The Real Loss of Michael Jackson's Death

This may not do me a bit of good. Gather 'round, children, while Mr. Degan commits journalistic suicide. Please forgive me for not participating in the canonization of Michael Jackson.

This is not meant as a condemnation of the man's private life, his eccentricities or the accusations hurled against him in the last decade and a half of his all-too-short life. A jury found him innocent of the worse charge (other than murder) that can possibly be made against a human being. We can speculate forever but in the final analysis, we have no other choice but to respect their verdict. My problem with Michael Jackson is a bit more complicated.

One day in the Spring of 1971 I heard a song on the radio by a group called the Jackson Five that was called Never Can Say Goodbye. It was (and is to this very day) one of the most beautiful pop songs I have ever heard. A couple of months later I read in the paper that he would be celebrating his thirteenth birthday the following day on August 29. This news piqued my curiosity; I had just turned thirteen less that two weeks before on August 16. Because the two of us were born on the same month in 1958, I would find myself over the years following his triumphs with the pride of a schoolboy watching a favored classmate win the World Series one year after another. Over a span of time, however, that pride would devolve into bewilderment and then later on, disgust.

Although I was never a huge fan of his music (my Jackson collection comprises a mere handful of 45 RPMs and one long-playing album) there was never any denying that the man was possessed of immense talent. It was my belief that, like Sinatra, he'd still be packing them in at eighty years of age. How ironic is that?

Last night in front of the Apollo Theater in Harlem, Al Sharpton was lauding Jackson as a shining example to the Black community. I am sorry but no statement could be further from the truth. At a time in history when young African American males were desperately yearning for a positive role model to look up to, Michael Jackson was running scared from his racial heritage.

This is where I will probably get myself into big trouble. After all, I'm just a middle-aged white guy (assuming I live to be one-hundred-and-one). What right have I to judge Michael Jackson - or any other black person for that matter? Who the hell am I? My "right" (such as it is) is as an casual observer of "American pop culture" and nothing more. I attempt here to be neither psychiatrist nor sociologist.

Watching the slow evolution of his features through the years - the "Caucasianization", if you will, of Michael Jackson - could not have been something that would make your average African American kid swell up with any amount of pride. The martyred South African dissident Steve Biko used to tell his people that "Black is Beautiful". Although Jackson never dared to say it out loud, he spent most of his adult life implying that "Black is Ugly". There is no other explanation for it - none.

Here's the irony: In his heyday, before the multitude of "procedures" which would eventually alter his looks to a horrible, grotesque degree (procedures he would deny to his dying day) Michael Jackson was an extraordinarily good looking guy.

No one could fault him for his first plastic surgery in the early eighties. In the past many Hollywood legends, for whatever reasons (not all of them bad) have sought to "soften" their features. Actually the result pretty was good. Picture him as he appeared in 1983 with Paul McCartney in the Say! Say! Say! video. He looked great, didn't he? Why couldn't he leave well enough alone? What was the man thinking?

By the turn of the new twenty-first century he no longer looked like a African American male. Do you remember the infamous mug shot after he was arraigned in 2003? He reminded me of Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest. Google both images if you think I'm exaggerating.