A few days ago, we remembered, 22 June 1969, the 40th anniversary of the death of Judy Garland in London -- and now this shocking development: Michael Jackson died as he prepared to perform in London. Tough town.
I heard the first bulletins of the sudden death of Michael Jackson as I drove around Provo running errands. BBC Radio announced sketchy reports that Michael Jackson had been rushed by ambulance from his home to hospital. This was during the 3 o'clock hour. In the 5:00 hour, National Public Radio reported as its first story that Jackson indeed was dead. As I write these words, I am listening to continuous coverage of KNX-AM Radio Los Angeles.
Farrah Fawcett died on 25 June 2009 as well. This is one of those rare days when two celebrities died on the same day. When Elvis Presley died -- and my memory of that day is that his death generated the same sort of public displays of grief -- Groucho Marx also died within a day. I remember that 1985 day that Yul Brynner and Orson Welles died on the same day.
Speaking of Presley, both Jackson and Presley died in decline as has-beens. Presley died a fat has-been; Jackson died a skinny, physically scarred has-been. Presley’s death rejuvinated his struggling career almost overnight. Jackson’s death will probably increase his commercial marketability overnight.
I liked some of his performances and songs. He was not, though, one of my favorite celebrity performers. He sold merchandise in record numbers, so by the standards of Hollywood that makes him The King of Pop. He, however, lived by his own set of creative and moral rules. His talent, great as it was, WAS , got disrupted by a series of weird sexual scandals, mental illnesses, and bizarre behavior, For example, it is hard to forget his hanging of a baby over a balcony. For another example, it is hard to forgive him for naming two of his children after himself Prince Michael one and two. l will be darned interesting to finally hear just exactly what he did to boys and to how many of them. It will be darned interesting to finally hear just exactly what sorts of substances he abused.
His death, however, did not surprise me.
All those plastic surgeries take a toll on the health, especially considering how badly some of the surgeries turned out. The trouble with having lots of money is that it can procure one all kinds of medical procedures whether one needs them, whether they are actually good or not. Literally he resembled a person 80 years of age.
Enduring all the public worship and hatred for decades takes a toll on the health.
Drug abuse takes a toll on the health, too.
Performing live before the public for decades takes a toll on the health as well -- all those adrenalin rushes, all the panic attacks, all the highs and lows of mental health.
Mr. Jackson possessed enormous singing, musical, and dancing talent, and most people do not understand where that sort of creativity comes. Thus he had to endure the insults and the sniping of the little untalented clumps and the jealous wannabes.
I heard one of his more vocal supporters say tonight on the radio that his upcoming revival tour of live performances would have restored him to triumphant stardom again, but there is no shred of physical evidence now to support that contention. He was 50 years of age, and few singing stars have returned to greatness after dissipating themselves so spectacularly in their 30s.
I remember something that Bernard Shaw wrote in the notes to Caesar and Cleopatra He compared-contrasted Caesar, and Charles XII, and Joan of Arc, and Admiral Nelson that
"were like most modern self made millionaires half witted geniuses, enjoying the worship according by all races certain forms of insanity."
The adulation that the public heaped on Jackson today validates Shaw's assessment --
but we didn't realize how insane Jackson really could get. Worshiping Jackson could get rather uncomfortable.
For example:
Jackson settled that 1993 pedofile accusation out of court, and the 2005 jury found him not guilty of child sexual abuse by getting kids drunk -- yet somehow he never quite shook off the negative image. He didn’t help this at all – he lived by his own sets of rules and continued to associate openly with boys. One has wonder about the parents of Michael’s boys – what did they expect? What did they really think?
I completely forgot about that exoneration, and yet somehow I always considered him a known child molester. It is one thing for an adult to like kids. It is quite another thing for that adult to appear to like kids more than adults. It is a public image problem that no amount of sophisticated public relations could fix.
Take a look at this comment that I copied from the comments section of an article detailing Jackson’s sudden death. I don’t know what MSM means, but I can’t be good, that’s for sure.
