It is a never ending source of amazement and disgust to me that so much importance is ascribed to anything so unimportant. Any sense of value and priority has been rendered irrelevant and impotent. The latest example of this is all the fuss over the late Michael Jackson. My initial response once it was announced that he was gone was, “One more screw up that we can well do without”. But all the mighty media is fawning over him as if he invented penicillin plus forgave all the sins of mankind. This begs the question; exactly what did he do that was so praiseworthy? The answer: nothing!
What he did was attract attention to himself simply because of his bizarre behavior – which is a gimmick of so many entertainment personalities. He will be remembered for wearing only one glove, grabbing his crotch on stage and having more nose jobs than the rest of Hollywood combined to the degree that I suspect the rhinoplasty industry may now have to apply for TARP funding to recoup their loss of income. For good measure we can add that he practiced reckless endangerment of children left in his charge including his own if we don’t forget that spectacle of his dangling one of his infants out a window not to mention all the weird behavior he practiced with the countless kids who came through his Neverland Ranch. The list goes on and on and none of it includes anything of lasting value which could be remotely considered a contribution.
In a nutshell he was a bizarre individual who sank ever deeper into an imaginary world with ever more strange fetishes and his position – let alone those charged with managing him - allowed him to indulge those peculiarities ad infinitum. He could completely control his environment and he did just that with the outcome being his early demise.
It is also true that he was not the only famous person to end up this way. Howard Hughes comes to mind as another who had unlimited resources which only served to contribute to his ever downward spiral into insanity. But there is one very big difference between the two and this is that Hughes was once a productive and brilliant man whose contributions are still in wide use. He was a genius engineer and architect especially in aeronautics. He was and still is a pioneer in aviation who set many world records for distance and speed which were benchmarks in the progress of the science. He invented many things which mankind still benefits from. It can not be left out that he was an esteemed and accomplished film director and producer who is still mentioned in conversations about the greats of the industry during its heyday.
But the fact of the matter is that Hughes was a renaissance man in many ways decades before he began his long slide into insanity. Jackson, on the other hand, can be credited with extolling bizarre behavior which encouraged it amongst his audience which is the youth of today. One more thing of lasting effect (note I don’t use the word value) is that reports are that he was perhaps half a billion dollars in debt when all things are tallied and told. Already reports are coming out that he owed many people money for all sorts of things both big and small. If his indebtedness turns out to be accurate then the dollar amount he has left people holding the bag for will place him in infamy with the likes of Bernie Madoff for colossal rip off artists of our time. So if his transgressions are measured as his contributions then he is in good company.