Things We Just Don't Want to Know

Last Saturday Bob Herbert, Op-Ed columnist with the New York Times, had a sad but thought provoking column regarding the life and death of Michael Jackson and how it reflects a whole era of extreme immaturity and grotesque irresponsibility that was already well under way in America. The craziness played out on a shockingly broad front and Jackson’s life, among many others, would prove to be a shining and ultimately tragic example.

It was the 80s, Ronald Reagan was president, making promises he couldn’t keep about taxes and deficits and allowing the readings of a West Coast astrologer to shape his public schedule. The movie “Wall Street” would soon appear, accurately reflecting the nation’s wholesale acceptance of unrestrained greed and other excesses of the rich and powerful. Sound familiar?

In neighborhoods through much of black America, crack was taking a fearful toll. Young criminals were arming themselves with ever more powerful weapons and prison garb was used to set fashion trends. Hip-hop would soon appear, and then the violence and misogyny of gansta rap.

All kinds of restraints were coming off and it seemed to many of us then that it was almost as if the adults had gone into hiding. The deregulation that we were told would be great for the economy was being applied to the culture as a whole. Women could be treated as sex objects again as misogyny, hardly limited to hip-hop, went mainstream. Astonishing numbers of men abandoned their children with impunity. Most of the nation seemed fine with the idea of going to war without a draft and without raising taxes --- sound familiar???

As Herbert says, in many ways we descended as a society into a fantasyland, trying to leave the limits and consequences and obligations of the real world behind. Politicians stopped talking about the poor. We built up staggering amounts of debt and called it an economic boom. We shipped jobs overseas by the millions without ever thinking seriously about how to replace them. And, we let New Orleans drown.
Jackson was the perfect star for the era, the embodiment of fantasy gone wild. He tried to carve himself up into another person, but, of course, there was the same Michael Jackson underneath – talented but psychologically disabled to the point where he was a danger to himself and others.

Reality is unforgiving and there is no escape. Behind the Jackson façade was the horror of child abuse. The court records and reams of well-documented media accounts contain a stream of serious allegations of child sex abuse and inappropriate behavior, but Jackson, a multimillionaire megastar, was excused as an eccentric. But to me, one of the worst and most inexcusable, is the fact that often small children were delivered into his company to spend the night in his bed by their own parents. One case of alleged pedophilia against Jackson, the details of which would make your hair stand on end was settled for a reported $25 million. He beat another case in court.

The Michael-mania that has erupted since Jackson’s death – not just an appreciation of his music, but a giddy celebration of his life, is just another spasm of the culture opting for fantasy over reality. We don’t want to look under the rock that was Jackson’s real life.

As with so many other things, we just don’t want to know.