Neverland Ranch State Park, Huh?

When I first heard that state assemblyman, Mike Davis had proposed that Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch be turned into California's newest state park, I thought it a joke. I know that I'm in a vocal minority that thinks Michael Jackson will be a forgotten figure in 30 years, (Remember Eva Tanquay? Fame is fleeting. Look her up, she's a great story.) but shouldn't we wait awhile to see if I'm wrong. Too, while Michael Jackson's supporters seem to attribute a god like quality to the man, the taint of possible child molestation can stink up the place.
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But, then I began to give the idea some thought. The first thing I did was look up Neverland Ranch. Its 2, 676 acres is a significant piece of open space in a state that has a habit of putting real estate development on a sacred plane. Turn the house into a Michael Jackson Museum and restore the remaining 2, 670 acres to it's natural state. Hiking, bridal, and perhaps some bike paths, crossing a near natural bit of the Santa Ynez Valley sounds like a pretty good thing to me. Paying to buy the land could be problematic, but not impossible. Rather than pass a bond initiative, take out a bank loan, slap a $10 admission fee to the museum, and tell the bank all the money is theirs until the loan plus a reasonable amount of interest is paid. I would be surprised if initial visitation was under a million visitors a year. I'm willing to put up with crying Michael Jackson idolaters in the parking lot if I can walk away and into a piece of old California landscape in 10 minutes.

State Funerals

Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Woody Guthrie, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Marvin Gaye, John Lee Hooker, Mary Lou Williams, Andy Warhol, James Jones, Stanley Kubrick, Paul Newman, John Wayne, John Ford, Jack Kerouac, Tennessee Williams, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Alberta Hunter, Johnny Cash, Billy Strayhorn, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Norman Mailer, Katherine Hepburn, Howard Hawks, Vladamir Nabokov, Greta Garbo, John Frankenheimer, Burt Lancaster, and Ella Fitzgerald are all cultural figures of equal or greater importance than Michael Jackson, who have died within my lifetime. ( I was born in 1955.) Not one of them was given the equivalent of a state funeral.


If I had months to go through the records, I could come up with thousands more.

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.