'WACKO JACKO' WON'T BE BACKO!

The untimely demise of Michael Jackson has precipitated a media-fuelled process that is becoming strangely familiar. A process involving mass grieving in public, hysterical overreaction and the phenomenal enrichment of florists; a process that first occurred, and most visibly, with the death of Diana. A process involving repetitive cycles of news bulletins with clichéd sound bites from celebrity friends, linked with footage of fans gathering in places connected with the deceased. A process that has no clear rationale behind the prioritisation of its coverage; causing Diana’s death to overshadow that of Mother Teresa and MJ’s to outrank Farrah Fawcett’s.
On TV, admirers relate their feelings of devastation with apparent sincerity, incongruous with their status as, often, complete strangers to their late icons. As superlatives are added to sentences of increasingly exaggerated praise, disproportionate to the achievements of any human life, marketing forces capitalise on relevant merchandise with the unselfconscious abandon of a swarm of locusts. Media mantras mesmerise members of the public into reactions of a Pavlovian nature. Discussions between people include the half-dozen or so catchiest headlines and quotes, becoming confused with their own thoughts.
There is much hypocrisy with this process of virtual deification—in Jackson’s case people seem afflicted with especially short memories. Forgotten are their previous impressions of the performer as a complete weirdo. ‘Wacko Jacko’ was the phrase most typically used to describe the eccentric star in life. In death, the same tabloid that coined this derogatory phrase published a 32-page commemorative souvenir in a vulgar display of obvious double standards. Although Jackson was cleared of child abuse charges, there was a widespread and general feeling among the public that there is ‘no smoke without fire.’ While Jackson’s reputation was tarnished by these suggestions—they would have irrevocably destroyed that of anyone else, famous or not—he appeared to bounce back. To survive suspicions and accusations of the type of behaviour that is universally condemned and considered so heinous it is irredeemable makes MJ unique. A fact as notable, perhaps, as the one that he produced the best-selling album of all time, ‘Thriller.’
Naturally, his death is sad—as sad as the loss of any life. How many millions of other people died around the same time is a hard to guess figure. Equally hard to figure is how public figures have come to figure so largely in the daily lives of significant numbers of people, leading pedestrian lives out of the limelight. Is there any shared sense (among anyone ‘out there’) of urgency behind the desire to understand this?