Enough with Jacko already
I know it’s customary to talk well of the recently departed, but the massive glorification of Michael Jackson is beginning to get on my nerves. I can understand why many appreciate him as an artist, but the quotes from memorial ceremony go way beyond that. Here are a few quotes from civil right activist Al Sharpton to illustrate what I’m talking about:
“Michael Jackson made culture accept a person of color way before Tiger Woods, way before Oprah Winfrey, way before Barack Obama”
“I want to say to Michael’s children, there wasn’t nothing strange about your daddy, it was strange what your daddy had to deal with. He dealt with it anyway. He dealt with it for us.”
“If you look at how they deal with Michael’s so-called shortcomings and then the shortcomings of Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley, it’s nowhere in the same world.”
Michael Jackson bleached his skin, narrowed his nose and straightened his hair – he did everything he could to look as white as possible. As a “person of color” he seems to have been ashamed of him self.
As for his personal conduct, I too would like to say to his children that there was nothing strange about him. But that’s simply not true. If a grown man has sleep-overs with children there is something very strange about him. If he pays 22 million dollars to shut their parents up then in my book he is a child molester. I know some will say “innocent until proven guilty”. But in that case rich people who can settle out of court are always innocent. At some point you have to rely on your own judgement. And if you can’t puzzle this one together you’re simply in denial.
I don’t think we should judge Jackson too hard though. He was by all accounts robbed of his own childhood. And he might have had a genetic predisposition. Who knows what made him what he was? There is good and bad in all of us. But like congressman Peter King says, it’s the soldiers, firemen, people who work with aids patients and so forth that should be honored. The media have indeed disgraced themselves by treating him as some kind of saint.
Filed under: Arts & Culture, Crime, Entertainment, Ethics, Media, Racism, Society | 2 Comments
Tags: Michael Jackson, Peter King
You should be glad that you are not living in America at the moment. We have been bombarded with Jackson’s stuff for weeks now and it is not stopping.
I suspect people here are almost as crazy about him as they are in the US. The memorial was even broadcasted live, like he was some sort of statesman. This clip from downtown Stockholm says it all: