Save Your Praise for the Deserving

As I read the Twitter and Facebook streams last night, an old Shakespearean quote came to mind,

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;

And perhaps I am bending it slightly out of context, but I was struck again and again by people who were all too willing to overlook the facts of who Michael Jackson was in favor of the icon he carefully crafted to distract the world from those facts. The financial deadbeat. The plastic surgery addict. The baby dangler. The accused pedophile.

Perhaps in an era of wide-spread fiscal mismanagement the rumors of his insolvency and creditors at his door do not strike anyone as anything other than normal. And with so many of our middle-aged peers obsessed with hand wringing every ounce of youth from themselves they are willing to transform themselves into freakish wax works, Jackson's self-mutilations pass for the new aging normal. His odd fathering might be chalked up to extreme attachment parenting depending on who is asked. But the elephant in the back of the funeral parlor? His little problem with little boys? Why is that not a bigger issue?

Some will argue, correctly, that Jackson was never convicted of a crime. Others will come back with the fact that he bought off his alleged victims before he could be brought up on charges. Regardless, he was a grown man who admitted - on television -  to contact with children that other people had no difficulty recognizing as improper and suspect. 

He has long been as forgotten as possible in the United States as a musical force to be reckoned with and his fame, such as it remains, centers largely around his eccentricities and financial problems. So it seems hypocritical then that his death should inspire such blind nostalgia. When did our youth become so intertwined with the media created idols that we lost sight of the frail human beings caught in the maelstrom of hype and self-aggrandizement?

My college years are soundtracked by a rich and varied collection of music - much of it standing up to the test of time better than anything Mr. Jackson has left behind. In fact, on the rare occasions I hear his music anymore, I cringe and change stations. He is no icon. He was an overrated pop star with questionable integrity when it came to preteen boys. Death should not be a free moonwalk past go to Rock'n Roll Heaven. If we must remember the man, remember that he was just a man and not a very nice one.