Much like his reaction to Iran in revolution or the Honduras in
coup, Barack Obama’s reaction to Michael Jackson’s death hasn’t
exactly shone. He’s let Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Larry
King fill the emotional void. It’s been his Katrina moment, his
Diana moment, his Marie Antoinette moment. We really don’t know
what he’s feeling, if he’s even able to feel anything, about this
latest disaster to befall the world of high culture. Perhaps our
president is simply a philistine. Look, some might counter, he
actually a snob. Oh, well.
A few days before Jackson’s final injections Mr. Obama reassured
us that his ears— and thus by inference the rest of him —
aren’t related to someone named Spock. We should have believed
him. As reaction to Jackson’s passing has confirmed, we know full
well who the alien among us was, dancing in reverse into and out
of our lives, having thoroughly colonized and mentally warped an
entire country and indeed an entire globe. “Never can say
goodbye,” he warned in an earlier life, and we can now see what
he meant: The world will never finish saying goodbye to him
either. And as owner of the Beatles’ songbook, Jackson is doubly
protected — he’ll say goodbye, and we’ll say hello, back and
forth. We’ll never get back to the moon, but we’ve gone back to
the moonwalk. The thrill is back in Thriller.
Fan reactions speak for themselves. Larry King’s correspondents
channeled
a “few of the sentiments from outside the UCLA Medical Center.”
One unidentified male was asked about what connected him to
Jackson. He replied: “Michael, him as a person, not too many
people is like Michael. But I don’t know nobody who has so much
funds who will go out to a regular kid and just try to touch him
and help them out. Help him, physically. Like, if I have a
problem and Michael came to me, that would be an honor.”
Reactions in the New York Times were, as you might
expect, a bit more pretentious, as for example in the case
of Veenchel
Ednilao, who is “a performer who goes by the name Vice and
sings at weddings.” “If it weren’t for MJ and my parents making
me moonwalk across the living room floor,” he told the
Times, “I wouldn’t be the entertainer I am
now.” Verlyn
Klinkenborg, who may or may not sing at weddings, was very
pleased that at one point Jackson “re-sexualized” his voice “in a
way that you could never really mistake — then — as
androgynous.” (That “then” must have pierced the heart of
Frank
Rich, who spent his Sunday lamenting the plight of those who,
“40 years later,” remain “second-class citizens” — but one thing
at time.)
Sexual confusion remains a dominant theme in the Jackson
reactions, as for instance in the poetic dabblings of MJ
specialist
Margo Jefferson, doing standup at the Washington
Post: “His skin was growing paler…his aura more
feminine.…Some fussed about his gender fluidity. I saw him as a
post-modern shape-shifter.…the macho and the girlishness. He was
a male and a female impersonator.” Aren’t you glad you only have
Mark Sanford to worry about? With Jackson, Jefferson
semi-concluded, it all came down to his talent and artistry,
which weren’t “a well-matched pair.” Unlike presumably what
Sanford focused on, according to our voyeur of the week, Ms.
Maureen
Dowd, as she quotes from pilfered Sanford pilfered e-mails
regarding “two magnificent parts of yourself.” We’ll leave it,
and what remains of Mark Sanford, at that.
The Jackson sendoff is bound to produce new surprises. Already
we’ve had this scary moment at the NYT. Turns out when
Jermaine Jackson sounded his sendoff to his brother, he didn’t
say “May our love be with you always,” as the Times
reported. He said, according to the correction
the paper ran, “May Allah be with you always.” Mr. Obama
isn’t home free after all. Who of the Jackson Five helped write
his Cairo speech?
