Mr. Jackson

About Michael Jackson, I only have this to say:

When I’m driving down the highway and there’s an accident, I generally make a decision to not look at it. For one thing, of course, there’s the practical side: all that slowing down and looking makes traffic impossible, even when the accident doesn’t actually block any lanes, and I don’t want to contribute to the problem. But on a human level, it just seems to me that whoever is involved in the accident is probably having at minimum a very bad day, and at worst one of the most awful days of their lives--and surely they deserve whatever privacy they can get. What they simply don’t need is all those looky-loos staring at them for their own damn entertainment value. “Thank God that’s not me!” think the looky-loos. And “Is somebody dead? Ooh, is that a corpse? Oooooohhhh.” I don’t want to contribute to that problem, either.

And certain celebrities--we all know who they are--slot perfectly for me into a category I think of as Perpetual Wrecks by the Side of the Road. Thus, Jennifer Aniston’s love life deserves just as much privacy as someone whose car got smashed. Which brings us back round to Michael Jackson, who was the King of Pop but who was also, unfortunately, the King of the Car Wrecks. I ignored the stories about his marriages, about his kids, about his various personal travails, about his court trial, all of it. It would mean nothing to him, of course--there will always be plenty of people in the world who delight in staring at the wreck--but it felt good for my soul to just leave that poor man alone.

And now he’s dead, and the world has gone a little bit crazy over it. I did not watch the memorial and frankly I can’t see why the City of Los Angeles should pay for it, but whatever keeps the peace, I guess. I’m certainly sorry he died, and I can’t help but feel a monumental sadness about that sweet kid who got so twisted by his awful life. (I also can’t help thinking that the weirder he got, the more we stared, which can only have contributed to making his weirdness get that much weirder.) All in all, then, I think it’s a better thing to just keep on driving through my own life, and not slow down to stare at the awfulness of his.