Stop All the Clocks – Mourning Without Object
Sharon July 7th, 2009
I have refused to turn on a tv or a radio today, or to even look at CNN, in the hopes of avoiding any knowledge of the spectacle of Michael Jackson’s funeral. I can almost forgive my friend Rod Dreher for making me know that the generally mediocre Maya Angelou has whored herself to write a poem about the death of Michael Jackson - almost. It reads like Auden’s “Stop All the Clocks, Cut off the Telephone” written by a maudlin and none-too bright fourteen year old. More importantly, there’s something genuinely disturbing about someone who has written so clearly and evocatively about the role of child abuse in her life eulogizing someone whose relationship to children was so overtly sexualized.
Let’s be clear. In the generally rather boring genre of pop music, Michael Jackson made some original, and debatably good pop music. Even when I was 11 and everyone else loved Thriller I still didn’t like him, but I will cede the fact that for people who like that sort of thing, this is the sort of thing that they will like. He then turned into a fountain of creepy weirdness, narcissism and child molestation. I think that the only reasonable response to the death of Michael Jackson is “that’s something of a relief” since pedophiles rarely cease molesting others.
So how to explain the outpouring of passion for someone, who, after all, hadn’t made an album anyone listened to in quite a while, and who more importantly, and done some truly horrifying things? How to explain the transformation of someone so totally pointless and bad into a hero – the Princess Di-ization of Michael Jackson (and Princess Di herself, before her martyrdom was also pretty clearly a freaky loon, if a better dressed and more charitable one)? Why do we do it?
The explanation is this – we love grief itself. It is so much fun to feel bad, to mourn, to grieve. I can still remember the death of a student in my high school, and the waves of grief that poured out – suddenly everyone had been her best friend, everyone had known and loved her best, everyone was awash with grand passion, eyes red, enjoying (here I obviously except her genuine friends and her family) the sensation of participating in spectacle. It is so exciting to feel something, particularly something that costs us nothing. Well, it costs us nothing in some senses – the tickets were black marketed at 700 bucks, last I’d heard, and of course, California can’t pay all that police overtime in money, they have to issue IOUs.
As the saying goes, there is no “there” there – Michael Jackson is not Michael Jackson the pop star, or Michael Jackson the boy from the silly Jackson Five, or Michael Jackson the child abuser – he’s simply an empty space of fame into which we can pour our need for saints and stories of redemption.
And of course, we have an endless sack of grief to call upon. We are, of course, not permitted to mourn dramatically for things actually worth grieving over – it is either normal or trivial that we cannot safely fish in the water, that small frogs that I once captured and released no longer exist, that we face a world of declining resources and a great deal of conflict over those resources. We are not permitted to grieve extravagantly or get maudlin over the fact that we pass on less to our children in every generation, or that we have a much less secure future than we once did. Instead, our grief is channelled into spectacles, into the iconic representation of all that is trivial about a generation – as the media prepared to run all Jackson, all the time, the front piece of yesterdays MSM page included the quote “New book says Jackie Kennedy may have had Torrid Affair with RFK.” Gee, that’s relevant – let’s also bring up the trivial losses of a previous generation, into which they could pour all their fantasies.
Anything so that we don’t have to think about the world as it actually is. Anything to wipe the death of all green shoots off the page. Anything to harken back to less important questions than whether your kids have a future, how hot the planet will get, how poor you will be. Anything to give us outlet for our emotions so that they may be expelled pointlessly on things that do not matter. Anything to let us feel passion for things that are totally harmless, conveniently distracting, and, bluntly, make us dumber just for being near them.
Weep now. Stop all the clocks. He is dead. He was not our North, our South, our East or West, but he’ll do in place of actual content, meaning or a moral compass. After all, a great many things worth grieving over are truly dead, and we never even wept for them.
Sharon
- America
- Comments(97)
I agree with you. I was in the town
square and a reporter with a camera-
person asked me what my favorite MJ
song was and I told her I was not a
fan.
It’s all escapism, part of the same
phenomenon that JH Kustler talks
about this week.
I say, let us grieve for all of the pain
and hardship for people all over the
world everyday we do not redirect
wealth away from Empire, the military
and greedy desires.
Sharon,
So true that our culture never weeps for the species made extinct, landscapes ruined, and cultures devastated or extinguished. There is a psychpathothology within our society that will be difficult to exorcise. I have found Jensen’s Endgame to be a good set of examples of our cultural decay.
bread and circuses.
