It’s 11:25 pm and the coverage of Michael Jackson‘s death on MSNBC is starting to drive me crazy. Tribute interviews with friends and colleagues, recaps, recollections, music videos, relentless references to the phenomenal record sales of Thriller, footage of the crowd outside the Apollo theatre, etc. And not a single word about why the poor man is dead at age 50.
I’m not talking about the diagnostic cause or an analysis about what amounts of which prescription drug (or drugs) may or may not have caused cardiac arrest. Nobody knows anything but we’ve all read today’s report and we all have our guesses and suspicions. We’ll be hearing the details soon enough.
What I’m wondering is why TV commentators won’t even obliquely allude to Jackson’s notoriously diseased lifestyle and behavior (particularly since the allegations of child molestation, which began in ’93, began to gradually collapse his career) and what I believe was surely a case of massive psychological anguish caused by his constant efforts to deny and obscure his sexual nature.
I’m asking because it seems fairly obvious to me that this anguish, deep down, is what killed Michael Jackson, and because the media are playing chickenshit games tonight in their efforts to avoid discussing this.
Jackson didn’t commit abrupt suicide but he almost certainly died from what he did to himself in increasing increments over the years. The reason he behaved and lived the way he did over the last 16 or so years and died the way he did today was due to the toxic effects of constant lying and denying about who and what he was. I believe in the end that his body and soul just couldn’t take it any more. The bullshit caught up with him.
The evidence has been clear for years that the man was a closeted pedophile, and that the elaborate games he played in order in order to conceal this aspect of his nature and misdirect the media and his millions of fans as much as possible led, I strongly suspect, to increasing spiritual stress and trauma. I’m obviously not pretending to know any of the particulars but Jackson, I believe, was surely driven mad by everything that he failed to deal with. Tell me I’m wrong.
