Michael Jackson Died for Our Sins

Four years ago, almost to the day, a jury in the case of The People of the State of California v. Michael Joseph Jackson found the entertainer not guilty on all charges. The child sexual abuse trial, which opened a window onto Jackson’s alleged misadventures with prepubescent boys at his Neverland home, dominated the airwaves for several weeks, offering us endless installments of the Michael Jackson saga as it unfolded. His face was in our face.

Why did the media lavish so much time on the trial? Were those just slow news days? Were we going to find out something we did not already know about Jackson – something that might help us feed the hungry of the planet, say, or improve literacy rates in the developing world?

Or was it plain old morbid curiosity that kept Michael on our TV sets day and night for weeks? Americans have always been enthralled by the sight of the rich and famous crashing down from the heights: celebrities may be indispensable to our culture, but they are also inherently undemocratic.

Consider this: we might have been frittering away so much time wallowing in the Michael Jackson trial because, in some strange way, he was us. We may have recognized in him, our National Freak, many of the psychoses that defined our culture during that time.

Psychotic disorders in people include severe mental conditions characterized by extreme impairment in the ability to think clearly, respond emotionally, communicate effectively, understand reality, and behave appropriately. Psychotic symptoms include delusions and hallucinations. A delusion is a false, fixed, odd, or unusual belief firmly held by people suffering from psychoses. For instance, there are delusions of paranoia (others are plotting against them) and grandiose delusions (exaggerated ideas of one's importance or identity).

These descriptions fit Michael Jackson, surely. His version of “reality” did not seem to correspond with any reality we live in. His behavior – eccentric, to be charitable – followed upon his delusions. They appeared to issue from both paranoia and what the Jungians call “inflation,” or overstated self-importance. If Michael was not certifiably “mental,” he certainly acted the part.

Psychotic symptoms also may have been haunting our collective state of mind then. Our culture seemed to be stuck in a Neverland of its own – a place where we could avoid indefinitely the hard realities of adult responsibility. Were we not suffering from delusions of paranoia? If you had any doubts about it, you could find out the color that day’s fear alert from the Office of Homeland Security or listen to our media commentators describing possible terrorist plots and places. Were we not living under the influence of a most insidious and isolating ego-inflation? Recall how many times in one week you heard the grandiose boast that the United States is the world’s only superpower.

Looked at from outside our mainstream culture, our American character bore an uncanny resemblance to the thirteen-year-old males who both attracted and mirrored Michael’s own Peter Pan personality: willful, materialistic, obsessed with toys, reckless, using money to gain power over others, entitled, fascinated with firearms, disrespectful to the opposite gender but fixated on sex, superficial, refusing to grow up.

Add to all this our preoccupation with shallow entertainments – the Michael Jackson trial primary among them – and we had all the makings of a culture in psychosis.

We connected with the tribulations of Michael Jackson on a profound level. He was our culture’s icon – and its scapegoat. We not only identified with him enough to make him the poster-boy of our anguish and strutting, but unconsciously we may have believed that if we heaped all our transgressions of adult responsibilities on his back, we would be home free. If we watched him being crucified long enough, maybe we would be delivered of our sins.

It does not work that way, of course. Each of us needs to be responsible to the degree of impeccability — especially at this crazy time of gigantic shifts in our species self-identity. Lately, we seem to be waking up to the idea that we cannot continue doing all the nutty things we have been doing — overeating, overspending, over-warring, diverting and distracting ourselves, mindlessly consuming, plundering our environment, numbing ourselves with trite religions and empty philosophies. If we are ever to transform ourselves up to the next level in the human adventure, we will have to grow up. This is a time to get serious, to get ‘adult.’

Adulthood is a bitter pill for our culture to swallow. There are only few precedents for it — the Age of the Founding Fathers was one, the World War II generation, maybe, another. But we are far from the inspired times of the Bill of Rights or the moral struggle against the Nazis. And there were precious few role models for us to follow in those years. It is hard to name five people in our culture at that time who were leading the way for us to grow out of a bratty adolescence and start taking on true adult responsibilities in the world.

In the absence of a blueprint for growing up emotionally and spiritually, we had, at least, the negative example. Not just Michael Jackson, but also all the corporations that got away with murder, all the purveyors of entertainment that kept us in arrested development, all the government leaders who paralyzed us with fear to push their various agendas.

Maybe having Michael Jackson in our face so much at that time was a kind of wake-up call. Looked at that way, the King of Neverland might have been more than merely our scapegoat. As peculiar as the thought sounds, Michael might have been the savior we had been waiting for.