Sharon- I do weep and mourn for our true losses, and I am not afraid to show it, either.
My environmental science classes have seen me cry over children dying because their families live on what they find in a landfill, over a polar bear that drowns because he can’t find ice, over a family in Africa who doesn’t have clean water to drink. They know that I cry because I care, and I hope that they recognize that yes, adults do care about the amazing losses going on all around us. I am unafraid to show this emotion in hopes that they will understand that these are true losses.
Hmm, I’d strike another note. One doesn’t like to disagree with a wise and vehement hostess in her own house… but to find in this an occasion for venting pent-up anger doesn’t feel pertinent to me, any more than the outpouring of grief. And I think being angry dramatically feels just as good as grieving dramatically, come to that.
I’m not his biggest fan by any stretch, but his daughter’s tears were real, and boy, could he ever dance.
(Angelou on the other hand… ^_^)
I walked today surounded by strangers I did not understand much like I did in High School when John Lennon died. I don’t get it, I don’t much like spectical, I don’t much like cults of personality.
I think more than love of grief – it is a desire for community. I often think the great rock spectacles in those huge arenas are akin to the medieval cathedral – in the absence of a genuine shared culture our fragmented populace finds community in mass events, in shared grief over cultural phenomena.
I agree it is trivial and distracts from things that do matter. But it is fed by the media and the blog world, even pundits who one thinks might know better.
I find the Sarah Palin obsession of the moment to be in the same vein.
On one hand, I agree that there’s a strong bread and circuses element in this whole Michael Jackson spectacle.
On the other hand, I suspect that the outpouring of grief over a stranger’s death is, in many cases, a release of sorrows that people couldn’t articulate enough, even to themselves, to mourn or haven’t had time to mourn because they’re too busy coping with the aftermath. I’ve often found myself crying over a novel or movie, only to realize I’m really crying about X, Y, and Z–each too “small” for tears on their own, but adding up to a considerable weight of stress I hadn’t acknowledged until something random and unrelated to my real life pushed me over the edge.
I also think you’re falling into intellectual snobbery here (one of my besetting sins, so I can recognize it). Just because you–and I and many of the readers of this blog–don’t find most pop music appealing or moving, don’t discount that it plays a huge role in many lives. I don’t like his style of music (and on a personal level, he was clearly disturbed) but Jackson had genuine talent as an entertainer and brought pleasure to many.
I’ve been avoiding it too, but my wife and daughter watched the memorial. If now he has so many “friends” and family, why couldn’t someone have gotten him into rehab? And leaving L.A. with a two million dollar security bill – priceless! I’m just glad it’s over, but of course now we’ll have to hear endless speculation about his death and Elvis like “sightings” (would he be wearing a vail I wonder?).
Amen and amen. Bread and circuses is right.
I think you are a breath of fresh air, not an intellectual slob. I have found him distinctly creepy for years, carving up his face and bleaching his skin. And while he may have been a rock star, I think the handling of his funeral was gaudy and tacky.
However, I’m a little sad and cranky because my son’s best friend from school that I’ve known since he was a toddler just arrived home from military service in Afghanistan. And his memorial service wont make the news or the papers. The grief will be quietly real.
Safira, I don’t know – I don’t mind when people mourn the talentless – and I don’t write about it. Plenty of boring pop stars have died without me caring much. What bothers me is that Jackson is not just speculatively, but almost certainly a *child molester* – and he’s being canonized. I don’t think it is snobby to be troubled by the fact that Maya Angelou, who has written so evocatively about the horrors of child abuse wrote a poem (about which I am being intellectually snobby, because it sucks, and about which I do not feel at all bad about being snobby about, even though it is definitely snobbery
) about the wondrousness that is Michael Jackson. It isn’t a question of whether his music pleased others – it is that we’re willing to overlook actual evil acts in order to canonize someone just so we can have a sob fest.
So yes, I plead guilty in my distaste for Angelou’s bad writing, but not for my dislike of Michael Jackson – it isn’t snobbery (and I may be a snob now but I wasn’t when I was 11), it is the fundamental incongruity that we are willing to suspend all memory in order to have a grief fest.
Sharon
Deb, I’m so very sorry.
