Michael Jackson's Funeral is American Culture's Latest Hollow Spectacle

By David Michael Green . Posted July 15, 2009.

I caught all of about ten minutes worth of televised coverage of the Michael Jackson memorial service this week (I was in a pizza parlor, waiting for my slice to heat up) - which, as it turned out, was about eleven minutes too many for my taste.

I don't mean to sound like somebody's craggy old grandpa, incessantly whining about how "it was better in our day", but I couldn't help thinking about the degree to which Jackson - in life and death - personified the utter shallowness of the culture we now endure.

And I certainly don't mean to play the game of My Dead Rock Star Is Better Than Your Dead Rock Star, but I also couldn't help being thrown back upon my memories and grief at the loss thirty years ago of a cultural figure who really did matter, John Lennon.

The two individuals, their contributions and contexts, our reactions to them, and even their deaths, say everything about America then and now.

The fact that some commentators have exposed the worst excesses of the Jackson media death-bacchanalia suggests there may be a shred of hope for us as a society yet. But stack those lonely voices up against the tidal wave of televised coverage of this non-event, and the grim visage of our unbearable lightness as beings comes into an altogether too clear focus.

Despite being twenty years past his prime at the moment of his death, Michael Jackson personified that lack of seriousness that has become to this society what water is to fish. As an entertainer - and that is the operative term - he struck me as a profound regression to an era whose then apparent demise I surely did not lament. Like, say, Sammy Davis Jr., Jackson could sing and dance, and was a black man successful at penetrating the white man's world. But like the entire milieu from which Davis emanated, Jackson's work (as opposed to art) was careful to demand little from its customers - again, this being the operative term. (Not for nothing was the song-writing machine that penned the Jackson Five's early hits known as "The Corporation".)

Hence the silliness that has been attendant to his death, and in particular the Academy Awards-like public ceremony featuring Mariah Carey and all the usual sultans of smarm. It would be most unpleasant to admit to ourselves that one of our greatest cultural icons lacked depth. That could only mean, ergo, that the fellow in the mirror is the proud owner of a substantial and uncomfortable absence of there there. And so we desperately try to append qualities to Michael Jackson in death that he never possessed in life, the better to explain away our own vacuousness. Jackson himself strikes me as a sort of tragic figure, according to the most gracious rendering I can put together, in honor of speaking as charitably about the dead as one can. His father appears to have been a success-obsessed sadist who may own the lion's share of responsibility for what his seventh child became, both good and bad.

And what that was more than anything, it seems to me, was a boy locked forever in the body of a man. I certainly don't begrudge anyone that, if that's how they choose to live their lives (sans the penchant for pedophilia, of course, or the use of one's own child as a daredevil photo-op prop). What I wonder about is what it says about us that we elevate such an individual to the highest ranks of those we adore as a society.

See more stories tagged with: america, john lennon, pop culture, american culture, michael jackson

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at www.regressiveantidote.net.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »