The seemingly global angst surrounding the death of Michael Jackson has me thinking: what are we really mourning? I doubt that it’s who he was at the time of his death, but rather, for those of use who remember, who he was when we liked him best.
We’re mourning the guy who introduced the moon walk, Thriller, and wore the title, “King of Pop” with aplomb, not the guy who adopted plastic surgery as a religion, faced charges of child molestation, and dangled a baby over a balcony. We seem to do this with every celebrity.
We mourn the Farrah Fawcett in the red swimsuit, not the Farrah Fawcett who appeared incoherent on David Lettermen. We want our stars, our heroes, to stay strong, to stay happy, to stay admirable. Sadly, they’re all-too-humanness makes them vulnerable to the same ills that plague us all. So when they fall, we push them aside until we’re given the opportunity to place them on the pedestal that death provides.
Even more intriguing, why does it take death for us to celebrate what we perceive as amazing in a person? As of this morning, 12 Jackson songs were sitting in Amazon’s top 25 MP3 downloads. For several songs, it’s the first day they’ve been in the top 100, let alone top 25. Why did we wait until now to celebrate the talent?
Our relationship with celebrity has always been complex. If we’re honest, we can acknowledge that our very fickleness can and has been the undoing of more than one star. As Oscar Wilde put it, “The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.”
At some point, the deaths of celebrities drop out of the news cycle, and we forget until the next time we’re informed someone from the past is no more. Perhaps stars would prefer more understanding from us now versus our adulation when they’re aren’t around to appreciate it.