Sharon
I suspect MJ was actually a closeted gay and the child abuse arose as a warped response to being closeted. He has all the hallmarks of being a closeted gay (I’ve experienced it up close and personal) and I’m NOT saying all child abusers are gay or all gays are child abusers. I’m just saying that one of the ways *some* closeted gays respond is to figure that if he’s not with another grown man, he’s not gay. The whole thing is tragic and bizarre in so many ways and this weird ‘grief fest’ as you call it is just one more facet. (I was not a fan but I did like some of his music from the early 90s.)
Dear Sharon,
What I admire so much about you is that you think of these things (as we all do, of that I’m sure) and then you must consider the possible reaction you’ll get, and then you go and write it anyway. And post it.
The world is strangling on homogenization and creeping blandness. Please don’t ever change.
Money, money, money and party, party, party. That is what this is all about. The public media of television, radio, newspapers, magazines, as well as the vendors of merchandise all are making a ton of money off of the public and the advertisers. Meanwhile the fans are out grieving their loss with music, drink, dance and more entertainment than I can list.
Every major network, the cable news stations as well as dozens of others all carry the huge entertainment that is touted as a tribute. Meanwhile, news of all kinds, domestic and world events are shoved aside to accommodate the advertisers wanting to hawk their wares to childish minds world wide.
We live in a very sick society.
Thank you.. thank you,thank you Sharon..
You said it so much better than I could..
I’m right there with your frustration at this train wreck, really who doesn’t believe he is a pedophile?
Maya Angelou’s “poetry has always reeked of sentimentality to me anyway, blah, one more bad poem to ruin poetry’s name.
I’m frequently accused at being morose because I like to discuss the ruining of our planet…maybe I’ll make up lyrics about global warming to the tune of “Beat it.”
Sharon, your thoughts are in completely contrast to what I observed on the TV broadcasts today! I think they are appropriate and I agree with them but it is such a leap from them to the Michael Jackson stuff on tv or 2-3 hours today.
I had an appt this morning and before I left for it I thought I’d check in to see what the local news was at a certain hour and found that there was no local TV news since that station and all the 5 broadcast stations I get were carrying the same memorial service at the same time. I was amazed at the whole detailed production. I guess I should have known better.
thanks, as always for your writings,
Shamba
I half expected MJ to moonwalk at his own funeral. Like you Sharon I couldn’t believe all the media hype but have no fear his autopsy will be news for weeks and the settling of his estate even longer.
Geez, not you too, Sharon. The less said about this person, the better.
What I meant to say… he does not deserve the room for a whole post in your blog.
Fame is an unsatiable beast. So many desire to achieve it, but very few understand how uncontrollable it can make your life. My TV has been off. I don’t need to weep with the masses. I grieved for him long ago, when I saw how such an innocent little boy, was sent out to sing with his brothers and make his family wealthy. In the process he was not nurtured in the basic skills to be emotionally stable and anchored- numerous sources report that MJ himself was abused in childhood. As a kid growing up listening to the Jackson 5, and then seeing the frenzy around ‘Thriller,’ I had realized that the beast had ate him. We, the public, in our hunger to avoid the mundane, had consumed him thoroughly. Chewed him up, spit him out when he became “a freak” and then swallowed him up again, just so we could have a good cry. He never really had the chance to just be a boy, just be a man. In my heart I say Rest in Peace, Michael Jackson.
Maya Angelou knows more than most about what it is to be an abused child. Read her biography to know what she experienced and how she dealt with it. I suspect that the irony of her poem, for this man, does not escape her. But as a child abuse survivor, a statistic that I too share, she knows that things are not so black and white. People in pain perpetrate pain onto others. Wrong, yes. But real. Though Michael was acquitted, he may have victims out there. They’ll someday come to understand the dynamics, the zen, of power and powerlessness, of which fame is an excellent model. They’ll see that this crying out from the masses was not about Michael the man. It was just the roaring of the beast.
Sharon,
Thanks. I couldn’t agree more.
Regarding the comment on John Lennon, I disagree that his death was trivial:
That truly was a tragedy, and worthy of mourning because Lennon was a cultural icon who changed society for the better on so many levels. His music, and peace activism were monumental.
Lennon mattered, truly mattered.
Amen, The man was a freak.
I revere Michael Jackson for his showmanship with his brothers on the Andy Williams TV show. And because his work so inspired the true artist, “Weird” Al Yankovic. To this day “Beat It” and “I’m Bad” sound wrong to me – when the better version, for me, is the Yankovic renditions of “Eat It” and “I’m Fat”.
