Neverland, Graceland “Just Imagine” and Woodstock
I am still trying to digest the Michael Jackson-Ed Bradley interview on “60 Minutes” last Sunday.
Right off the bat there is a long list of plastic surgeons out there who should have their licenses stripped from them IMMEDIATELY.
It is one thing to look at someone who is deformed (I refuse to indulge in the idiocy of abusing the English language by using terms like “challenged”)by nature or accident; it is something else altogether to look at a deformed man whose only reason for being deformed is that he had the money to have it done and there were people, apparently without consciences, who were willing to do do it.
As for the interview, it was a strange concoction of religion and psych-babble, a not uncommon phenonenon.
When Bradley asked Jackson whether he knew of any other 45 year old men who slept with boys who were not family members, Jackson vehemently said, “Yes!” and then went on to say that it was a great expression of love and followed that up by saying that Jesus said that we should love one another.
My respect for Jesus of Nazareth by the way is growing by leaps and bounds since he seems to have held every possible position on every possible issue. He is now in vogue with Howard Dean along with Jackson, George W Bush, some homosexual activists and a wide range of “Christians”.
I frankly am not sure that Jackson is a “pedophile” in the strict sense of having physical sexual relations with children but his sense of reality does seem to be sufficiently disturbed for him not to be able to realize that a 45 year old man sleeping with teen-age boys is not “a high expression of love”.
But that is no what struck me most forcefully about the interview.
What did strike me was yet another example of the Baby Boomer fascination with and entrapment by fantasy. Jackson is 45 which means that he was born in 1958, the heart of the Baby Boom demographic.
Whether it is Jackson building “Neverland” (the Greek word “utopia” means “no place” by the way), Elvis Presley building “Graceland”, the Beatles writing “Just Imagine”, the “Woodstock” experience, not to mention “Star Trek”, “Star Wars” and the Tolkien phenomenon, the reality that previous generations have had to come to terms with (suffering, old age, death), is something the Boomers don’t want to face.
And like Jackson they have had enough money (as a group), power plus a huge dose of historical luck (so far, anyways) to be able to get away with it.
I think that this has had several effects on the Baby Boomers: their readiness to accept notions that other generations have dismissed particularly in the area of sex.
“Free love” was around in the 20’s; no group of people have ever equated heterosexuality, which is the perpetuating mechanism of society, with homosexuality, which is a deviation, and the gross trivialization of the relationship between heterosexual men and women and the act of sex between them.
The flurry of material on aging now that is trying to hustle the notion that old age is
like the first half of life is just one more recent example. (AARP mag headline: “Sixty is another thirty!”)
The Boomers have also had a hard time with the notion of laws and limits. Their heroes and heroines are those who challenge laws, sometimes all laws, not those who uphold them.
Peter Coyote, the actor, said that when he was young and involved in the Haight-Ashbury movement, the goal was absolute freedom.
This is a normal adolescent desire. The difficulty is that if it is not out grown, chaos follows.
And is you don’t believe that, look around you.
The Baby Boomers have always made me think of a drunk on a tight-rope.
Experience says that at some point, there will be a fall.
We’ll see.