When I heard Jacko died, I laughed since I (like all thinking humans) was shocked that the disgusting, misjudging MSM actually still considered him celebrity enough to warrant making a big deal over his death! Nothing could be further from the truth! In my opinion, the amoral MSM is glorifying a weirdass pedophile with issues concerning gay sex, not growing up, and hating his black skin color! As a moralist, I can’t in good faith give so much as a damn about Jacko dying because of what a serial fruitcake, lunatic and molester he looked to be. This is the weirdass, folks, who wore masks in public, slept in beds with little boys until the cows came home, slowly began to turn his once-black skin white via weirdo treatments, and lived like a five-year-old little boy his whole adult life! This guy is/was a pervert in my opinion! He was such a perv, in my opinion, that the only creatures mourning him are his longtime lover, Bubbles the Chimp, and Macaulay Culkin, his first victim!
In a Prairie Home Companion joke show held around the time of the trial, two jokes that got huge laughs from Garrison Keillor’s audience illustrate public perceptions of Jackson:
What is the difference between a grocery sack and Michael Jackson?
One is plastic and dangerous for children to play with, and the other holds groceries.
What does Michael Jackson like about twentyeight year olds?
The fact that there are twenty of them.
His estate Neverland located near Santa Barbara, California illustrated one of the creepiest aspects of Jackson’s mental state. A title of "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree," opens the news reel sequence of Citizen Kane. Jackson, like William Randolph Hearst, actually did it. The name suggests that land of lost boys in Sir James Barrie’s ubbercreapy play Peter Pan, which at least in Barrie’s version features unsettling dark emotional undercurrents in it about males who refuse to mature and who prefer male bonding to heterosexual coupling. Jackson built an amusement park on the property as well, and it suggested overtly Pleasure Island in Disney’s Pinocchio (1940) – a place designed to entice and then entrap boys.
It says a lot about Michael Jackson’s colossal stature in 20th century popular culture worldwide that a an Old Testament warning Prophecy may have actually warned about him.
Background:
In the 1983 MTV music video Thriller, Jackson transforms into a dancing friendly monster, an image usually negative in American pop culture.
In 1987, he recorded an album and song called “Bad.” Bad in the context of the song was positive in a perverse sort of way. Roughly at the same time, a urban slang expression bad evolved which meant “good.” It confused all sorts of old people all over the nation. It is quite true, as explained by the on-line answer site called answers.com, that
Most people might think that the slang usage of bad to mean its opposite, “excellent,” is a recent innovation of Black English. While it is of Black English origin, this usage has been recorded for over a century; the first known example dates from 1897. Even earlier, beginning in the 1850s, the word appears in the sense “formidable, very tough,” as applied to persons. Whether or not the two usages are related, they both illustrate a favorite creative device of informal and slang language—using a word to mean the opposite of what it “really” means. This is by no means uncommon; people use words sarcastically to mean the opposite of their actual meanings on a daily basis. What is more unusual is for such a usage to be generally accepted within a larger community. Perhaps when the concepts are as basic as “good” and “bad” this general acceptance is made easier. A similar instance is the word uptight, which in the 1960s enjoyed usage in the sense “excellent” alongside its now-current, negative meaning of “stiff.”
However, most black kids knew nothing about historical English of 1897, but they knew Michael Jackson and the connotation of the song “Bad.”
In 1991, Jackson recorded an album and song and music video called “Black or White.”
His co-stars included very young Macaully Calkin (who insisted that Jackson had never harmed him, which is not quite the same thing as saying that Culkin did not have any sort of intimacy with Jackson) and George Wendt. For the record, I will state that I thought the young black Michael Jackson was the most sexy, desirable, and cute of the various incarnations of Michael Jackson. Unfortunately, he had enough money to indulge his excesses, one of which was boys and another of which was transformational plastic surgery. Over the years, he got progressively more caucasian and more white, and his hair got progressively longer, blacker, and straighter. Officially, the explanation for the color change was a skin disorder that makes negroid skin white. Unofficially, rumors circulated of skin-lightening drugs gone awry.
Back to the song: On the surface at least the song lyric extolls tolerance for our sexual and racial differences. The video images though were something else again. The images morphed at such a fast rate that I came away with an overall impression of some sort of internationalist grey race not quite male, not quite female entirely. And it was all young.