I think MJ’s passing is celebrated in part, because we no longer have to fret about more kids being molested, or new charges being filed – that part of the hurting has stopped spreading with his death.
The musical legacy, his relationships in the entertainment industry and with his fans, that will be remembered, and hopefully it’s true worth will come to be recognized. I think that will not be much, except as he inspired Yankovic and cartoonists like Berkeley Breathed (the Bloom County rendition of the flaming Pepsi commercial were priceless!).
The showcase of talents at the service today were in a sense, like a clown’s funeral. Acts that refused to perform risked being considered disrespectful, arrogant – and it could cost them fans, revenue or appearances. Those that did show got to showcase their talent, a chance to endear some MJ fans and maybe build (or just maintain) their following. For many, I assume it was cheaper and simpler to perform than to sit it out. This is show business, and like Obama, no crises or photo op should ever be wasted. Anyone that thinks those performing was about anything but production value, marketing, promotion, and being performers – missed the context of the event.
I did like Queen Latifa’s backhanded compliment. I don’t know if she meant it the way I heard it – she claimed that Michael Jackson gave everything he had in his performance. What I heard was that there wasn’t any substance to the man, outside his performance. Like I say, that might not have been what she meant.
I find it telling that Tam at View From The Porch kept repeating each day in her post, that “Michael Jackson is still dead.” Which is a relief, and a comment on the hysteria. I have encountered the phase on other blogs today.
Sharon reports on a nation that is so full of itself, so full of confused numbness by now that it can only feel a stir when expressed under an umbrella of extreme extravagance toward someone, sometimes just about anyone.
Myself, I don’t mind today’s private thinking-grief for an empty and lonely life that’s passed; for used and exploited children – three of them that may now have half a chance; for an oppressive reporting press that can’t see the fine line of boundaries and can’t miss the driving sign of a dollar; for our lack of courage to say “No.”
I recall hanging on to a poetic ending when once reciting Maya Angelou’s “America”
I beg you
Discover this country.
The belated tears, they will come.
I grieve when they finally do.
Danielle
Tucson, Arizona
I completely agree. I wasn’t surprised when I turned on the radio and heard a clip of Jackson’s funeral, until I realized that our local news station was preempting the actual news to cover the whole thing live. And I was beyond shocked when I flipped the radio over to NPR and found the same live coverage!!! National Public Radio should have had more important stories to feature, somewhere in the world. For shame.
Shame on you. I found this post to be profoundly disturbing. I was not a fan of Jackson’s music really but I believe he was very gifted. I feel sorry for anyone that has the arrogance and judgement in their hearts that you have just displayed. Any respect I had for your writing has evaporated. It may help you to recite the wonderful saying of Sali Baba each day:
“Before you speak, ask yourself, is it kind, is it necessary, is it true, does it improve on the silence?”
Haruumph…When I put public radio on yesterday afternoon they to spent an hour of discussion on this man.
I don’t get it…
I did not find your post to be arrogant or judgmental. I found it reflective of my own thoughts on this matter.
Pop- valium…so much better than actually reflecting on the true wrongs of this world.
sad…
I agree, Sharon. In the meantime, a “regular guy” was found hanging from a tree outside my office yesterday, just yards from where I park my car! Shocking to say the least but I can’t seem to find a single news article about the incident. Who was this man, why did he kill himself, and why was his life so much less significant than the “King of Pop?”
Very sad indeed.
I am having a hard time figuring out the point to all of the press. He was certainly an influential musician but really… does he rate an entire week’s worth of news? Farrah Fawcett was also an icon in her day and barely managed to eke out more than a few hours of news.
I too am puzzled about the amount of adoration that has been pouring out for a man that most were vilifying in recent years. Regardless of whether or not he did it, how do you turn from – What a freak! to What a genius! in the space of moments because of his death.
I have seen moments here and there because I did grow up with MJ and enjoyed his music very much but mostly I have been avoiding it.
Stacey, sorry I lost you. I don’t think child molestation improves in the silence. Michael Jackson to me isn’t very interesting – the phenomenon of his canonization, the fact that the national news was pre-empted for his funeral, that all those people came and said those things despite his actions – that is interesting to me. But no, I don’t think I’m obligated to speak kindly of some people.
