I wrote a comment on the  Guardian’s ‘Open Thread’ discussing Michael Jackson’s death and how he would be remembered – nothing too out there, just the obvious comment that once somebody has used their position of wealth and power to buy off serious criminal allegations and make the proceedings go away they really should be thought of as being off the team.  It was removed as innapropriate by the moderator.  I made a second comment, on how hagiography was fine but maybe he may not have been quite such a figure to be looked up to, and maybe that was the real lesson of this, that celebrities seem to think that they can act from a position of power, that they can get away with absolutely anything and we won’t care.  That was removed too – not noted as ‘removed by a moderator’, just struck out, as though it had never existed at all.

So now I’ll write the same over here – that I like The Jackson 5 a lot, like Off the Wall very much and can see how significant an album Thriller is and always will be.  But I don’t understand how people can gloss over his behviour since then.

It’s often said (and it’s said repeatedly on that Guardian thread) ‘well he had such a terrible upbringing, trying to cope with that father and all that fame and living in the public eye, you have to make allowances’.

I’ve just finished reading a book about children who kill other children, and the section of that which struck me the most was the section on Mary Bell, who as a 12 year old killed two younger boys.  There’s no doubt that Mary Bell was brought up to a life of horror, raped and abused repeatedly by the clients of her mother, who was a prostitute.  There’s no doubt at all either that the public’s view of Mary Bell is that she was, is and always will be a vicious monster who deserves nothing but contempt, and that there can be no mitigation in her background that might change this.  There’s a message to Venables and Thompson in this – start singing and dancing now, whilst you still have a chance.

I’m not trying to make a direct comparison here – I’m not suggesting he’s been running around killing children on the sly – but Jackson paid over twenty million dollars to make child abuse allegations go away before they reached legal proceedings – and he did it in public.  (I don’t think it’s too unreasonable to speculate about the amount of money he might have paid along the way which served its purpose and kept other allegations of abuse  out of the public eye completely, but I wouldn’t rely on that here.)  When you start throwing around your wealth and power to make sure that the rules and standards of society don’t apply to you, well, then you’re no longer entitled to the benefit of the doubt, let alone to our affection and support.  Once you think that you’re so different, that real life is happening somewhere else and you’re above it all and you do as you please, well, then you’re no longer entitled to the benefit of the doubt, let alone to our affection and support.

We foolishly think that people out there, people who run things and who live off a hundred thousand times what we do because an accident of economic design favours and values them in a way that it will never value us, people who run the businesses that employ us, sit in the parliaments and seats of government and legislate for us, adminster our mortgages, savings and pension funds – we foolishly think that they must see our world as we do, that they are, fundamentally, people like us.  We imagine it’s reasonable that they should be treated in the same way as we would expect to.  We imagine they would want to behave in ways that we consider reasonable to other people, and to us.  Fools that we are.

There’s only one person to play records by today.

Jarvis Cocker – Cunts are still running the world mp3