Too Bad

Michael Jackson is dead. It's not politics in an ordinary sense, but this news will be more widely known even in Iran than anything about Neda or Mousavi. Michael Jackson may have been the most famous human being on earth. The twentieth century made it possible for the almost the whole planet to know of people like this, across a hundred cultures.

So it is all the more sad that, for all that fame, his life ultimately means so little to most of us. Perhaps, as NPR commented, he can be seen as something of a transitional figure or pioneer who helped mainstream African-American pop music. Maybe. But you might hope that a black American more famous around the world than Martin Luther King Jr., Michael Jordan, and Barack Obama put together might be more than just a singer, that he might have more to contribute than unfulfilled dreams of returning to childhood, pedophilia, and endless surgical attempts to become white. Some megastars seem to use the media for their own ends; he always seemed to have been the one used by it. Somehow he bought into the fake world he was supposed to be selling. After a bruising probate battle, I am not sure how much will be left behind. Michael Jackson's obituary was written twenty years ago. This is just the occasion for them to print it.