Sharon
This will soon be over and the microsecond media exposure will move on to something else. It’s sensational, that’s all. It’s really very simple. I keep a little tally next to my computer of what I gather from the international press of real traumas that are going on right now in the world: people are dying of the flu in New Zealand, terrible ethnic unrest in China, ( and they rounded up all the men and hauled them away), flooding has been really bad in eastern Europe, seven of our own were blown up yesterday in our war, and many of our local farmers have been totally wiped out by a series of massive hailstorms. That’s what I grieve for and pray about. Oh…plus my mother’s precipitous decent into dementia.
I’m also sad that you posted this. MJ is a confusing character, and I doubt any of us have a clue what was going on in his head. None of us can know if he was or was not a child molester–there are just too many confounding issues–and asserting that he is is in poor taste at best. He’s dead. He had a troubled life. He changed the landscape of music. I don’t know what he did or didn’t do, and neither do you. We all know our society is bread & circuses–this post was unnecessary, and cruel against someone who you didn’t know at all, may have been entirely innocent, and is now incapable of self-defense.
Wow. My sister sent me your links for seeds and I find a review of a country trapped in a Greek tragedy. Brilliant and insightful.
This is your blog, Sharon, and you have the right to post anything you want here. The vitriol of this post was disturbing and it made me lose a little respect for you. I think you could have said what you wanted to say about our society without the nastiness directed at a dead man. I look forward to each new post of yours usually but I’m sorry I logged on to read you today and I’ll think twice about doing so tomorrrow.
Thank you for this. I was appalled by the amount of coverage that even NPR devoted to his death. Even if none of the creepiness that attached to the man obtained, he was nothing more than a pop star. You’d think, based on the coverage, that he’d been an MLK, Gandhi, or Churchill. Feh.
I caught a little bit of this on TV yesterday – I was trying to watch the news and this came up instead. I didn’t think I would care – it’s just one more bit of bread-and-circus, pop culture gaudiness – but the tastelessness of it all took my breath away. I couldn’t even watch long enough to get to the “real” news; when they trotted out his little girl to mourn on camera, I literally felt nauseated and had to shut it off. So inappropriate, so horrifyingly tasteless – not that a little girl was grieving her father, but the sheer salaciousness of the whole spectacle, and how the poor kid was inserted into it all – it felt close to pornographic, which in context is especially awful.
I don’t have any particular opinions about Michael Jackson and I hope I never do, but I was relieved to find your post on this – sometimes I feel like the whole world is insane and I’m the only one who notices. It helps to know that someone else notices, too. Thanks.
And it’s not snobbery to think that the Maya Angelou poem was awful; it’s simply correct. There is just no standard for judging poetry that would allow that to be a called a good poem.
Can’t please all of the people …. I just don’t buy it, Robyn – he’s dead, and he’s being eulogized by the most famous people in the world, watched by millions, including plenty who just wanted to hear the actual news, and I’m hurting his reputation? Let’s see…who is more likely to have an effect here, Queen Latifah or me? I don’t buy the “we must speak well of the dead” argument simply because they are dead in general, but I buy it even less when we are speaking *insanely* of the dead – when someone who was molested as a child write a paean to a person who had sexualized sleepovers with children.
Might he be entirely innocent? I don’t think that’s possible, actually, at least if we make a distinction between legal status (and perhaps I’ll change the wording in the essay to “unconvicted child molestor” for accuracy’s sake) and common sense. He did, in fact, have sleepovers with lots and lots of unrelated pubescent boys, and share a bed with them. Beyond that, let’s say that we use some common sense – doing so was incredibly dangerous for him – back in the early 1990s when he was still touring the first charges came. Let’s see…anyone acting rationally out of anything other than a pathology totally out of their control would say hmmmm…getting into sleeping bags with the children of my servants…bad. Maybe stop? And yet, he kept doing it – that’s not in dispute. For years. Another kid would charge him, and he’d still be doing it. I think we all know that MJ wasn’t innocent in any meaningful sense, just as you and I both know that George W. Bush knew he was lying when he told us that we were in danger from Iraqi WMDs. I don’t think you’d have the slightest problem saying so, or feel any obligation to add “allegedly” on your blog – I can’t prove it, there’s no conviction, but it stretches the imagination passed the breaking point to imagine he did not. I’d hope that if GWB suddenly kicked off, you wouldn’t go back to saying “allegedly” just because he was dead and couldn’t defend his reputation – frankly, I’d hope you’d keep saying what you’d said, particularly if someone started spewing out a stream of noble words about Bush. I don’t mind saying that he changed the landscape of pop music – but it is also correct to point out the other part, and the ways that taints our bread and circuses, IMHO.
