A very strange thing happened during what had been breathlessly billed as the “trial of the century”. Americans turned off. Yes, the Michael Jackson trial has spawned its “media circus”, its occasional tabloid splashes and its cable news shows. But compared with the trials of, say, Martha Stewart, Scott Peterson (the man who murdered his wife and dumped her in a lake), or OJ Simpson, the affair has been a bit of a dud.
And the reason, I think, is not simply a function of the ick factor — that simply imagining a 46-year-old porcelain doll groping half-drunk teens is more than enough to get you to turn the channel. It’s because the Jackson trial focuses attention on features of American culture that most Americans simply don’t want to acknowledge or handle.
The trial is about class in America at its most extreme — the topic Americans most want to avoid. Jackson represents an extreme case of the increasingly powerful and isolated overclass, the super-wealthy who, in a society where money is the ultimate source of power, have become used to creating gated, sequestered universes of their own. They are free from limits or middle-class morality. And they are never satisfied.
But Jackson’s accusers are also a symbol of the inverse phenomenon: a white underclass whose preferred method of self-enrichment is the victim culture of lawsuits and celebrity manipulation.
Ask yourself what virtues or values Jackson shares with his accusers and you uncover an obsession with material wealth, a never slaking thirst for fame, an ethics-free approach to the shakedown. The Jerry Springer culture embraces the very high and the very low. It’s what they have in common.
The case is also subtly about race, another taboo. The key fact about Jackson is that he is the first true black celebrity in America who has literally turned himself into a Caucasian. African-American culture has long been obsessed with varying degrees of blackness. Light-coloured men and women have historically enjoyed social status in African-American society and we have learnt from the exhaustive biographies of Jackson that his father ridiculed him in his youth for having a flat nose and stereotypical black features. Jackson’s response? To take the valuation of lighter skin to its logical conclusion.
That has damaged Jackson. For all his nightly chats with Jesse Jackson, the Gloved One can hardly play the race card. With OJ Simpson, black America still saw the former football player as one of them, even though he had largely left black society, had married a white woman and done next to nothing for black causes. But Jackson has more support among Japanese teenagers than American blacks — and for understandable reasons. He looks more like a character from a Japanese cartoon than anything resembling a black American male.
He is not Tiger Woods, declaring himself post-racial. He is a far more retrograde and repulsive figure: a person who has become a reverse minstrel, a black man finally reincarnated through surgery as a white androgynous waif. He is therefore a racist in the most profound sense — and one that neither blacks nor whites want to claim.
His alleged crimes, moreover, are repellent, but not on a scale that can shock Americans into paying attention. If you read the papers, you will know that hundreds of Catholic priests have raped young boys and teens with impunity over the past few decades; the visuals of sex abuse at Abu Ghraib, soon to be amplified by a new release of photographs, are still seared into the American consciousness.
Jackson, in contrast, is merely accused of creepy fondling, getting kids drunk, exposing himself and other sordid habits, but the pattern never quite rises to the level of real horror. The fascination comes less from the crime itself than from the lurid details of its environment — the insane luxury of Neverland, the locked doors, hidden alarms and stashes of pornography that give you a glimpse of derangement on credit.
So we’re left with a trial between a highly unpleasant mother with a history of scams and what can only be described as a walking hologram of self-love. No wonder few want to stay for the credits.
And then there’s fame. The way in which celebrity has become, after money, the ultimate American poison is illustrated in a particularly poignant way by the case of Jackson. Forced into unimaginable exposure as a prepubescent boy, hounded by a brutal father, denied any natural childhood or adolescence, Jackson became the hideous caricature that pure celebrity spawns.
Like Gollum with his ring, young Jackson became twisted into unrecognisable malignity by celebrity. No one ever said no; no limits helped secure reality for this boy in the media bubble; parents were part of the problem; and money on a mind-boggling scale kept any sanity or balance at bay.
Some may find it hard to feel pity for someone as wealthy as Jackson, but if you view wealth, as I do, as a potential prison of pitiless isolation, then the damage to the man’s psyche and soul must have been, and still is, immeasurable. And damaged people damage others — even in the pathetic, sick way in which Jackson obviously wounded some of the children who foolishly came into his care.
The parents of these boys should have known better, but they too were mesmerised by the fantasy of eternal wealth and youth.
What you see in this case, then, is the cold, heartless core of American celebrity: a Faustian trade-off between instant, fathomless attention and the maintenance of any sort of psychological or spiritual perspective.
Meanwhile, fame moves on. No one cares much about Jackson’s music any more. No one cares about his soul or those of his alleged victims. What the culture of celebrity builds it also destroys — casually.
In this case, the wreckage is a husk of a human, the detritus of a culture that feeds on exposure and then, bored, moves on to the next victim.
It is because we do not want to look at this too long that we finally look away. The world that created Jackson is also the world that will happily forget him.
