I only heard the news this morning. I felt very tired last night, I had a headache, slept through the night, and when I turned my phone on, there was an sms from my friend:
“Michael Jackson has died“.
There will be a lot of talk about whether the phrase “music has died” is justified; how Google and Bing are catching up on the real-time reporting; and many more things. It could be the day of remembering a Charlie’s Angels star, Farrah Fawcett, who passed away on June 25, after a long battle with cancer. Instead, it will be a long string of rememberances of the King of Pop who suffered a cardiac arrest and couldn’t be saved.
Back in Moscow, I’ve got one of his albums/tours in a video cassette. When I watched “Thriller” first few times, I was quite scared (although all horror films scared me back in the day). I was amused by the feminists who accused HIStory of mysogyny or at the very least of sexism. There was this controversial obsession with Elizabeth Taylor that saw Jackson doing plastic surgery time after time. There were marriages, kids, and then a widely publicised court affair over alleged child molestation. Robin Gibb has reportedly compared Jackson’s treatment to that of Oscar Wilde’s, and many already find it ridiculous, and are unforgivable of Jackson.
Well, you know me… I almost always know too much to stand firmly on one side of the fence – which is why it’s hard for me to belong to a group: a group is always on the side on some fence. It was in about 2005 when I had to research for one paper about juvenile delinquency that I noted that according to the UK laws a child could receive a sentence at the age of 8. Consider now that children cannot work until they are 14, and a legal age for sex is 16. Isn’t it strange that you can be classed as a young criminal even before you get to earn your first dosh and have sex?
But let’s look back in time. Today we are horrified by the custom of arranged marriages in the East – but we have forgotten completely about our own, European and English, arranged marriages that were sometimes concluded even before the future man and wife were born. We probably don’t realise that when Romeo and Juliet conducted their affair they were not of “legal” age for sex. As with boy-kings, when we focus on “boy” and forget that he was of the royal stock and hence was well-educated, so do we forget that it was 19th and 20th centuries that imposed on our conscience a concept of a “child”, as we use it today. Underneath those lofty ideas runs the “long duree”, and in this “long time” children are still no different from adults. So, when we try and “save”or “protect” children, we’re doing so against the logic of time, against the deeply embedded pattern that still has the power.
I don’t think that Jackson knew this or thought the same. To quote Chesterton, the beauty of an open mind is that you can close it on something. With the child molestation case, I choose to close my mind on jury’s verdict. But I would hope the above would be a sound proof of the ambiguity of our attitudes, particularly to children. And if anything else, those quick points certainly prove that Nabokov’s Lolita, for all its “indecency”, is not the fruit of a perverted mind.
Below are two videos: Smooth Criminal has been playing in my head since this morning; and Can You Feel It is Jacksons 5’s song I really love.