Sharon
When I was young (1960s, I am speaking of), I didn’t understand why the older generations were so critical of the music of my boomer generation.
Now I do understand. Severe cultural decline and rot – that is what we have been experiencing for around half a century now. It isn’t just music, of course; one also sees it on Broadway and Hollywood, in literature (so-called), the arts (which no longer really deserve the prefix “fine”), and throughout the culture.
We no longer have cultural heroes that we can look up to, and who pull us upward; instead, we have cultural anti-heroes, who pull us downward.
The American nation is in economic decline, and has been for some time now – not just cultural decline. I have no doubt that these are definitely connected.
Interesting this coming from a woman who encouraged her children to call people they never will meet “friends”. Since our exchange on this topic a while back I have thought about what a friend is and why I don’t call strangers and acquaintances “friends”.
One of the definitions of friend that I have considered is: a person who would mourn your passing/be invited to your wedding/know how to you would most like to spend an afternoon together.
I completely agree- the whole MJ circus is a spectacle to keep our minds and emotions from more important issues.
Willow and others-get over yourselves.
Why is an opinion of Sharon’s labeled as vitriol? Why is it not acceptable to speak one’s mind about a larger condition that someone like Jackson only personifies or symbolizes? Why is it that we can not “speak ill of the dead”?
Is it ok to speak ill of them when alive? Is it acceptable to say nothing when someone like a priest rapes a child? Is it somehow wrong to be intelligent, step back and observe the larger picture or the fact that Jackson just like many others are/were really sick in mind and spirit? Why is this an observation that deserves a chastising? Shall we remain in denial, silent, and say nothing other than our own truth? Shall we do this while others suffer? Oh-the emperor has no clothes.
Michael is dead so we must not speak ill of him. What crap.
What bull. This is a thoughtful interesting post and at no time is Sharon being hateful or vitriolic (is that a word?).
EJ, actually, my children called them friends, and I did not change their words – which I said also in the clarifications of my original article. They didn’t call them “our dear best friends” – they signed a letter “your friends” because the book we had showing letters offered that as a possible final salutation – the other choices were “sincerely” (they weren’t sure what that meant), “love” (they didn’t pick that one), and “respectfully yours.” Believe it or not, not everyone who signs a letter “sincerely” is fully sincere – expecting ritual forms to be fully accurate seems a high standard. They are five and seven years old, and they were writing their first letter that wasn’t to Grandma. I’m fascinated that someone holds them to the same literary standard they hold their mother to, higher standards than we hold most letter writers to – that seems to me a little tough on them. Can we wait until they pass their 10th birthday to abuse them for their writing style and choice of closing salutations? I may not regret writing this piece, but I certainly regret publishing my kids’ letter – I won’t ever do that again. Sheesh.
Sharon
I generally ignored the attention paid to Michael Jackson’s death. I was not a fan (like an earlier poster, I related far more to Wierd Al Yankovic’s parodies than I did to MJ’s music). I also share some of Sharon’s concerns about the lionization of a very troubled man. As a victim of abuse in my early adolescence, I find the folks willfully ignoring that aspect of MJ’s life disturbing. I think there are lessons we could learn looking at his behavior, and the role the abuse he suffered growing up contributed to that behavior. Abusers tend to be people who were abused themselves, and it would be wonderful if we could work on beaking the cycles of abuse.
As for the circus – it bothers me greatly that MJ’s death is treated as big news, but in-depth reporting on the state of the economy, or the climate bill working its way through congress is severly lacking. We as a society face critical issues, and people die all of the time. If we don’t face the issues confronting us, far more people will die early and young.
@WNC Observer
Culture is in the eye of the beholder. I’m another child of the 60′s, and I very much disagree with you on the trajectory of ‘culture’ (whatever that is). Just because you don’t relate to the products of our entertainment culture today doesn’t mean it’s ‘rot’ – it just means you don’t relate to it. I suspect people have been complaining about the decline of ‘culture’ for centuries as art, music, and drama have evolved (Van Gogh never sold a painting in his lifetime). I suspect future generations may look at the energy extravagance embedded in much of modern entertainment with a sense of dis-belief, but that’s a observation on the excesses of our entire society, not just the arts.
