one of us

So now he is gone. Sent off in a golden casket. Surrounded by his sun-glasses-clad brothers and sisters. Farewell to a pale brother. The man whose heart couldn't take it anymore. I wouldn't necessarily think of myself as someone being struck by the death of Michael Jackson, but I was. He was a part of my teenage fabric. I was the right age, hungry for music and dancing and images when MTV started. I watched Billy Jean and Thriller on Dutch TV week after week, imitating the moves as I stood in front of the TV in the early 80s, loving what the music did to my joy of moving. Loving this guy who was sooo good at moving and singing. My first time in the US I happened to see him on stage during the Victory tour. He was an integral part of my personal American quilt. As a teenager in Germany I didn't connect him to a struggle or being black, to me he was American and they came in all colors. He could sing and dance and make me dream and move, a star from a culture I found endlessly fascinating.
That later on the real existing Michael Jackson and what he signifies parted ways. I observed and accepted. Poor guy, haunted by a lost childhood, by media, by a world that just didn't want to heal. He tried strange remedies, a new nose, the adoration of childhood, a fantastical lifestyle. He went as far as a black man can go to function in a world run by the white man. The ultimate sacrifice to the struggle. He became white, he had white children. He became tabloid fodder, scandalized, not without his own doing, something I cannot make sense of other than that he refused to grow up and that he existed in a world where that doesn't work.
During the farewell, on world-wide TV, I sat in a black church in South Central and felt the healing in his death. I was sad because I am always sad when life's absurd irony is screaming in your face, when the inevitable end can be felt clearly because someone somehow close to you actually passes on. I was sad also because of the enormous tragedy of his time on the planet. No Greek playwright could have come up with this plot of a life. And yet, gone, he was a kid from the hood, the pride of the community, a black man, the greatest entertainer in the world. It felt good sharing the farewell with brothers and sisters in a church.
Some people might not feel anything, get even upset by the over-coverage of just an entertainer. They will feel this with someone else they find easier to connect to. I see the media beast that feasts on the creature they created. Hypocrites. That has nothing to do with what happened. Media create their own surreality for their own purpose. Who cares. I just happen to have a line to this fellow traveler and his torturous bond with earthly existence. Even though at the time I wasn't so excited about it as I was about the dancing - he reminded people to not forget they always have a choice to go to the bright side, to look in the mirror, to make it a better place. I think that is good and I'm glad he told the world. To my own surprise. Maybe I am a sap after all, at least every now and then....