The Big Cult

Perhaps it's my age, but I'm not all that bothered by the death of Michael Jackson. Sure, it's sad that he died at 50, a fairly young age, but then again most of the population of the planet is going to die prematurely. For me to mourn the death of a stranger, I would have had to be touched by that person's life in some way, and Jackson's music wasn't really to my taste.

I've always felt that political revolutions are usually accompanied by cultural revolutions, and the rise of Ronald Reagan was most definitely a political revolution. The accompanying cultural revolution ushered in a respect for great wealth, and a willingness to accept any sort of strange behavior from the famous. In short, a good, old fashioned era of personality cults.

I'm sure the Christianists, and moral crusaders will be shocked at my writing this, but no one, other than Reagan himself, embodied the whole personality cult era more than Michael Jackson. The man had an undeniable talent for manufacturing a certain type of facile entertainment, but the real fascination that people had with him was about his bizarre life style. From the endless plastic surgeries, the perpetual child like behavior, and the charges of pedophilia, Jackson's life, not his music was the driving force of our obsession with his every move. I always thought it was like looking at a freeway accident. We all knew it wasn't a good thing for us to be interested in a man who wanted to recreate himself as a asexual, aracial, perpetual child, but we were anyway. I'm not glad he's dead, but I do hope he's forgotten soon.