothesis of weirdness� this is what I tell my students is a �no duh� kind of an argument). Some want to focus on how he had so many talents�the singing, the song writing, the dancing and choreography, the talent for arranging a pop hook, the multi-layered character of his music, and how it isn�t very easy to cover a Michael Jackson song or do one of his dances without looking like a fool�prodigious prolific precocious talent. Others accuse him of never growing up. Then some want to forgive him because he was abused as a child and then isolated as an adult. Inevitably some will respond that abuse and isolation don�t always make people into pedophiles. And then others will draw us back to the humanitarian work and the prodigious talent. And most of them speak, write or argue as if they had the only truth, and the other truths were mistaken. But the other truths are not mistaken. They are all true.
Why is that so hard to understand?
When I teach Levinas to undergrads I always describe his work, especially his later work, as requiring of us a kind of breathlessness, where we allow all kinds of assertions that, if put on paper in the cold bright space where A always equals A and A never equals B or C, would have to cancel each other out. I can�t be subjected to the demands of others and free at the same time, right? Nor could I possibly be both my own person and inescapably formed by others, can I? It just can�t be that I can a think a thought, while also admitting that what I�m getting at transcends the possibility of containment in one thought. Could it? But if you think about the conditions of your own little life, then of course the answer to all those questions is: yes. Yes, you can. Sometimes A equals A, but it also equals B and C, at the same time. Especially when it comes to human beings.
Al Sharpton says to MJ's kids: �your daddy wasn�t strange, what happened to him was strange.� Um, Al? Come on. Daddy was freaking strange. And also: what happened to him, that was also strange. And part of what happened to him was very wrong. And part of what happened to him was very right. It benefits no one to pretend things were otherwise.
None of the defenses of Michael Jackson make sense, nor the denunciations, if we can�t take into account the whole picture. But people don�t like that, because things get messy. It�s easier to think of him as a musical genius, a pedophile, an abused child, or a Good Man. Much harder to admit that he was all of those.
While it may seem hard to admit that the truth isn�t just one thing, trying to force it to be one thing ends up smothering the truth.
4:12 p.m. - July 07, 2009
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