Mourning Michael

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

And so the prince has passed on. The sad little prince who after he failed to grow up to be something even remotely resembling normal, who came to characterize the brokenness that we can fall into when our formative years are deprived of love, who made so many of us scream with joy and amazement when he created a new world of music on stage and then cringe with revulsion when he created a strange wonderland for him to play with little boys, finally departed the world in which he could never find a place. Finally, he made the passage to the only wonderland that could embrace him with the love he sought.

The world mourns his passing. Every media agency is focused on talking about his death and projecting their sorrow. Fans are camping out in spontaneous communities of shared sorrow. Celebrities are tripping over themselves to release the most profoundly sorrowful sound bite.

Of course everyone feels a genuine sorrow because MJ is dead. Michael was part of the soundtrack of their youth at some point of his career. I'm sure “Ben” or “Billie Jean” or “Man in the Mirror” triggers some memory of some important event in most everyone's life. But as we mourn and remember him so fondly, I cannot help but remember how he was so mocked and reviled by the western media as if he were a circus monkey fit only for the admiration of shrieking Asian girls.

If there is a lesson to his death, it is this: death makes everyone love you and makes them guilty for their terrible thoughts about you. And if you are famous and the mass media obsesses over your death, everyone will try to remember how much exactly they loved you all along. Can you therefore blame poor outcast teenagers who fantasize about being famous and about being dead?

But the other lesson to learn as everyone mourns the great child prince's death is this: celebrity culture is incapable of celebrating genuine greatness. Without a doubt, Michael Jackson did contribute greatly to popular music. He was at the forefront of the invention of pop styles from the 60s to the 90s. But in the grand scheme of things, what did his style contribute to human civilization in its quest to realize the potential of its spirit? How has his music helped us discover our potential for creativity as we face the end of world civilization and life as we know it? How does he help us discover who we are as we come to realize that the world we have built for ourselves is neither sustainable nor enriching? Because in the end, shouldn't our greatness be measured by these standards? And yet, half of the shows of most of our serious news programs spent their time extolling the life and death of one whose best lyrics were “I'm looking at the man in the mirror and I'm asking him to change his ways” and “Heal the world, make it a better place, for you and for me and the entire human race.”

On the other hand, just a few weeks ago, a great peasant leader was shot dead. Rene Peñas was a simple man from a simple background who against all the odds rose to greatness. Ka Rene was a truly great man. He led a handful of powerless peasants to fight a whole system designed to deprive the margins of their resources and won to teach his nation that hope and perseverance can sometimes triumph over systematic evil. He showed us all that we could still believe in happy endings in a history built on the deeds of petty evil and shameless, magnificent greed. Ka Rene's greatest hit was a simple march of 444 kilometers. It was not sold to a lot of people but to those who were his fans, their spirits were made to awaken to the greatness of the simplest of men. Their hearts were blown open to embrace the love in the universe that ever so subtly invites us to move with its heartbeat and bring outrageous good to the world.

But when he died, only a few nuns and priests, activists and NGO workers, peasants and students wept and scrambled to say something meaningful so that his death would not be so absurd. And so the peasant leader, the exemplar of who we could be if we were attuned to the call of the good, passed on to his true ancestral lands where he will never be hungry or threatened or killed, where he will truly be enlivened by the creative power that he felt in the land and heard calling in the suffering of his people. But the remembrance of his passing did not come anywhere close to the world's mourning for a boy who could walk backwards as if there were no gravity and had a sweet, sweet voice that could make us forget that there was a goodness to humanity beyond petty loves and glamor.