What up, Michael?
The Michael Jackson affair has overtones of serious impeding tragedy. The train wreck about to happen but you can’t stop watching.
Sheriff says Jackson brutality claims untrue
<Jackson> also said he had been locked for 45 minutes in a jail bathroom with feces smeared on the walls, floor and ceiling.
While police sometimes do treat people brutally, I can’t imagine them being so stupid as to do this to a high profile person like Michael Jackson. Or having a bathroom that filthy.
In other signs of chaos, Stuart Backerman, his long time spokesperson was either summarily fired or quit in protest. The Nation of Islam (NOI) either is or absolutely is not involved in his affairs now. (Hmm, it would be amusing if NOI took over Jackson’s Beatles publishing rights, as some darkly hint might happen.)
And long time supporter Elizabeth Taylor didn’t come to his party last month.
There’s so many threads here. He’s black, maybe gay, hugely wealthy and world famous, and, in my view, unquestionably mentally unbalanced. An easy target, especially since he persists in doing brain-dead things like loudly proclaiming that it’s ok to sleep with children.
It’s another media feeding frenzy, where the target is pilloried even before the trial begins, while all manner of people with their own agendas jump in from the sidelines. Tom Wolfe wrote a novel on this topic, “Bonfire of the Vanities”, about a Wall Street player who took a wrong turn in the South Bronx with his mistress in the car, ran over and killed someone who may or may not have been trying to jack him, then lied about it when the story broke. Wolfe deliberately makes the circumstances of the death vague, it may or may not have been self-defense or an accident – or it could have been manslaughter. It mattered not. The media firestorm destroyed whatever life the Wall Street player had prior to the event, mangled the lives of others, while catapulting still others to new-found celebrity and importance.
That’s what may happen here too. In the end, as in the novel, it won’t matter much what the facts are or whether Michael Jackson is guilty or innocent. In many ways, he’s already been destroyed.
And that’s not justice.