And so by the late 1990s, and certainly by 2005 when California tried to convict him of being a danger to boys everywhere, I thought of Michael when reading this passage from the Old Testament:
Isaiah 5:20 1611 translation
20 ¶ Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
2 Nephi 15: 20 Joseph Smith 1829 translation
20 Wo unto them that call evil good, and good evil, that put darkness for light, and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
Depending on the type of translations from ancient Hebrew to English and what words originally occupied the scripture – it is really not much a stretch to translate the passage this way
Isaiah 5: 20 Rick Soulier 2009 translation
20 ¶ Woe unto them that call bad good, and good bad; that put black for white, and white for black; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
2 Nephi 15: 20 Rick Soulier 2009 translation
20 Wo unto them that call bad good, and good bad, that put darkness for light, and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
It speaks volumes about the moral decay of Hollywood that so few people talking about Jackson in the media even mention the scandals of his private life. However, if a single male someone without musical or dancing talent had moved on 1320 North and set up a house to attract boys, that would be the only thing my neighbors would talk about.
My mind goes back to the little boy who performed with his brothers in television variety programs of the early 1970s.
My mind goes back to the 1978 movie version of The Wiz directed by Sidney Lumet. The New Yorker’s film critic said of the thing that it was almost as stagey as Victor Fleming’s 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz, but that the Wiz’s sets made less sense. The setting was the most art deco sections of Manhattan. Diana Ross portrayed a 30ish repressed school teacher Dorothy from Harlem, which was only the first of its problems. I remember Ross, I remember Richard Pryor as the Wizard, I remember Mabel King as the Wicked Witch, I remember Lena Horne as the Good Witch, I remember “Can You Feel a Brand New Day.” I literally do not remember Michael Jackson at all as the Scarecrow. I suspect he got to dance more in that role than did Ray Bolger in that role in the 1939 film, but I don’t remember a thing about it.
My mind goes back to my viewing of Captain EO at Disney Land in 1991, Michael Jackson starred in Captain EO in 1986 for the Disney Organization, produced by George Lucas and directed by of all people Francis Ford Coppola. He costarred with Anjelica Huston and wrote the music with James Horner who scored it. Lucasfilm-Disney -DDD filmed the short in 3-D that required glasses. The nicest thing to say about EO is this: if it hadn’t starred Jackson and if it hadn’t featured his music, and if it hadn’t been filmed in 3-D, EO would have been unbearably awful. One of the captain’s opening lines was something like, “They say we are losers, but we are the greatest.” That is not the sort of line that studs the mind with details. It is also the sort of line one should try to say with a straight face toward the end of a movie, not at the beginning. With Jackson, with 3-D, with his music, Captain EO was bearably awful. Jackson’s entrance was unforgettable in 3-D – the camera focused in close on Jackson’s glorious backside wearing a tight space suit. The rest of the movie for me is a loud, three-dimensional blur.
My mind goes back to the young man who in Thriller, an early and highly influential music MTV video of 1983 directed by of all people John Landis, observed wryly that he was different from the other boys. That turned out to be one of the great understatements of that time.
Fortunately, much of his performances have been saved on audio and video recordings so that the future generations can make their own judgements about Michael Jackson and his talent.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Thursday, June 25, 2009
INSURANCE REFORM VS. HEALTH REFORM
I feel intense disappointment in Senators Bennett and Hatch for using scare tactics to justify no medical insurance reform. I wish they and the rest of the Republican establishment would behave honestly and tell us to our faces that the Republicans believe only people with money deserve to have good health and access to the American system of medicine.
Of course, our Senators have plenty of company in the Congress. These days, health care reform discussions illustrate Congress’s preference to appear to be doing something as opposed to actually doing something. Its behavior wears thin in this time of crisis.
The debate on health care reform has generated all sorts of oddities. For a start, I find it unacceptable that few -- if any -- people publicly discuss how much profit insurance companies should make – or even if they should make a profit at all. This basic assumption remains crucial to the debate.
Furthermore, many citizens, politicians, and policy experts obsess over the issue of whether private insurance funds or a public one-payer system should pay for the medical system. Yet hardly anyone discusses what governments should do to promote good health.
We will get reforms only when we citizens and our Congressional representatives get serious about the scope and nature of reform. For example, we should stop allowing farmers to grow tobacco, the ingredients of alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana. If we could reduce if not eliminate the number of people who use these dangerous and unhealthy substances to their detriment, that will reduce medical costs of these substances’ wide-spread bad effects.
Let us look at this issue in a way that will become more important as the planet gets more overpopulated. How long should starving people tolerate the growth of tobacco, alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana on properties that could grow more food? How long will the starving poor put up with the excuse that the needs of moneyed addicts for tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine take precedent over the needs of the poor for food?
