At LAX Art
I would trash this but I may end up watching some of this show, if it ever gets made.
CULTURE
8
Jul 09
Little Paris Tears
11-year old Paris Jackson was given a microphone at the conclusion of the Michael Jackson memorial service: “I just wanted to say, ever since I was born. My daddy has been the best father you can imagine.” I was moved as the little girl buried her tears in Janet Jackson’s embrace.
Earlier in the program, former child star, Brooke Shields also cried as she recalled her carefree times with MJ. They had a bond. A dominant theme in the life of Michael Jackson was his absolute faith in the innocence of childhood. I was a child in the 1980s and I witnessed Jackson transform into a genderless and ageless enigma -- pale, bizarre, and blank. As he got older and more reclusive, his vast wealth became a means to arrive at perpetual childhood. The soul music blackness of Jackson’s childhood had no place in the Peter Pan fantasy of his adulthood.
It was the young Michael Jackson, the black Michael, that garnered mythic language in a rousing speech by Reverend Al Sharpton. Despite all of the ambivalence displayed in Jackson’s life and music, Sharpton still insisted on the singer’s key contributions to the civil rights struggle. It was a dubious claim and endemic to an older generation of black leaders. He said: “I want his children to know there was nothing strange about your daddy, it was strange what your daddy had to deal with.” But Jackson’s behavior was, in fact, very strange. His weirdness was inextricable from his brilliance. Sharpton wished to normalize Jackson -- to bring the whitest, queerest sheep back into the fold.
As it was in life, Jackson’s death is impossible to separate from spectacle. The sadness of watching little Paris Jackson was not simply a little girl’s expressed loss of a father, but also the televised exhibition of mourning that could help redeem Michael’s competency as a loving father. Surrounded by the Jackson clan, I didn’t question the sincerity of the Paris Jackson’s tears. Instead, I wondered if this child, like her father before her, had been stage-managed to vindicate the Jackson name.
While alive, Michael Jackson obsessively sheltered his children and that practice will hopefully continue. I don’t want to watch Paris cry on TV again.
