A Calgary Sun columnist has written a great piece about Michael Jackson. Link. Excerpts:
I mean, here we have a man who speaks in an affected little baby voice, owns a face that looks like a drunk did surgery on it with a McCulloch chainsaw, hired women to bear his children and then pensioned them off, dresses like a Third World general, and apparently bleached his skin so that between that and the plastic surgery he looks like the unacknowledged love child of Diana Ross and Johnny Winter. . .
Add to that the fact that Michael built a retreat called Neverland that's 50% amusement park and 50% Freudian freakshow, and I'd think that the vast majority of human beings in North America would stand back and go: Ick!
But we didn't, did we?
And least not at first, and even today it is hardly a unanimous view. . .
I'm thinking that what Michael Jackson became is not entirely his fault.
We helped create him, because we thought it was wrong to express our natural revulsion for him.
We were tolerant. So tolerant that what should have, at the very least, been uneasiness, turned into approval.
Michael Jackson is poster boy for the culture of permissiveness that is the unfortunate legacy of social liberalism.
Nobody says no anymore, not to celebrity millionaire musicians and not to the creepy guy who works in your company's website development program who took two weeks off so he could be eighth in line for the Revenge of the Sith premiere.
The most important -- and noble -- thing about human beings is not that we're individuals, lovely little unique snowflakes with hopes and dreams and desires.
The most important thing about human beings is we suppress those impulses that aren't useful. . .
The fact that Michael Jackson -- even if innocent -- has lived and prospered among us for so long, is testament to the fact that we have quit listening to the things that we know, utterly, to be true.
Guilty or innocent ... he's one of the guys we should turn our backs on.
