iMichael

A huge talent is gone … by his own doing.

~ Billbrady (on Breitbart.com, June 27)

iMichael at Motown, Detroit, circa 1970

I was 8 years old when “The Jackson 5″ hit the airwaves. The new hit song “A-B-C” was blaring outside storefront record stores. I can still remember listening to that song over and over and struggling to do the dance steps that iMichael did so effortlessly on TV. That record was cut at Barry Gordy’s Motown Records, in the basement of a converted home on W. Grand Blvd., about five miles from where I was born in Detroit, Mich.

For an 8-year-old boy born in the ghettos of Detroit, surrounded by blight, ignorance and despair, the Jackson 5 were like euphonious angels descended from heaven. We couldn’t get enough of these boys and their wonderful new music. However, as I matured and started learning things at the library independent of my peers, popular culture, or conventional thinking, I soon became bored with mere pop music entertainers and only found intellectual stimulation in the works of the classical masters.

Indeed, the Jackson 5 and other Motown groups made millions from poor black people in cities and towns across America, but what happed after the music stopped? I (we) had to “look at the man in the mirror.” I came to the painful, Sisyphus realization that I was still in the ghetto, still surrounded by a dysfunctional community and still mired in debilitating pathology, or what conservative scholar Dinesh D’Sousa in his book, “The End of Racism,” referred to as “promiscuity, ignorance and crime.”

How could I get my body out of the ghettos of Detroit? More importantly, how could I transcend a ghetto mentality and get my mind out of the ghetto … forever?

The public library: Segregation & salvation

After the 1967 riots in Detroit, one of the worst in American history, to protect us my mother made us spend Saturdays at the local library, starting at age 5. This epiphany experience taught me two profound things: 1) The library taught me that knowledge is power; and 2) The library taught me not to automatically accept the opinion of others (even adults) without first confirming it with other sources, preferably original sources.

Indeed, for a time I was beguiled by the cult of iMichael and the Jackson 5, but even as a little kid of 8, 9, 10 years old, I began to see that the world of entertainment was a world of delusions and psychosis: “The Ed Sullivan Show,” tens of thousands of hysterical girls who didn’t even know you jostling to touch the hem of your garment, trips around the world, TV commercials, radio appearances, limos, big mansions in California; a surreal, existential pathology that I wanted nothing to do with. I wanted to live, move, thrive and operate in reality, in the here and now; therefore, the older I got, the less enamored I was of iMichael. By the time his “Thriller” album came out in 1982, I was 21, a college graduate. iMichael was irrelevant to me.

The legacy of iMichael – vanity

What is the legacy of iMichael? Yes, on one level it is excitement, fame, fortune and the cult of celebrity. Yet, despite a billion dollars in record sales, I can hear the words of the ancient king of Israel, Solomon, ringing in my ears: Vanity of vanities all is vanity saith the preacher!

Although King Solomon never met iMichael, he prophesied the narcissism, futility and worthlessness of his entire body of work in those sublime words for the ages: “Vanity of vanities …” If you doubt my analysis of iMichael, look dispassionately at his oeuvre. What really has he left the world? What substantively has iMichael contributed to humanity to make this world a better, safer place for children, a godlier planet?

Here is the chorus to his popular song, “We are the World”:

We are the world
We are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day
So let’s start giving
There’s a choice we’re making
We’re saving our own lives
It’s true we’ll make a better day
Just you and me

Has that song, which netted tens of millions of dollars, brought world peace or an end to poverty since 1985 when the song was written? Has iMichael and his cadre of the world’s most noted entertainers (Quincy Jones, Lionel Richie, Diana Ross, Steve Wonder, et al.) that created, produced and sang that song, filled one hungry belly of a child so that they would never hunger again? Did that song stop one dictator from plunging yet another nation into chaos and civil war? … Absolutely not!

What, then, is the true legacy of iMichael separate and apart from titillating the masses and sycophantic Hollywood propaganda? The answer is found in a revelatory comment posted on Breitbart.com by “Afuel”:

[The] Hollywood freak show continues. Jackson succumbs to his problems with life, all the usual suspects surround him: lawyers, doctors, agents and many so-called friends and acquaintances, all looking for a score. The sick fans, living their fantasies through him, caring less about him even when they say they love him; all the time bleeding Jackson’s very life away and pushing him further into the depths of his psychosis. The real truth will come out now that he is dead, while the real money is now going to be made with a larger cut for all with Jackson not sharing in loot. … Another Hollyweird archive story.

Requiem in ‘C’ (for Circus)

In the late first century A.D., the great Roman poet and satirist Juvenal once famously wrote: Two things only the people anxiously desire: bread and circuses. Two-thousand years later the people haven’t changed. President Obama has promised America the bread of welfare, union care and health care. A commentator on Breitbart.com regarding the death of Jackson gave us the circus, saying we now have “one less freak in this circus called Life.”

RIP, iMichael … yet the circus continues.

Ellis Washington, currently a professor of law and political science at Savannah State University, former editor at the Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute, is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history, political philosophy and critical race theory. He has written over a dozen law review articles and several books, including “The Inseparability of Law and Morality: The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law” (2002). See his law review article “Reply to Judge Richard Posner.” Washington’s latest book is “The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust.”

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