Michael Jackson Is Guilty?!
By David Dalton
11/20/03
Michael Jackson is guilty as hell. The case has been made beyond the
shadow of a doubt. Haven’t you been paying attention? Bill Press,
Dan Abrams, Chris Mathews, Imus, Brian Williams, Dateline NBC
and E! Bill O’Reilly, Linda Stasi of the New York Post,
Diane Diamond from Court TV, whatshername from Celebrity
Justice (!), and Gloria Allred have all come right out and said it.
How many psychologists, profilers, relatives, ex-cops, ex-D.A.s, ex-employees’
lawyers, and free-floating pundits do you need? A battalion of “experts”
has deconstructed Jackson’s neuroses, psychoses, plastic surgery,
porcelain doll collection, and video library. Why waste the taxpayer’s
money on a long, drawn-out trial? He’s a rich creep, a hideous freak,
and clearly a slimy pervert who lures young boys to his personal Donkey
Island and molests them. Let’s just string the little faggot up.
Hear his side of the story? Are you kidding me? What other side?
Listen, pal, maybe we should look into your video library. What
do we have here? A Boy’s Life, About a Boy, Boy Crazy, Boys
Don’t Cry, Bad Boys, Boyz N the Hood, The Boys in the Band….
Hmmm, now I’m beginning to wonder about you.
The cable channels are in a feeding frenzy—again. Every three
or four weeks they have to find some new outrage, some new freaky-deaky
item that will keep you glued to the box. It started with OJ, built
up steam with Monica and Congressman Gary Condit, and had been coasting
along on the Laci Peterson case when they hit a bonanza with the
Michael Jackpot child abuse allegations. They press every button,
manipulate every quivering emotion into outraged indignation. And
what could be more enflaming than a child being abused by a rich
freak—who the last time bought his way out of his shameful
perversion?
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The case against Michael seems open and shut. Let’s review
the principle facts as we know them: (1) He molested a 12-year-old
boy back in 1993 and bought him off with hush money; (2) And now
he’s doing it again; (3) This, as the hired shrinks tell us
over and over again, is because you can’t cure a pedophile.
They can’t stop themselves and they’ll just keep on
doing it until you lock ‘em up and throw away the key; and
(4) A 45-year-old man who likes to have young boys sleep in his
bed with him—this is tantamount to admitting he has a sexual
fixation on pre-teen boys.
But in actuality the current case against him is, at the moment,
no case at all. All these supposed pieces of evidence could actually
prove the reverse: (1) The original child abuse allegations of ten
years ago have been more or less discredited. In “Was Michael
Jackson Framed?” (GQ, October 1994) Mary A. Fisher
pretty conclusively showed that the boy in question (who initially
denied any abuse) was coerced by his parents, relatives, and an
unscrupulous lawyer into testifying against Jackson. At one point
they gave him sodium amytol, the so-called truth drug, to get him
to talk. But sodium amytol has also been shown to be a highly suggestible
drug—especially for an impressionable boy who knows what his
parents expect him to say. The D.A. found him so unreliable that
he decided not to proceed with a criminal case;
(2) The new allegations against Jackson are even more suspect than
the first ones. The mother of the boy, after being scorned and refused
more money, made verbal threats that she would go to the tabloids
if Jackson didn’t “take care of her.” The vindictive
Diane Diamond of Court TV claims that because there is
(so far) no civil suit brought against Jackson, it “cleanses
the case.” In other words, since they don’t want money,
the charges must be true. But just you wait.
The unsettling thing about accusations of child abuse is that they
are hard to disprove, and they taint the accused even when disproven.
The most egregious example of this is the McMartin case where children
at a school testified to repeated, sadistic, ritual molestation.
Years later, child psychologists realized that such memories can
be easily implanted in children's minds by the interview techniques
which were used at the time.
(3) Jacko is an obvious case of arrested development. Most rock
stars remain frozen in their teen dream of sex and revenge—which
isn’t that serious, seeing as the entire culture is in a state
of adolescent regression. We actually count on them to exhibit the
kind of boorish, narcissistic behavior we can’t do ourselves.
But Michael has the misfortune to be stuck back in the limbo of
pre-adolescence: pillow fights, hot chocolate with marshmallows—and
sleep-overs. A great deal has been made of the fact that he only
has sleep-overs with boys—but that’s what 12-year-old
boys do. It’s pre-pubescent—they don’t get girls
yet. A 60-year-old rock star smashing up his hotel room may be a
bit pathetic, but a 45-year-old man who likes to sleep with young
boys—well, let’s face it, this does sound a bit creepy.
But perhaps (and we’re giving him a wide benefit of the doubt
here) he’s not necessarily someone who molests 12 year olds—maybe
he just thinks he is a 12 year old whose childhood habits have been
hermetically sealed by fame. Neverland is a giant pre-teen biosphere,
an alternate reality that is maintained at huge costs financially
(and now morally as well).
(4) Everything about this case is unsettling—your reactions
yo-yo wildly from one extreme to the other. Just at the point
where you start saying maybe he just looks guilty and, in the interest
of fairness, we shouldn’t rush to judgment, up pops some scaly
fact like the love letters which spins you back to thinking about
that 2O million bucks of hush money and you start to get that creepy
feeling about him again.
Michael Jackson is clearly delusional, disturbingly eccentric,
and damaged. On top of corrosive celebrity, child star psychosis,
and a brutalized, purloined childhood, he obviously has such ambivalence
about his racial identity that he has virtually buried that little
kid from the Jacksons under dozens of plastic surgeries and made
his face into a grotesque mask. But that doesn’t mean he’s
guilty of anything other than trying to make reality fit into his
aberrant make-believe world.
The truly disturbing thing about this case is the crowd frenzy,
the sadistic glee with which the news shows have pursued Jackson.
His entire two-hour drive into Las Vegas was filmed live, as if
we were hunting down some dangerous mass murderer. The Santa Barbara
D.A. Thomas Snedden clearly has it in for Jackson. After ten years
of investigation and interviewing dozens of kids who had sleep-overs
with Jackson, he found only one disturbed child and his rapacious
mother. Sheriff Jim Anderson, rushing in a fleet of 70 cops in black
vans, was a disgusting and pointless deployment of man-power and
spectacle. Hate radio, with its infernal mix of bile and self-righteousness,
has savaged Jackson. Talk show hosts make nasty jokes about him—“Two
tykes and you’re out” (Leno). Something about Jackson
brings out the vicious, feral side in us, the way a pack will attack
a sick animal.
Michael Jackson has begun to fight back, setting up a web site,
attacking the press for their “irresponsible speculation,”
the D.A. for his “personal dislike” of him, and even
those unauthorized people speaking on his behalf for undermining
his credibility. In the curious equilibrium of the media’s
churning well of adulation and spite, it looks as if they went after
Jacko too savagely and public opinion is turning in his favor. Jackson’s
fans are holding vigils around the world for the Little Prince of
Pop.
But in the dream-world of popular culture, there are always rip tides.
Idolization and defilement are two sides of the same coin. As in Nathaniel
West’s scathing vision of fan frenzy, The Day of the Locust,
nightmares and fantasies drift into a psychic Sargasso Sea. “Just
as that imaginary body of water was a history of civilization in the form
of a marine junkyard, the studio was one in the form of a dream dump.
A Sargasso of the imagination! And the dump grew continually, for there
was not a dream afloat somewhere which would not sooner or later turn
up on it.… Many boats sink and never reach the Sargasso, but no
dream ever entirely disappears. Somewhere it troubles some unfortunate
person and some day, when that person has been sufficiently troubled,
it will be reproduced on the lot.”