@Sharon
This post was, in my perception, one of the angriest posts of yours I’ve read. I don’t mean that as a criticism, only an observation. I don’t think anger is an inappropriate emotion – it’s what we do with it that counts. Given that one of the reasons I read you first amongst all of the peak-oil / transtion related blogs I process on a daily basis is the compassion that shines through nearly all of your posts, your anger in this one was a bit surprising. Once again – this is my response, I don’t have any expectations or ideas about what you -should- be writing about (I think -should- is a particularly nasty 4 letter word).
Michael
Actually I’ll second, whereaway’s last point, both this post and the Obama one after it struck me as a lot angrier than your norm. I ain’t saying that thats a good or a bad thing, just that that is how it struck me.
WNC Observer, I will say I don’t entirely agree with you that we’re experiencing cultural decline across the board – I actually think there’s some really good art and music being made out there. I think very little of it is being made in the pop genre of music, but that has more to do with the genre than not, for the same reason that little, but not none, art is being written in the mystery genre – certain genres are more limiting than others, and it is tough to create great things inside those forms. That doesn’t mean, of course, no one does – in among the crap of mysteries is Jonathan Lethem and Dorothy Sayers, and undoubtably among Pop are a few geniuses as well. It is even possible that MJ was one of them – I’d be the wrong person to say.
I do think that there is a case to be made that the quality of the art made since WWII is overarchingly lower in a number of genres, than it was before, at least in the rich world. The quality of say, literature in English has, I think generally gone down a bit in the US, but then it is matched by astonishingly good stuff coming out of India and Africa etc… that is, the best English Literature isn’t English or American at all. But I think it is a much more nuanced than “those kids today (or even those kids my parents’ age
) like crap 
.
Brian and Whereaway, I think that’s fair. I am angry – not at Michael Jackson, so much, as at people who should know better who still can’t step away from the spectacle. If I’m really pissed at anyone, it is at Maya Angelou, who has always been a publicity whore and a mediocre poet, but who can write prose, and who can sometimes think, and who I think lends an aura of legitimacy this is not entitled to. I would have ignored it had Angelou not pushed it over the edge – because you know that this inanity will be published in the Norton Edition of Contemporary American Crap or whatever, and taught to students…oh, it is about Michael Jackson…bleah!
Sharon
What Michael said.
I have mixed feelings. Personally, I’m mourning the kid who gave up his childhood while bringing awesome music to the rest of us. I’m mourning a kid who had to grow up in that family. I’m mourning a real genius who was so much a part of my youth and coming of age, whose music transports me strongly and specifically back to that time. But I’ve been mourning that guy for a long time now.
The media coverage is irritating and infuriating, I agree. And I’m also convinced that he’s probably guilty of everything he’s been accused of. But you saving your vitriol for his death is almost as hypocritical as everyone overdoing their celebration for it. He’s dead. Someone should have spoken up earlier for him, when he was a child, when he was a young adult, and against him when he began acting strangely, when he began making bad choices that led to probable crimes, and from that point on people should have been after him for it. He was socially and sexually stunted and damaged, clearly, and no one seems to have cared enough to do much about it at any stage of his progression.
I don’t condone it or excuse it, but the man is dead. There are three kids who are going to have a tough enough time without more angry internet venom dripping into the world. The only people left to bear the brunt of our anger are those who don’t deserve it and don’t need to hear it.
Megan
I find much truth in this post, Sharon. I enjoyed some of MJ’s videos…that was when MTV was new, but I could never fathom what he did to himself. I think JHK overlooked last week the sadness aspect of America as “man in the mirror.” I grieve for the potential that we’ve lost — and that we lose — each time we lose the “others” (non-human species) that we’ll never get to know, because only in meeting that otherness do we gain some sense of who we are, what our place is here. I grieve, often silently, sometimes vocally, the passing of mountains lost to mining, species whose habitats are displaced by grand things (think Dusky Seaside Sparrow and NASA at Cape Canaveral), and the things we will lose (firing a missile into the moon, coming this September; shouldn’t the moon, a muse for the ages, be held sacred and off-limits?)…basically, we’ve lost any recognition and respect for limits and in doing that, we lose ourselves. I wonder if we’ll ever find our way — and if so, how. MJ obviously couldn’t find his and I can’t help but think that was because he could never recover from his excesses. I hope that we will, but we’ve less and less time each day.
Thank you for this post.
Sharon: I support your position on this MJ issue completely. You are right on. Yesterday’s exhibition was nothing more than shameful and embarassing in my estimation. And we wonder why other nations think America is a country of degenerates? Geesh!