The Jackson obit we were waiting for

By the world’s best obit writer, Mark Steyn. My, what was The Atlantic thinking.

If he was that aware of what was wrong with his childhood, why couldn’t he see his adulthood was even more luridly screwed up? You had to try hard to love the ”grown-up” Michael, even before he started outpacing his Fleet Street caricature of Wacko Jacko. He spent his childhood singing adult love songs with the Jackson Five. He spent his adulthood pretending to be a child.

Of course, Steyn is just starting to roll …

Later, he was friends with Home Alone cutie Macaulay Culkin: they liked to go shopping together wearing buck teeth and false noses. But Macko outgrew Jacko and moved on to broads and booze, and Jacko turned to less worldly companions. A couple of years back, he visited London accompanied by Omar Bhatis, a 12-year-old boy who came first in a Michael Jackson look-alike contest in Norway. If you check into the EconoLodge with a prepubescent lookalike wearing matching white gloves and surgical masks, the gal at the front desk will give you the fish eye and buzz the house detective. But at the Dorchester Hotel it’s not a problem, at least for pop stars.

Gets better …

You could argue that his ever more pallid complexion made him the pithiest shorthand for pop’s history: in splendid contrast to Little Richard and Pat Boone, he was the first black singer to become his own lucrative white cover version.

MTV continues to play the “Michael Jackson Victim-thon.” Which they should, Jackson made MTV possible. Sure, Duran Duran and Van Halen were no slouches and gargantuan in their own right, but Thriller turned MTV into a cultural vortex for a good chunk of the early 1980s. The network repeated this even more so in the early 90s and has rotted since. So MTV will hold onto the ghost as long as possible, if possible, enabling the dead to to speak.

And you realize that, in the end, even for the most famous and famously damaged celebrities, wackiness is a choice. Michael Jackson made his. In the years ahead, we’ll remember the freak show, but not much of the music.

Steyn’s eulogy and deconstruction of Jackson is one thing. Andrew Breitbart’s is one you will hear seldom of in the coming days. Breitbart shows off some of his inside muscle with his latest – “A Monster of Our Own Making is Dead.”

Michael Jackson’s shtick was simply a more sophisticated, well financed variation on the molester with an ice cream truck. When after paying millions to his young accuser, Jordy Chandler, Jackson was later found to have gay porn producer Marc Schaffel, an un-indicted co-conspirator in Jackson’s 2005 child molestation trial, as his PERSONAL VIDEOGRAPHER and close pal on the very private grounds of Neverland Ranch.

“The minute Michael and his advisers found out about Schaffel’s background, they cut the cord immediately. This was months ago. (Schaffel) has nothing to do with Michael Jackson, doesn’t represent him in any way, shape or form, and has been told this repeatedly by Michael’s attorneys.”

Well, a year later, Schaffel was back at Neverland and again acting as Jackson’s personal videographer who chronicled the taping of the famous Martin Bashir BBC documentary that later appeared on ABC in the U.S., which centered around two young brothers hanging with Jackson and Schaffel as their ‘chaperones’ at the creepy amusement park cum bachelor pad.

Jackson was an innovator. A pop culture force. For that, he deserves credit. He is also an example of celebrity at its worst. As Steyn eloquently wrote, he sang love songs with passion as a child and twisted songs about childhood as an adult. But Jackson made his own choices, he could have grown up and gone on with his life (like his requisite South Park episode suggested) or go on being the freakshow. With some thanks to a screwed up family and an enabling entourage, he choose the freakshow. It led him to painkillers, drugs, and a bad heart at age 50. Millions spent on plastic surgery while a life was wasted.

Jackson, despite all his accomplishments, is another example of the death of celebrity. Stars are nothing to emulate. They aren’t role models. TMZ may be sickening to some, at least it shows this seedy side of life for what it is. Hollywood is to be abhorred, not upheld.

Share on Facebook