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Arrested Development: The tragedy of Michael Jackson.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Tuesday, June 14, 2005, at 3:35 PM PT
I’ve never believed Michael Jackson was a pedophile. To begin with, he doesn’t fit the profile. Child abusers tend to do the same thing again and again. According to one study, the average molester of boys commits 280 crimes over a lifetime. Yet despite the lure of getting rich by making accusations against Jacko, only two alleged victims have ever come forward with detailed allegations.

What’s more, those two accusations, separated by 10 years, don’t conform to a pattern. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the accuser in the recent case—the cancer victim—alleged groping by Jackson. Jackson’s previous accuser, whose family settled a civil suit in 1993 for $20 million, accused the singer of more extreme abuse, including oral sex.

But the main reason I never bought the prosecutor’s depiction of Jackson as a premeditating sexual predator “grooming” his victims is that it doesn’t ring true in psychological terms. Whether or not he has ever touched a boy inappropriately, Michael Jackson seems too emotionally stunted to act in any grown-up way, including a deviant
sexual one. Naive, juvenile, and terribly damaged, he seems pathetically incapable not just of criminal intent, but of adult consciousness.

People tend to throw up hands at Michael Jackson’s multifarious bizarreness. But is it really so strange? The boy was forced to work by a cruel and physically abusive father starting at the age of 7. (If he’d been sent into a factory or coal mine, instead of onstage, we’d have more compassion for him.) As a boy, he was denied what even most abused and underprivileged children have: school, friends, and play.

Instead, Michael was made into a performing sexualized freak, a boy whose soprano voice kindled passion in grown women. He was made to witness adult sexuality at an age when it can only have been terrifying and incomprehensible to him. By 10, he was performing in strip clubs and hiding under the covers in hotel rooms while his older brothers got it on with groupies. At 11—the age at which his psyche seems frozen—he was a superstar. “My childhood was completely taken away from me,” he has said. Almost everything that seems freakish about him can be explained by his poignant, doomed effort to get his stolen childhood back.

To describe the world Michael Jackson has created around himself as a childhood fantasy isn’t quite accurate. Thanks to wealth and celebrity, he has been able to live as a superannuated child. With the help of plastic surgery and dramatic affectation, he has made himself look and sound pre-pubescent. He amuses himself with fancy toys, fantastic pets, amusement park rides, and a personal magician.

What emerged at the trial wasn’t the picture of a man playing with children in order to seduce them. It was the picture of a man playing with children because he sees himself as one of them. He and his friends in the “Apple Head Club” stayed up all night playing videogames, watching television, and eating popcorn. In the absence of parental authority, they would sometimes drink wine out of Coke cans, make crank calls, look at dirty magazines, and try to gross each other out (head-licking, anyone?). A child in his own mind, Jackson sees all of his behavior as completely innocent. It was a sleepover party, not a seduction or even the sublimation of one. Hence his sincere-sounding admission to Martin Bashir, the British filmmaker whose 2003 documentary Living With Michael Jackson initiated his recent troubles, that sleeping with young boys is loving, and not sexual. Jackson appears not to comprehend adult sexuality enough to get why people might divine a more sinister intent.

There is, of course, a literary precedent here. “I am Peter Pan,” Jackson told Bashir. Even without his cosmetic remodeling as Mary Martin, this identification would be hard to miss. At the Neverland Ranch, as in the Darling nursery, the boys all sleep in the same room. Michael, like Peter, casts himself as father, big brother, and ring-leader. He takes his lost boys on romps and adventures. Girls are not welcome. One of the few exceptions was his sister, whom he calls “Tinkerbell.” But as Jackson knows, Peter Pan is not entirely a happy story. The boys will return from Neverland and grow into adults. Peter cannot.

A more interesting comparison may be between Jackson and the author of that fantasy, J.M. Barrie. Like Jackson, Barrie suffered from a kind of arrested development, brought on by the death of his beloved older brother when he was 6. According to Andrew Birkin’s book J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys: The Real Story Behind Peter Pan, Barrie’s marriage remained unconsummated, while his deepest relationships were with the Llewelyn Davies brothers, the five boys he met in Kensington Gardens in London who formed the basis for the characters in Peter Pan. Barrie performed tricks for the children, played with them, more or less moved into their home, and fantasized, in print, about sharing his bed with them. But there is no evidence of any physical involvement. The best guess is that Barrie was celibate or asexual.

Today we find the idea of nonsexuality more bizarre than deviant sexuality. But in Michael Jackson’s case, it seems more plausible than any other explanation. All of Jackson’s oddities seem to be reactions to what he suffered as a child. Manhandled by strangers, he became a mask-wearing, gloved germophobe. Tyrannized and abused by his father, he turned hyperbolically gentle and generous to children. Terrified by adult sexuality, he froze in pre-adolescent immaturity.

“I haven’t been betrayed or deceived by children,” Jackson once said. “Adults have let me down.” Kudos to 12 in Santa Barbara, Calif., who didn’t.
 

I love this stuff! The world is a weird wacky place to be.
A man (identified in court papers as John Doe), who suffered injuries and sexual dysfunction 11 years ago when a woman unexpectedly changed positions during intercourse (and fell on him and fractured his penis), was again turned down in his attempt to sue the woman. The Court of Appeals of Massachusetts said in May that it would be impossible for a judge or jury to decide which movements in consensual sex were legally reasonable or unreasonable. [ABC News-AP, 5-16-05]

http://www.msnbc.com/comics/nw.asp?vts=62220052210

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15052336/site/newsweek/

I liked this article so I decided to pass it on.  Maybe some of you will like it also, if so please pass it on.

