The Jackson Jury Looks Down the Barrel of a Gun
by Aemilia Scott

Surprised by the jury of your peers? Don't be. Michael Jackson was never going to go to jail, fellow citizens. This was obvious well before any evidence or testimony was brought before the Santa Barbara County Court. The reason Michael Jackson was never, ever going to go to jail was because it would mean the end of modern culture as we know it.

Michael Jackson is just a man, you say. Michael Jackson, like every American, deserves to be subject to the California legal system like everyone else, you say. Unfortunately, that is not true, and that is why Jackson will be tried but never convicted.

Jackson is not flesh and blood. Whatever part of him that was human died sometime between his sixth birthday and his precipitous climb to fame as the boy-wonder of the Jackson Five. Now all that remains is our need for him. His face, disfigured from repeated plastic surgeries, is only the tip of the iceberg that is his entirely public persona. We are to blame for this.

You see, we made Michael Jackson, King of Pop. He is our creation. From the time before his voice dropped, we have been crafting him and developing him into the world's greatest living entertainer — one whose entire person exists for our viewing and experiencing pleasure. He is a pop Frankenstein, made from found chunks of our dreams, our expectations and our whims.

But like Frankenstein's monster, the flesh from which we assembled Michael Jackson was tainted. Along with our appropriate cultural desires and tastes, it contained all of our fears, our evils, our cultural skeletons. He is one part Shirley Temple and one part Jon Benet Ramsey. He is one part G.I. Jane and one part Lynndie England. He is one part Medgar Evers and one part Byron De La Beckwith. He has all the impure elements of culture you can't simply strain out.

From his pre-puberty on, we have been slowly assembling Michael Jackson using bits of our own partly sour cultural flesh. And now we seem surprised and aghast as this impossible monster comes clomping across our newspapers and TVs, leaving a path of unspeakable evils behind him. But how could we expect anything different?

In the movie Frankenstein, the monster killed an innocent girl. But he killed her unintentionally, out of ignorance. He was fascinated by her, he wanted to be near her in order to understand and capture her innocence and joy. Neverland Ranch is where our pop monster also gathers children to fixate on them, fascinated by the childhood and innocence he never had. He wields his power and fame to surround himself with innocence, but ends up crushing it under his own weight. If we love Jackson's grandeur, we must also acknowledge his demons.

He is made of the Jackson Five, Motown, great dancing, the '80s, a silver glove, a zipper jacket, loafers with socks and many platinum records. But he is also made of an abusive stage father, the exploitation of blacks in Motown, the unthinking conservatism of the '80s, the opulence of silver gloves and expensive jackets, the absurdity of loafers with socks and the unfettered power of having platinum-selling records. We created quite a monster.

He lives by no laws other than the one we wrote for him: entertain us, at all costs. He understands nothing but the court of public opinion. He knows that he exists entirely for us, and therefore fears nothing, because he is made of us. Because we can never truly hate something that is us. And because as horrible as his struggle becomes, it is damn entertaining.

So when we indict Michael Jackson, we implicitly air our own cultural dirty laundry. Like a church revival, we declare publicly our rejection of our own skeletons. We allow ourselves to reel in horror at this monster with a horrible face and a horrible soul, who repulses us precisely because he is the mirror of our own desires and evils.

And thus we can indict Jacko, but we could never convict him. If we convict Michael Jackson, we convict ourselves.

E-mail Aemilia Scott at aemilia at gmail dot com.

— top graphic by James Norton
main graphic by Derek Evernden (derek@ocellus.net)