On the news
Everybody's dog food
Bang bang
Shock dead
Everybody's gone mad...
From "They Don't Care About Us" by Michael Jackson
As a little boy, Michael Jackson had an extraordinary charisma -- as
well as an absolute innocence -- that was disarmingly charming. It
captivated millions of Americans and eventually people around the
world.
As the years went by, his career took strange turns and he slowly
turned white, transforming his face eerily into a pale and ghastly
masque, perhaps to conceal the pain of alienation from his own self and
family. He was also rumored to have unsavory predilections that would
never have been suggested if one used the rigorous criteria of Islam
before hurling an accusation. Despite the rumors, he appeared to have
had a genuine concern for children, wanting to provide them with a
world that was denied to him as a child due to the abuses he claimed to
have suffered.
I was very happy for him last year when he reportedly became a Muslim.
He had apparently followed the footsteps of his dignified and
intelligent brother, Jermaine, who converted to Islam 20 years ago and
found peace. It seemed befitting that Michael sought refuge from a
society that thrives on putting people on pedestals and then knocking
them down. He was accused of many terrible things, but was guilty of
perhaps being far too sensitive for an extremely cruel world. Such is
the fate of many artistic people in our culture of nihilistic art,
where the dominant outlet for their talents is in singing hollow pop
songs or dancing half-naked in front of ogling onlookers who often
leave them as quickly as they clung to them for the next latest
sensation.
In the manner of Elvis or the Beatles, Michael is unwittingly both
a cause and a symptom of America’s national obsession with celebrity,
currently on display in the American Idol mania. Celebrity trumps
catastrophe every time. Far too few of us make any attempt to
understand why jobs are drying up, why mortgages are collapsing, why we
spend half-a-trillion dollars to service the interest on the national
debt, why our government’s administration, despite being elected on an
anti-war platform, is still committed to two unnecessary and unjust
wars waged by the earlier administration, wars that continue to involve
civilians casualties on an almost daily basis. Instead, we drown in
trivia, especially trivia related to celebrity. And the response to
Michael’s death is part of the trivial pursuits of American popular
culture. The real news about death in America is that twenty Iraq and
Afghan war veterans are committing suicide every day. But that does not
make the front page nor is it discussed as seriously as the King of
Pop’s cardiac arrest.
Nevertheless, Michael’s very public death notice is a powerful
reminder that no matter how famous or talented or wealthy one is, death
comes knocking, sometimes sooner than later. Michael has now entered a
world of extraordinary perception, a world that makes his “Thriller”
video seem mundane. It is a world of angels and demons, and questions
in the grave, a world where fame is based upon piety and charity. Given
Michael’s reported conversion to Islam last year, Muslims count him as
one of our own, and we pray that he can finally find the peace he never
found in this world and that he is in a place, God willing, of mercy,
forgiveness, and solace.
http://www.zaytuna.org/articleDetails.asp?articleID=125
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