Why all this hullabaloo over Jacko? (From The Northern Echo)

Why all this hullabaloo over Jacko?

10:26am Tuesday 7th July 2009

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SO, today will see the funeral of Michael Jackson and we shall witness what one commentator on the BBC described as “the biggest outpouring of pretend grief since the death of Princess Diana”.

Perhaps. Certainly, we are guaranteed that billions worldwide will watch the event on television. Why the fuss? Of course, anyone’s death is a sad event and a cause of personal sorrow to family and friends, but I find it impossible to fathom why the demise of a remote, reclusive popular entertainer should generate such a hullabaloo.

GK Chesterton warned us not to “stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age”.

In other words, there are things we ought to grow out of. But we don’t. When Michael Jackson died, television and all the newspapers described him as “one of the greatest singers ever”.

This is a ridiculous judgement – actually, a failure of judgement. Gigli, Caruso, Maria Callas, Kathleen Ferrier – these are a few candidates off the top of my head who might qualify for the appellation “great singer”.

By contrast, Michael Jackson was an hysterical, twitching, dithyrambic marionette: the whitened face of the clown in the funeral parlour. I recall one particularly sulphuric scene: Jacko dancing, grabbing his crotch, on a stage full of people dressed as undead zombies.

A high proportion of his audience about ten years old. When we pay homage to Michael Jackson, we are overlooking the corruption of children.

Journalists and commentators who are supposed to be grown up, mature enough to mediate – that’s what media is for – to convey truth and sound judgement – persisted in this disgusting deification of Jackson for days on end.

Night after night the only news was “Michael Jackson: Still dead”. Four days after his death, I sat through 15 minutes of this necromantic sycophancy on the ten o’clock news before the real news of the day got a mention: the fact that nine British Embassy workers had been taken hostage in Tehran. That order of perspective represented a loss of perspective and the devaluation of all values.

One of the greatest achievements of homo sapiens – thinking beings – is the ability to form critical judgements, to distinguish between things of quality and things that are worthless. That is artistic or aesthetic judgement.

At the most meagre level, it is what tells me that Daniel Barenboim’s playing of Mozart’s piano sonatas is sublime, whereas what I plinky-plonk out on the piano is pretty poor stuff. Alongside aesthetic judgement, there is also moral judgement: by this we hope to discover the difference between what is good and wholesome and what is destructive and harmful.

Does anyone in his right senses doubt that Michael Jackson’s stage and screen performances were unwholesome and surely not the sort of thing we should encourage children to see? I will say nothing concerning the reports we hear about his private life.

There are some disturbing contradictions in our private judgements and also in our public policy – between what we claim to oppose and what we celebrate. For instance, we spend millions on “the war on drugs” because drugs ruin the lives of so many. Then we award knighthoods to rock stars who make a public exhibition of their drug-taking.

Bah, humbug.

■ Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.

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