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Am I the only one who finds it odd that the death of a meek, soft-spoken, painfully-shy man has been attended by such anger among the punditocracy?
In the course of a few news cycles, television's talking heads have seen fit to ape New York congressman Peter King's (a rival to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher for the title of "Original Angry Man About Town") violent reaction to Michael Jackson's public eulogy. On a Sean Hannity panel alone (or on-air sprint to the discourse bottom, you choose) Sunny Hostin called Jackson a "self-hating black man" and "molester"; Tucker Carlson compared Jackson to Cambodian blood-letter Pol Pot; and Hannity characterized Congressman King's statements as "truthful". Responding to Rev. Al Sharpton's criticism of the tabloid culture that dogged Jackson most of his life, CNN's Jeffrey Toobin channelled the same blue-collar frustration with media saturation of the event: "Give me a break."
So, like all arguments these days, we have two equally compelling and competing sides of the same coin: Jackson as brilliant innovator--Jackson as "pedophile" who "did some dancing." If this is the punditry's idea of promoting balance in the Jackson legacy narrative, it is a false choice. While I agree that the public mourning seems out of proportion to Jackson's importance in world affairs, this is not the first case of death washing away a lifetime of sins in the collective memory (see Princess Diana, Reagan memorials). And it ignores the fact that much of this debate fractures along generational lines: to the 40 and under crowd, raised in the afterglow of MTV, Michael Jackson was a towering figure in popular culture. We had our own sequined gloves, "Moonwalked" in suburban rec rooms, and listened to his music on school field trips. Then, as now, the older generation just shook their heads in disbelief.
In life, Michael Jackson wasn't an agent of either the left or the right--attempts to make him that are the by-product of our own growing tendency to divide people into neat ideological camps, or to use their death as an occasion for another cultural tug-of-war. Let the dead have their moment, and indulge the ones they left behind as grief-stricken. People reconcile these events in their own way.