I just finished watching Michael Jackson's memorial service. While I didn't begin my day with plans to watch it, I have to say that I'm glad I did and that I was moved by it.
When I first saw the news alert that MJ had been taken to the hospital in apparent cardiac arrest, I IM'd my sister what I'd learned and wrote "Can you imagine if Michael Jackson dies?" It was the same day Farrah Fawcett died and I believe Ed McMahon was the day before. Iran was chaos, unemployment numbers were reaching new highs and the economy was, and is, crazy low. I felt like the world's mood followed the recent weather - grey, rainy, and just down altogether.
Obviously it wasn't an hour before news of MJ's death spread like wildfire, no - faster than a wildfire - across the world. Instantaneously, it was all MJ all the time. Every news station was carrying emerging details, some accurate, others less so, surrounding this mysterious death.
The world was in a state of shock.
I heard people who were upset that MJ's death was upstaging Farrah. How ridiculous. If we were actually engaging in a game of 'my death is bigger than your death', I hate to say it, but MJ would win (did I really just say that?). I actually hadn't known much about Farrah until I watched her documentary which aired about a month before she died. I felt like I got to know her a little bit in those few hours, and I got to like her as well. I thought about her every day after that, and was sad when she died. But while her death was a tragedy, it was hardly a shock. Nor did it hold any mystery. MJ's did. And so, the world wanted to know about the seemingly constant developments.
MJ was also about as big a star as one could be. Granted his celebrity was often shrouded in strange goings-on as well as negative press, but he was, after all the King of Pop. Personally, I can recall going to see Michael Jackson's Victory tour in September of 1984. I was 9 years old and it was the first concert I had been to. I remember wearing earplugs so as not to burst my fragile, young eardrums. Tickets cost a whopping $40, considered outrageously expensive at the time.
Even then, there was an air of mystique around him. Reporters in this 25-year-old piece which aired on Canada's CBC, contributed to the weird rumors that swirled about MJ, including that he talked to mannequins and lived with animals.
Based on what he would later endure, these allegations were child's play.
Years later, his death is as big as any news of his life. Only now, we've come to pay tribute to this musical genius, and we seem to have forgotten what we did to him while he lived. Suffice to say, MJ was put through the wringer, publicly ridiculed and accused of lewd and illegal behavior. I can't really remember what my thoughts were at the time of the trial, but based on my ambivalence on the topic, I don't think I ever felt passionately one way or the other.
But now it doesn't matter. But for some reason, it's bugging me that the same media who brought him down is working overtime to inflate his memory to enormous, almost God-like proportions. I'm grateful to people like Brooke Shiels and his daughter, Paris, for making sure the public knew he was simply an awesome friend, and a wonderful daddy.
From what I've seen, read, and heard, throughout his life, Michael Jackson only wanted approval. And it's sad that only in death is he finally achieving what he sought after during his 50 years on earth.
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