LIBERTARIAN SUS: Who’s wacko?

Susan Ryder reacts to the reaction to Michael Jackson’s death.

Hippocrates was reputedly a keen observer of humanity. If he was alive today, he’d be in his element right now. Or not.

I was never a Michael Jackson fan. I don’t own a single recording, unless you count his 1972 recording of “Ben” which featured on 20 Solid Gold Hits, Volume 5 (or so my sister reminded me). It was one of my first pop records and I played it to death – “Ben” included. But I was never into Thriller or Bad or anything else he did. It simply wasn’t my cup of tea. Nor was I ever interested in the details of his personal life. I was a libertarian before I even knew of the term.

But that doesn’t mean that I do not acknowledge his undoubted genius. He displayed astonishing talent as a child that continued right into adulthood. He was an American success story: a talented, beguiling little boy who grew into a talented, handsome young man. And I was saddened to hear of his untimely death last Friday morning (NZ time) at the age of 50.

I heard the news while driving on Auckland’s southern motorway. “Oh God,” I thought, “it’ll be Princess Diana all over again” and thus far it has been. Another massive media meltdown subject to all sorts of nonsense.

Mercifully, I was out and about for all of Friday and Sunday and chose to ignore it all at home on Saturday. But it’s almost impossible to be 100% media-proof and the bits I heard confirmed my suspicions.

On Friday evening, fill-in drive-time host on Newstalk ZB, Susan Wood, asked her Australian correspondent “I guess the death of Michael Jackson is a huge story in Australia, too?” No, Sue, only here. Only in New Zealand has hell broken loose …

Sheesh. But it got better. The “Hollywood correspondent” – one of life’s necessities, that – said that a recent rehearsal (of Jackson’s) was “recorded and might be released, making it a sort of comeback album for Michael, if … ”, she faltered, “er, he wasn’t dead.” Not much of a comeback, then.

Every man and his dog – and with Michael, you can’t dismiss anything – seemingly wanted their 2 cents worth of time. And within hours of his death, Real Groovy Records had reportedly sold out of its entire stock of Jackson merchandise.

Thousands of people in various stages of grief were milling around places such as Times Square in New York and outside Jackson’s Los Angeles home and the hospital where he died. “I can’t believe he’s dead; I don’t believe he’s dead!”, cried one woman, eerily echoing those from an earlier generation upon news of the death of Elvis.

“Michael Jackson made culture accept a person of colour!”, yelled a defiant man, oblivious, it would appear, to the success of Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Sidney Poitier and Sammy Davis Jnr. Not to mention the legions of black musical legends such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Muddy Waters, together with the many Tamla Motown talents of the last 50 years, just to start with. And then there is sport with Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe along with three of the biggest names in basketball: Johnson, Jordan and Abdul-Jabbar. That man should be reminded that entertainment and sport were among the first US industries to respect talent, irrespective of skin colour – not the last.

I realise that celebrity is the new religion in the west, vying only with environmentalism for the top spot. But what I don’t get is the necessity for a mass display of public grief for a public figure unknown to most of us, such as we saw for Princess Diana. Whatever happened to acknowledging the loss, should you feel it, quietly at home?

Remember the flowers outside Buckingham Palace? That first small gesture was enormously touching. But what was the point of everybody else spending a couple of quid on a bunch of cheap chrysanthemums from the local shop? You’d have been better off surprising your elderly neighbour with the gesture, than have it lost amid all the others. That one single floral tribute on its own signified so much more than the truckloads that eventually went off in the warmth.

I was never a Princess Diana admirer, either. Nor did I ever rush to buy a publication with her in it, either before or after she died. But I was very sad that a young woman was hounded to death at the age of 36 leaving behind two young sons. In the same vein, why would anyone rush out to buy a Michael Jackson CD just because he died? Surely if you liked his music, you’d already have it. It all screams of mass hysteria to me. And hysteria has never been synonymous with reason. In the months after Diana’s death, British health authorities announced a sharp drop in reported cases of depression and related mental illnesses. The decrease was linked to the affected people dealing with their personal issues via the loss of the princess. It was a literal transferral of grief.

Perhaps the best example of mass-media madness was the furore surrounding the O.J. Simpson saga. I was living in Australia at the time and watched the frenzy in disbelief with reports of media breaking into scheduled programming all over the world to carry the vehicle pursuit live. Having lived in the US, I was aware of Simpson. He used to co-host Monday Night Football, having been a professional player himself. He also had a few minor film roles to his credit, but was largely unknown outside North America.

That didn’t stop the worldwide media from carrying the story all day, every day for months. A Tasmanian friend mentioned it one day in conversation. “Did you know who he was?” I asked. “No,” she said apologetically, “I’d never heard of him before,” as if that was a shortcoming. And yet there she was following the story, chapter and verse.

Why the hell should she have known who he was? Can you see NBC or CBS interrupt programming over there to breathlessly announce that Colin Meads had gone mad in the King Country? Or that Waka Nathan was terrorising Tauranga? Ah, but OJ was an American celebrity, so the world’s media was transfixed and the world along with it.

Rose Van Wylich might disagree. Sunday’s early TRN news carried the story of the young Christchurch woman who plans to set up a local Michael Jackson fan club so New Zealand fans can “come together. We are there for you and we understand that this is going to be a long mourning process,” she said. She went on to say that some fans were “blanking out completely” because they don’t want to acknowledge Jackson’s passing. I suspect those same individuals have been ‘blanked out’ for some time.

Rose, bless her, is busy. She’s planning to hold three memorial services in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch on the day of Jackson’s funeral in Los Angeles so local fans can farewell him. A quick internet search unearthed that Rose “has a passion for most everything creative, even if it is something I don’t want to pursue for myself.” Among her interests She lists “litterature” and “Ameture theatre group preformances” [sic, and sic, and sic again]. Let’s hope that Rose’s organisational skill is better than her spelling.

Perhaps the last word belongs to one of those cerebral giants of popular culture, the sports reporters. Doug Golightly said on Newstalk ZB that “all sportsmen will be lining up to pay tribute to him. I know Beckham is going to come out and make a statement right across the US .. I don’t know whether Tiger Woods will say anything .. he and Michael Jordan tend to stay away from that sort of thing .. neither of them came out and had a huge go for 9/11 .. it was a bit disappointing, really.”

Says whom? Good for Woods and Jordan for sticking to their knitting, I say. Beckham should stick to soccer and fashion and silly women, and Tiger Woods on 9/11 makes about as much sense as Winston Churchill on the subject of cheese.

Doug wasn’t finished unfortunately. “It’s times like these that you look to your iconic sportsmen to stand up and speak on behalf of sports fans”, he said. Hell, I hope he’s excluding the NRL from that, otherwise we are screwed! [Ed – “we”?]

Who knows what really went on in the life and mind of Michael Jackson. For all the fame, wealth and adulation I wouldn’t have traded our lives for a second. At least he won’t be witnessing the absurd mass grief that will have been forgotten five minutes after the funeral or hear the nasty jokes doing the current rounds. Or, even worse, watch the crocodile tears being shed by the same media-ocrities who were all too quick to take pot-shots when he was alive. R.I.P., Michael Jackson.

* * Read Susan Ryder’s column every Tuesday here at NOT PC * *