The Freak Show On Trial

Fans of Michael Jackson might want to take a couple of beta blockers before they read this…

The last place one would expect a freak show to be staged is in a courtroom in politically correct California. Yet for several months (or is it years) the dysfunctional and dismembered have paraded their physical and mental weirdnesses. To the utter boredom of the world at large.

Michael Jackson, alleged serial kiddie fiddler and one time pop star, has been brought before the courts again. I suppose the law officers who brought the case have to be seen to be doing the job taxpayers pay them to do but by now does anybody really think that anybody – anybody at all who is associated with Michael Jackson in any way can be so sufficiently aware of what planet they are on as to be able to give credible evidence in a court case. Is there a plague of self delusion happening over there.

Now I am a liberal and a libertarian and believe in the right of every predatory paedophile to a fair trial, but if you want my opinion on the case Jackson should have been banged up decades ago for that record about the effing rat. Michael’s whole career has been a triumph of marketing over mediocrity. We were told that Micheal was prodigiously talented, despite the lack of evidence enough people believed it to make him a star. We were told the “Michael invented the moonwalk” and enough of us erased memories of our childhood visits to the circus where we watched clowns doing that very thing as they had for centuries. We went along with the myth that “Michael invented body popping despite hearing our grandparents talk of vaudeville acts whose contortions to music made Jackson’s prancing look like a tasteless impression of an epileptic on speed.

The world believed the myth of Jackson’s talent when all the evidence screamed that he was a spoiled child who demanded to be told he was wonderful because he had done the most mundane things.

Perhaps it is because people have short memories. “Oh poor little dear to be so afflicted,” they mutter on seeing his mutilated face. Let’s not forget that face is entirely self inflicted.

Setting aside Michael Jackson’s nose (something he does every night we assume) it is important to examine the psyche of a man who seems to have created himself simply be believing his own publicity. How can any forty – five year old man be so divorced from the world that he can believe it is a healthy and beautiful thing to invite adolescent boys to share his bed? How come none of the parasites that surround him ever thought to take him to one side and say “you know Michael, this is a worse idea than your last nose job.”

Am I the greatest soul singer ever?” he asks a music journalist who has been primed with lavish gifts, “of course you are, and I will write it in my magazine so the whole world knows.” And by the time the hype machine has worked through a mile long queue of music journos the world believes. Step aside Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Wilson Pickett. Those poignant, unforgettable songs dripping with real, raw emotion are nothing when set against the minnie mouse voiced warblings of a child – man singing about AN EFFING RAT!

What is really sad abut the trial in Santa Maria is that it is the untimate expression of a warped philosophy that holds much of America in thrall, a post modern way of thinking in which self – obession is the central plank of culture. It runs like this : “there are no facts, perception is all. This kind of thinking is very destructive to civilisation of course. It is not the fact that Jackson chooses to believe he is a megatalented genius or that it is fine for an adult male to share a bed with a boy so long as he can afford to shell out $20million in gifts (that only an English curmudgeon would refer to as “hush money”) but people’s willingness to let him believe that, to murmer mealy – mouthed platitudes such as “we must not deny him the right to explore his individual truth” that is damaging.

If we are willing to accept that Michael’s truth is as good as anybody’s then we must also be willing to accept that it is better than most peoples’ simply because Michael, though near bankruptcy still have enough money to buy the truth that suits him. Just as in post – modern America corporations and politicians may buy for themselves the “truth” that serves their interests. Michael Jackson is not the disease, merely a symptom.

And so we all choose to live in our own little reality, forgetting about the third world farmers working for five pence an hour to put exotic food on our western tables as we continue to believe that the banks and corporations are run by Santa Claus and will never call in our debts.
And so we can all be Michael Jackson, cocooning ourselves in candy floss, safe within the certasinty that reality is never more than skin deep.

FOR GOD’S SAKE AMERICA, FIND JACKSON GUILTY OF SOMETHING EVEN IF IT IS ONLY FRIGHTENING THE HORSES!

Copyright © 2005 Ian R. Thorpe

Trial News
eonline
yahoo news
BBC online in – depth reports
Say No More dept. – Michael’s “hands on” relationship with Bubbles the Chimp

Guilty or Not Guilty
(this is the bit that gets me sues)
Are the clues in the songs?

1. Ben
2. In The Closet
3. Give In To Me
4. The Lost Children
5. Privacy
6. Get On The Floor
7. Billy’s Jeans
8. Rockin’ Robin

I was going to do a “top ten but I got bored.