Michael Jackson

I do hope, gentle reader, that you did not spend too much of your weekend mourning the demise of Michael Jackson, or even talking about said demise. Because (and I don't really need to tell you this do, I?) time spent in such a way would be wasted, wouldn't it? Your emotions were manipulated, were they not? Manipulated not by the Mass Media - that is like so 20th Century; no, said emotions were manipulated by your Twitter pals, and your Facebook Friends: people you know, sort of. They all rushed to make a comment, each one hoping that he or she would be the one who told you and countless others about it. And so, it came to pass that a rather inconsequential event became terribly important.

Or, to put it another way: Michael Jackson was forgotten, for the most part, by ordinary decent people. He was, after all, Creepy and Weird. The only people who did not share this opinion were His dedicated fans, those who stayed with him long after He stopped making half-decent records and throughout the child molesting stage of his life. Why so? Answer: the dedicated fans are (a) creepy and (b) weird. They wouldn't have minded if he had been found guilty; they would have offered their own children to him. The rest of us carried on our lives, feeling vaguely uncomfortable about what we did in the Eighties.

Then He died, suddenly. It made the news. It stopped the news. Everybody remembered Him, and what He had meant to them, back then, before it all became rather sordid. And everyone felt sad. But everyone also secretly rejoiced, because His demise was an opportunity for everybody to come together, to share their feelings and their memories. And such mourning for our past is acceptable, in this post-ironic culture; not just for the Proles, who have always enjoyed mawkish sentimentality, but also for People Like Us. Look: even the Guardian is doing it.

It is better this way. Concerning ourselves with the death of a composite media figure (the King of Pop, as he insisted he be called by any media outlet that was wanting of his blessing; an insistence that has now paid dividends, since it is as the King of Pop that he is known) is so much easier than dealing with the real problems, like the millions of plastic beads flowing from exfoliating soap into the oceans, or that interview on Nine to Noon with Charles Clover about the imminent extinction of fishes.