The Michael Jackson Circus

Nobody wants to speak ill of the dead, but at some point you have to bury the corpse and get on with it, don’t you?

Michael Jackson’s death was a sudden end to a tragic life. He was a man with immense talent that was overshadowed by inexplicably bizarre personal behavior that invited ugly controversy. When I was 8 years old, I loved him. When I was 12 years old, I knew something was creepy about the dude. And it was all downhill from there. The weird marriages, the horrifying plastic surgery, the baby-dangling, the obsession with children. According to his fans, we’re supposed to overlook his oddities because he himself was “childlike” and was just trying to spend his adult life recreating the childhood he never had. That’s bullshit. Say what you want about the Osmonds, they (as far as we know) haven’t been passing out Jesus juice to hairless tweens and having ticklefights with Macaulay Culkin.

Sigh. OK, I’ve got that behind me. My point is that he wasn’t the national treasure that he might have been in his youth, and the intense media coverage of his autopsies and public debate about the contents of his will aren’t appropriate 24-hour news content two weeks after his passing. It seems crass and low-rent to provide wall-to-wall coverage of his memorial, with none other than Katie Couric, the TV journalist of record, anchoring the event live from the Staples Center. This isn’t serious news. This is network entertainment. It’s reality TV. It’s cheap thrills. The poor guy wasn’t even allowed to die with dignity; somehow, the Michael Jackson circus must go on.

The circus doesn’t matter, folks. His talent mattered. His music mattered. His influence on other performers mattered. Remember him for that, not the spectacle. Not the place where he’s buried. Not whether he was buried with all his parts. That’s all a distraction and it’s all trivial. Give him the peace in death he never had in life.

Let him rest now.