‘Best of the Worst’

WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY

By Marc Gellman

Newsweek

Updated: 7:06 p.m. ET Sept 28, 2006

“Sept. 28, 2006 – This week’s popular but untrue saying is, “If you have your health, you have everything.” Because if this saying is true, then it also true that if you lose your health, you have nothing. This is not only false, it is spiritually corrosive. Placing upon people the double burden of both their illness and the despairing conclusion that their illness has taken away from them everything important is much more than false. It is deeply cruel.

“I know that the saying intends to be positive. It intends to say something like, “We should never want more than just our health because nothing we have is more important.” Of course I agree that we should strive to live healthful lives and avoid the transfatty parts of the universe, but health is a fleeting thing, affected by environmental and genetic and even purely random factors. The fixation on health as the only important thing is what is behind this saying, and what is behind the unnecessary and often debilitating despair of sick people.

“In my life so far, the two people I knew who best refuted the if-you-have-your-health-you-have-everything saying were Henry Viscardi and Pam Rothman, may their memories be blessed.

“Born with severely short, twisted legs, rejected by his parents and forced to grow up in a sanatorium, Henry Viscardi was the Martin Luther King Jr. of the disabled. He was a driving force behind the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act and the founder of the Henry Viscardi School for the disabled in Albertson, N.Y. One day when my friend Msgr. Tom Hartman and I were visiting Henry, he said to us, “I never think of the people in this center as disabled.  I think of you guys as just temporarily abled.” Henry taught us that day that we are all part of the same continuum of gradually decreasing ableness that moves from the time we are children flying across lawns to the time when we wake up, get out of bed and say, “Oy, that hurts!” Nobody is disabled. We are all just temporarily abled until that day when we are no longer quite so abled.

When Moses broke the tablets bearing the Ten Commandments because of his anger at the people for worshiping the golden calf, God gave him a new unbroken copy, but God also commanded Moses to place all the broken pieces of the first tablets together in the same golden ark of the covenant that held the new unbroken tablets. The broken and the whole were together in the same ark. As it was so it is with us now. Those of us who happen to be disabled and those of us who happen to be temporarily abled are together in the covenant of God’s love and must be together in the bonds of love and support we extend to each other. The broken and the whole are together in the same ark.

“In the Jewish laws concerning the treatment of dying people, the rabbis taught this same lesson. In Shulchan Aruch Yoreh Deah, the first line we read is, “A dying person is like a living person in all essential respects.” We are commanded to view dying people the way we would view any other temporarily abled people. They are living and we are living. In that essential respect we are the same. When we coddle them, infantilize them, hide the truth from them or treat them as if they were already dead, we have separated them from the community of people made in the image of God. My father, Sol Gellman, has Alzheimer’s disease. My father does not know my name, but when I hugged him and kissed him goodbye on my last visit, he grabbed me and said to me, “I know that I belong to you, and I know that you belong to me.” Even now, in the midst of his deepening fog, my father still knows everything that is important to know.

“Pam Rothman died of cancer after a long struggle, and although she eventually lost her life, she never lost her smile. One day sitting in her hospital room, Pam said to me, “Rabbi, I can’t be the best of the best any longer, but I can still be the best of the worst.” And she was the best of the worst, the very best of the very worst. She helped other cancer patients cling to hope, she held her family together by her embracing love and she read and wrote to the end. In the end Pam was taken, but she was never defeated.

“Like Pam, many people find that their greatest artistic, spiritual and personal achievements come after they are sick. The greatest theoretical physicist in the world is Stephen Hawking. He has the motor neuron disease ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), and he cannot move from his wheelchair. He speaks through a speech synthesizer. He has the best mind trapped in the worst body and this fact has not dimmed but brightened his brilliant light. Christopher Reeve was a good actor and a great Superman but he became a great inspirational force only after his injury. The greatest modern Jewish theologian was Franz Rosenzweig, and though he died in 1929, also from the predations of ALS, his illness did not diminish his brilliant translation of the Bible into German with his friend Martin Buber nor his philosophical masterwork, “The Star of Redemption,” which he wrote by holding a pencil in his mouth and pointing to the keys on the typewriter.

“Henry and Pam, Stephen and Chris, Franz and Helen Keller, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Soren Kierkegaard, FDR, Beethoven and a thousand brave and wise and creative people whose bodies were broken or who suffered disabilities or ill health have given everything to the world—while millions of people who have their health have given nothing. And how else can we understand God’s decision to pick Moses, a disabled man with a cleft palate to be the leader of the Exodus from Egypt? God picks the soul, not the body. Through an endless list of wounded genius we are taught and must finally learn that losing your health does not mean that you have lost your genius or your destiny.

“Much of my counseling is devoted to helping people cope with newly broken lives. Perhaps their life has been broken by injury or illness or perhaps by the death or illness of someone they loved more than life itself. In all these cases the people who come to see me know that they have lost a substantial part of their physical or mental health, and because they secretly believe this damn saying, they think they have lost everything. My job is to convince them that the saying is wrong. I must try to urge them, cajole them, teach them and remind them that even in their weakened state they still have everything they need to lead a spiritually, morally and even physically happy life. They may not have what they had but they have what they have, and as long as they are still alive, what they have is enough. They may not be able to do what they once did. They may have to adjust the expectations of their life, but they do not have to surrender their life or their hope or their resolve to be the best they can be with what they have left. This is not a counsel of despair and resignation. It is a counsel of hope and faith.

“The reason health is not everything is your health is about you, and everything really important in your life is about others: serving others, loving others and teaching others reveals our true purpose and ultimate destiny. The rabbis wrote, “Give me community or give me death.” Losing your health is a terrible thing but losing a community of love and purpose is fatal. Our only chance to find everything is to get out of ourselves.

“So I wish you a year of health, and I wish you a year of knowing that having your health is not even close to having everything.

© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.