Delurking, because all of this coverage has been nagging at me consistently because of one thing, and I've reached my tipping point now. I've been lurking on Making Light for a while and you all seem like the sort of commentariat who would have a thoughtful response:
Am I the only one who thinks Michael Jackson isn't all that weird? Or, more precisely, that he became exactly what you would expect given the circumstances of his life?
It's not just that he was a childhood star who became extremely famous and wealthy, though that's part of it. Add to the mix that he was raised a Jehovah's Witness, was almost certainly non-heterosexual in some way, had lupus and vitiligo, and also apparently was an extremely anxious, shy, introverted man, and you have all the ingredients for a cataclysm:
- Childhood star: a lot has been said. Basically, he never had his own childhood, but he also never learned to interact with anybody who didn't want something from him, who didn't already have their own image of what he was. And he had the immense pressure of being his family's primary breadwinner from the age of 10. So: never learned how to normally interact with people, never did the "learning about oneself" that is the outcome of such interactions, and dealt with intense, crushing stress all his life. For a naturally shy, anxious person, that must have been hell.
- As a teenager / young man, he must have been becoming aware that he was, sexually, not something that society approved of. I think there are many enormous differences between being gay and being a pedophile (I'm gay myself), but I imagine that the psychological effects in his case would be similar: either way -- as a devout Jehovah's Witness living in the 70s/80s -- he probably would have been horrified, deeply shamed and full of self-loathing. And because of his immense fame he would have had nobody to talk to about it or (if he was gay) experiment about, etc. Enter all of the pathologies of the closet, hatred of one's body, etc.
- Because of his vast money he could at this point withdraw from many of these problems and create his own fantasy world. It's not surprising it revolved around childhood, since not only was that something he missed out on, but -- dealing with what he would have seen as the horror of his sexuality -- it must have seemed especially pure and ideal. He obviously wanted nothing more than to go back to that.
- But he couldn't. Then he got vitiligo, which I would guess would have had the following psychological consequences: (a) making him hate his body even more; (b) making his already tenuous and ambiguous relationship with his race even more fraught. My guess is that he bleached himself once the vitiligo got "too bad" (read: too ugly for him). This, of course, rather than making him appear more normal, just set him apart even more as a freak. Same thing with the plastic surgeries, which were starting then too.
- Then the accusations of child molestation. If he was guilty, talk about the self-loathing, and the crumbling of this edifice he had constructed separating him from society and people. If he wasn't guilty, the psychological effects would probably have been worse. For all this time, he at least could have used his extremely positive reception about the world as a source of emotional sustenance. Having been tried and found guilty in a court of public opinion of a crime that is universally one of the most reviled ever had to have been shattering. Especially if he wasn't guilty, but even if he was. (Although, of course, if he was it was no more than he deserved).
- This is getting long, so I'll just note that after that is a steady downward spiral in which his tragic attempts to make things better -- plastic surgery, unsuccessful documentaries -- only made it worse and worse for him.
It's horribly tragic. And speaking someone who is myself introverted, gay, and anxiety-prone, all I can think is: there but for the grace of God go I. Thank goodness I was not also super-talented, black, devoutly religions, and born in 1958.
Just wanted to delurk to say that as somebody who has had two siblings recently attend Colorado College, I know for sure that Colorado College is actually quite liberal.
Colorado Springs is an interesting town because there's always a little simmering tension between the highly-conservative town itself, and the highly liberal college in the middle of it. I can readily believe that voter suppression tactics are being directed toward CC students. They are generally very looked down on by most of the townspeople, largely because of their liberality and (perceived/relative) lack of religiosity.
On the plus side, CC students are also generally fairly independent and not likely to take this sort of tactic lying down...
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