This editorial feels a little scattered even to me.
Therefore, let me conclude with my three calls to action.
1) We should promote healthy practices first.
2) Congress should rise to the occasion and set up a one-payer system that will helps pay medical bills. It should set up that system independent of employers. We should unlink finally employment and health benefits.
3) We should not tolerate the growth and use of tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine, for they increase the costs of both illness and health.
Of course, our Senators have plenty of company in the Congress. These days, health care reform discussions illustrate Congress’s preference to appear to be doing something as opposed to actually doing something. Its behavior wears thin in this time of crisis.
The debate on health care reform has generated all sorts of oddities. For a start, I find it unacceptable that few -- if any -- people publicly discuss how much profit insurance companies should make – or even if they should make a profit at all. This basic assumption remains crucial to the debate.
Furthermore, many citizens, politicians, and policy experts obsess over the issue of whether private insurance funds or a public one-payer system should pay for the medical system. Yet hardly anyone discusses what governments should do to promote good health.
We will get reforms only when we citizens and our Congressional representatives get serious about the scope and nature of reform. For example, we should stop allowing farmers to grow tobacco, the ingredients of alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana. If we could reduce if not eliminate the number of people who use these dangerous and unhealthy substances to their detriment, that will reduce medical costs of these substances’ wide-spread bad effects.
Let us look at this issue in a way that will become more important as the planet gets more overpopulated. How long should starving people tolerate the growth of tobacco, alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana on properties that could grow more food? How long will the starving poor put up with the excuse that the needs of moneyed addicts for tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine take precedent over the needs of the poor for food?
This editorial feels a little scattered even to me.
Therefore, let me conclude with my three calls to action.
1) We should promote healthy practices first.
2) Congress should rise to the occasion and set up a one-payer system that will helps pay medical bills. It should set up that system independent of employers. We should unlink finally employment and health benefits.
3) We should not tolerate the growth and use of tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine, for they increase the costs of both illness and health.
HAPPY UNFATHERS DAY
Happy UnFathers Day
In his 19 June column Garrison Keillor said of Fathers Day that it has more to do with cheap commercialism than it does about fathers. I would put it this way: Fathers Day has everything Mothers Day has – plus more cheap commercialism and less sincerity.
I am 53 and have never once been wished a Happy Fathers Day, just because I never reproduced.
So I eat a meal at a restaurant by myself alone to celebrate UnFathers Day.
Entirely too many think of Fatherhood strictly in a biological sense.
Jesus never reproduced biologically, so far as anyone can tell, John Brown’s sexual fantasies notwithstanding, and the yet the New Testament is full of references to him as a spiritual father.
George Washington never reproduced, and yet we still call him the Father of the Country.
Abraham Lincoln never fathered any slaves and yet many former slaves thought of him as Father Abraham.
Even before my friend Richard adopted a daughter two years ago, he had the spirit of fatherhood about him.
Creativity is fatherhood.
Sound advise is fatherhood.
Mentoring is fatherhood.
In his 19 June column Garrison Keillor said of Fathers Day that it has more to do with cheap commercialism than it does about fathers. I would put it this way: Fathers Day has everything Mothers Day has – plus more cheap commercialism and less sincerity.
I am 53 and have never once been wished a Happy Fathers Day, just because I never reproduced.
So I eat a meal at a restaurant by myself alone to celebrate UnFathers Day.
Entirely too many think of Fatherhood strictly in a biological sense.
Jesus never reproduced biologically, so far as anyone can tell, John Brown’s sexual fantasies notwithstanding, and the yet the New Testament is full of references to him as a spiritual father.
George Washington never reproduced, and yet we still call him the Father of the Country.
Abraham Lincoln never fathered any slaves and yet many former slaves thought of him as Father Abraham.
Even before my friend Richard adopted a daughter two years ago, he had the spirit of fatherhood about him.
Creativity is fatherhood.
Sound advise is fatherhood.
Mentoring is fatherhood.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
OUR OLD FRIEND RED INK
The current finance crisis has shown us that many emperors do not have any clothes. Many institutions cannot sustain themselves out of current funds.
Bobbing amid all the economic wreckage, I find Republican politicians hilarious these days. I cannot listen to them decrying big federal deficits with a straight face.
