Michael Jackson: He never had a chance

Via Andrew Sullivan, a 1984 Michael Kinsley piece about Michael Jackson at the peak of his stardom captures the essential tragedy of the man's life well. Excerpt:

What's happened to Michael Jackson isn't too different from what they used to do to young male singers in Europe a few centuries ago, to keep their voices sweet. In another way, it resembles the exploitation of child stars like Judy Garland in the heyday of the Hollywood studios. In fact, what American capitalism has done to Michael Jackson is even a bit like what the Soviets do to their women athletes.

A sickening cover story on Jackson in the March 19 Time takes as its theme that there is something wonderful about being an incompetent human being. "Jackson's world of fantasy is easier to dismiss with malicious gossip than understand with sympathy," Time scolds. It quotes Steven Spielberg: "He's like a fawn in a burning forest." Describing Jackson "chatting and swapping gestures with E.T.," Spielberg reflects, "I wish we could all spend some time in his world." Jane Fonda reports on a week ostensibly spent talking with Jackson about "acting, life, everything. Africa. Issues." Her conclusion? "His intelligence is instinctual and emotional, like a child's. If any artist loses that childlikeness, you lose a lot of creative
juice. So Michael creates around himself a world that protects his creativity." Time notes with approval: "His friends [sic] . . . help him keep life at bay and illusion near at hand."

The only truly normal thing Time describes Jackson doing is listening to the soundtrack of Oklahoma. Of this, the magazine remarks defensively: "Jackson. . . can rise above embarrassment on such matters of taste."

Yes, I know, it's hard to feel sorry for Michael Jackson. Millions of dollars and zillions of adoring fans, a huge party in New York at which, says Rolling Stone, "a procession of CBS executives" rises to declare fealty. If he wants a duplicate of the Disneyland "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride built in his house (and he does), he can have it. But how many CBS executives or editors of Time would want their own child, at age 25, to want such a thing, to be babbling about misunderstood snakes, to be "like a fawn in a burning forest"?

Michael Jackson supposedly is writing a book. Not an autobiography--"You know, he's not forty years old," his agent explains--but rather a "statement" involving "pictures and drawings and poetry, and then a substantial text." His editor is Jacqueline Onassis.

Write, hell. Can Michael Jackson read?

By the end -- and in fact, long before the end -- the poor man ceased to be a person, and became instead a pathology. They're already talking on cable news about rumors that people surrounding him were always providing him with prescription drugs -- wonder who his Dr. Nick was -- and because it is impossible under US libel law to defame the dead, we'll now get all kinds of testimonials from former employees about what really happened at Neverland Ranch. If Jackson really did behave indecently with children, then he was a kind of monster. I laughed at more than my share of Wacko Jacko jokes over the years, and given the way he carried on -- the plastic surgeries, collecting children as playmates, the hyperbaric chamber, etc. -- Jackson brought it on himself. Still, once upon a time there was a beautiful and talented little boy named Michael Jackson, whose father decided it was more important that he be a star than that he have a childhood. And everything else followed, up to today's sad denouement.

UPDATE: Sullivan says more or less the same thing, only better, here.