Mass Hysteria

It does not say much about the majority of people who clamour emotionally of their love for a popular entertainer acclaimed as a giant of the entertainment industry, as though their attachment to this figure and his subsequent death has diminished the meaning of their lives. Have we so little to engage with, so little of real value that we must substitute a figure of celebrity for someone with real meaning in our lives?

It is the public grief for Princess Diana revisited. It is quite simply amazing that a virus of shared grief, an outpouring of common loss is capable of overtaking peoples' sense of proportion and reality. The public's fascination with, and attachment to celebrity, to outlandish and outrageous super-egos whose purpose in life is to flamboyantly present themselves as super-achievers in music or acting is a symptom of social and emotional immaturity.

Much as the extreme exhibitionism and self-extolling prowess of excellence of those whom they adore and place on a celebratory pedestal represents emotional immaturity. Those individuals with a singular expressive and charismatic talent for music or dance or acting whose sole purpose in life is to achieve the utmost adoration from their loyal supporters. Once having tasted that exalted level of adoration, nothing else will suffice.

And then, like Michael Jackson, they believe of themselves as royalty among dross. A dross upon whom they depend for their celebrated position, whom they deign to acknowledge, haughtily, as though no amount of homage is quite enough to express the value their 'talent' brings to the lives of the great unwashed.

A man whose inability to accept his racial heritage leads him to deny it in the most graphic way, by undergoing surgery and chemical treatment. A man who nonetheless sought to discover the nexus to his heritage, travelling to a remote African village where the delighted people proclaimed him their prince.

Utterly devoted to self, he was unable to adequately gift himself with costly and often arcanely inappropriate treasures to delight himself as the recipient of his just due. His spending excesses over-ran his prodigious earning capabilies. Yet did he ever spend a penny to improve the impoverished lives of that African village?

A crowd of 17,000 Michael Jackson devotees, overcome with anguish at his self-administered death, to attend a memorial service that will represent the highlight of their lives. To hear the Reverend Al Sharpton declare Michael Jackson the god of love. To applaud when another music impressario announces that "He is going to live forever and ever and ever and ever"; the pinnacle of childish absurdity.

The man was driven by his hunger to pamper his ego. He was a pathetic figure of public acclaim struggling to maintain his celebrity while denying his coloured heritage, and is now boasted of as representing the bridge of love between black and white. Emotion does trump reason in peoples' unreasoning wallowing in self-pity and attachment to mediocrity, labelling it excellence.

Although I have never discussed this matter with my grandchild, she is puzzled at the emotional turmoil she sees with millions of people surrendering themselves to a spectacle of mass grief over the death of an entertainer whose tawdry self-love and manipulation of his own children, and whose earned reputation as a child molester should have left him to pass unnoticed, with mild regret.