The federal government has lead the way into debt for well over two and half centuries – with major growth spurts in the Lincoln Administration to finance the War Between the States, and in the Wilson Administration to finance our involvement in the Great War, and in the Roosevelt Administration to finance our involvement in the Second World War.
The Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford administrations all had big public debts. The Reagan administration increased public debt at an astronomical level, as did Bush II administration on an even grander scale of red ink.
So when Republicans decry the Obama administration’s public debt ratios and rattle off scare stories about saddling our grandchildren and great grand children with hideous and unmanageable debt – my response is simple:
things should not be any different now than they have been in the past.
Bobbing amid all the economic wreckage, I find Republican politicians hilarious these days. I cannot listen to them decrying big federal deficits with a straight face.
The federal government has lead the way into debt for well over two and half centuries – with major growth spurts in the Lincoln Administration to finance the War Between the States, and in the Wilson Administration to finance our involvement in the Great War, and in the Roosevelt Administration to finance our involvement in the Second World War.
The Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford administrations all had big public debts. The Reagan administration increased public debt at an astronomical level, as did Bush II administration on an even grander scale of red ink.
So when Republicans decry the Obama administration’s public debt ratios and rattle off scare stories about saddling our grandchildren and great grand children with hideous and unmanageable debt – my response is simple:
things should not be any different now than they have been in the past.
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A few days ago, we remembered the 40th anniversary of the death of Judy Garland -- and now this shocking development.
I heard the first bulletins of the sudden death of Michael Jackson as I drove around Provo running errands. During the 3 o'clock hour MDT, I heard on my car radio.BBC Radio announce sketchy reports that an ambulance rushed Michael Jackson had rushed him from his home to hospital.
In the 5:00 hour, I heard National Public Radio report as its first story that Jackson indeed had died. As I write these words, I am listening to continuous coverage of KNX-AM Radio Los Angeles and of KSL-AM Radio Salt Lake City.
Farrah Fawcett died today as well. This is one of those rare days when two celebrities died on the same day. When Elvis Presley died back in August 1977 -- and my memory of that day recalls his death generated the same sort of big disorganized public displays of grief -- Groucho Marx died with a day. I remember the day in 1985 that Yul Brynner and Orson Welles died on the same day.
I cannot say Jackson's death surprises me.
All those plastic surgeries take a toll on the health, especially considering how badly some of the surgeries turned out. The trouble with having lots of money is that it can procure one all kinds of medical procedures whether one needs them, whether they are actually good or not.
Enduring all the public worship and hatred for decades takes a toll on the health.
Drug abuse takes a toll on the health, too.
Performing live before the public for decades takes a toll on the health as well -- all those adrenalin rushes, all the panic attacks, all the highs and lows.
Mr. Jackson possessed enormous singing, musical, and dancing talent, and most people do not understand where that sort of creativity comes. Thus he had to endure the insults and the sniping of the little talents and the jealous wannabes.
I heard one of his more vocal supporters say tonight on the radio that his upcoming revival tour of live performances would have restored him to triumphant stardom again, but there is no shred of physical evidence now to support that contention. He was 50 years of age, and few singing stars have returned to greatness after dissipating themselves so spectacularly in their 30s.
I remember something that Bernard Shaw wrote in the notes to Caesar and Cleopatra . He compared-contrasted Caesar, and Charles XII, and Joan of Arc, and Admiral Nelson "who were like most modern self made millionaires half witted geniuses, enjoying the worship according by all races certain forms of insanity."
The adulation that the public heaped on Jackson seems today to validate Shaw's assessment --
but we didn't realize how insane Jackson really could get. Worshiping Jackson could get rather uncomfortable.
For example:
Jackson settled that 1993 pedofile accusation out of court, and the 2005 jury found him not guilty of child sexual abuse by getting kids drunk -- yet somehow he never quite shook off the negative image. It is one thing for an adult to like kids. It is quite another thing for that adult to appear to like kids more than adults. No amount of sophisticated public relations can fix a public image problem of that magnitude.
My mind goes back to the little boy who performed with his brothers in television variety programs of the early 1970s. My mind goes back to the young man who in an early and highly influential music video of 1983 observed wryly that he was different from the other boys. That turned out to be one of the great understatements of that time. Fortunately, much of his performances have been saved on audio and video recordings so that the future generations can make their own judgements about Michael Jackson and his talent.