Priorities perverted
Sorrow over Jackson's death epitomizes West's dysfunction
Last Tuesday was a day of extraordinary solemnity and emotion. We remembered and recalled passing and loss and in so doing many of us shed a tear and said a prayer. Life never to be replaced, promise never to be fulfilled, greatness and goodness cut down in their prime.
No, no, no. Not the sordid little funeral of a sexually and ethnically confused pop star in California, but the anniversary of the mass slaughter of more than 50 people and the injuring of more than 700 in London in 2005.
We may also last Tuesday have asked ourselves how and why a world so bulging with wealth and privilege could, on that day as on every other day, have allowed 40,000 children to die of starvation in Africa and Asia, while boys and girls in Europe and the United States are bursting out of their clothes and fighting diseases brought on by obesity, greed and grotesque self-indulgent diets.
Now if any of you, any of you at all, think that there is no connection among violence, war, terror and suffering on the one hand and neurotic hero worship, false emotion and vicarious death thrills on the other, you are as closeted as someone hiding away in the inner sanctums of the Neverland Ranch.
There is in this world a finite amount of empathy and concern. Our compassion fatigue is notorious and recent history has demonstrated that the plight of a kitten or death of a vacuous princess means far more than a dead child held to the lips of an emaciated black mother or an innocent man ripped to anonymous bloody flesh on a subway train on his way to work.
The death of the ridiculous Michael Jackson epitomizes the dysfunction. The very same people who choose presidents and prime ministers by their votes cried in public for a person they never knew and then took time off work -- often lying to do so -- for a chance to attend the man's stadium memorial service or watch the interminable coverage on addled 24-hour television.
They could not control their weeping at the death of someone who gave the world moon walking, some catchy songs, an obsession with holding one's genitalia in public and sleeping with little boys in an apparent attempt to recapture his childhood -- while simultaneously, of course, destroying theirs.
Which surely leads us to understand why Muslim fundamentalists assume the western world to be bizarre, pointless and decayed beyond repair and ask why the people of the developing world are not more angry and bitter. The whole Jackson nonsense also should oblige us to realize just how racist is a North America that likes its black entertainers best when they are hardly black at all. Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones stole black music, Diana Ross bought into white culture and Jackson simply pretended not to be black.
This is the sophisticated, advanced world of the early 21st century. A world people fought and died to save and one we are supposed to proclaim as an example to those who would bring us down.
In England last Tuesday the parents, children and friends of the dead stood at a new memorial and listened as the names of their loves ones were read aloud.
No Michael Jackson songs were sung, but the screams of injustice and perverted priority shook the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment