The Myth That Michael Jackson Was Happy And Healthy
There is a destructive myth taking hold about Michael Jackson, originated by some of his devotees, perpetuated by many in his entourage and articulated outright by the Rev. Al Sharpton in his eulogy at the Staples Center last July. As Rev. Sharpton put it, looking directly at Michael's orphaned children, "There was nothing strange about your daddy. It was strange what he had to deal with it." The myth is that Michael was living a healthy and balanced life at the time of his death and expired only because some careless doctor accidentally murdered him in his sleep with a drug overdose. I have heard more and more people in the media making the same claim, particularly after having seen the This Is It documentary which is now being released. As one radio host put it to me recently, "Michael looks amazing in the documentary. It's clear that he was in excellent physical health and couldn't wait to go out and do his concerts."
The reason this misrepresentation is so destructive is that it would have us believe there is nothing to be learned from Michael's tragic death. It was all a mishap. Michael was loving life, ready for his big comeback, but a capricious mistake cut his life short. This myth demeans the tragedy of Michael's life by robbing him of a redemptive moment. It would have us believe there is nothing that we the living can learn from his untimely death; nothing that a celebrity-obsessed culture can extract from the painful life of one of America's greatest icons. And if this myth is allowed to continue then, dare I say it, Michael died in vain.
Of course nothing could be further from the truth. Health is not determined by the physical alone. There is also mental, emotional and spiritual health. In all these departments Michael was suffering severely. It's not normal to have to take hospital-grade anesthetics to fall asleep, and this even after downing a small trove of anti-anxiety medication and sleeping pills. Toward the end of his life Michael was an isolated and lonely figure who had squandered his wealth and was forced to agree to a staggeringly large number of concerts in order to rescue himself from a fate he repeatedly told me he feared, namely, becoming like Sammy Davis Jr., who was forced to degrade himself on late-night talk shows in order to pay his bills.
Michael always believed in the power of mystery. He stated repeatedly that while other stars had destroyed their careers through ubiquitousness, he had remained in the public imagination through scarcity. He highlighted the fact that other artists produced an album a year while he did so only once every few years. He also told me he never agreed to ever be a presenter at an awards show because it would make him too available. There is no way on earth Michael would have agreed to do 50 concerts unless he was absolutely forced to by insurmountable financial pressure.
In The Michael Jackson Tapes, we encounter, for one of the first times, not Michael Jackson the performer but Michael Jackson the man. Michael recorded these tapes for the express purpose of making it available in a book because he was tired of the myth. The book, which contrary to the speculation of some was published for an extremely modest advance and will benefit the "Turn Friday Night into Family Night" initiative, reveals a performer who understood that his heart was not known to a public who judged him very harshly for what they saw as his unethical excess. They did not know the extreme pain he had endured as a child, the loneliness with which he lived as an adult and how much it hurt him that people thought he had improper motives in his relationship with children. While Michael's entourage now say that Michael was positive and happy, Michael himself reveals that he was regularly walking around Encino, California, begging people to simply talk to him. While some of Michael's fans want us to believe that Michael had a lust for life, Michael himself says that he wished to "disappear" and that his greatest fear was growing old and beginning to forget. Michael rued the day when he would be seen as past his prime and therefore unable to command the admiration of the public through his talent.
All this, as well as a broken and lost childhood, is part of the price that Michael paid for fame. He wanted to share with the public the utter emptiness of fame and the importance of family and love. Michael loved being around ordinary families and he dreamed of a life of simple pleasures.
So why are we so afraid to hear his voice?
I suspect it has to do with a culture that is mostly fueled by fame. In a world where nearly every teenager wants to be famous, in a country where reality TV dominates the airwaves and where celebrity magazines rule the newsstands, we simply don't want to hear that it's all one big lie. That the unbridled lust for fame is killing people and that the emperor has no clothes. Fame will never be a proper substitute for love, and talent will never be an acceptable alternative for virtue.
How sad, therefore, that so many who claim to love him now want to rewrite his story to tell us that Michael was so shallow that fortune and fame alone were enough to make him happy. This was never the case.
My book The Michael Jackson Tapes has been greeted with apprehension by some who would like to perpetuate the lie that our celebrities are for the most part healthy. They are not. Very few flourish in fame and a great many do not even survive its effects. Those who do prosper in the limelight do so only if they hold on to what I call the three essentials of fame:
1. A strong religious faith, reminding you at all times that amidst the public's hero worship you are not a deity and are a servant of the one, true G-d.
2. A loving spouse who makes you take out the garbage and otherwise keeps you humble.
3. A cause larger than oneself to which one can consecrate one's celebrity.
Bono is an important case in point. A devout Christian, married to the same wife for 27 years, he has consecrated his fame to the cause of Africa and third-world relief and has not only survived celebrity but has become, deservedly, one of the most admired humans on earth.
Michael aspired to the same. But when he abandoned the Jehovah's Witnesses Church to which he was once exceptionally devoted, went through two divorces, and, most importantly, was prevented from serving his beloved cause of helping the world's children because of multiple allegations against him, he lost much of the anchor in life that kept him grounded.
Those who loved Michael should be true to his memory not by creating a myth of a happy man cut down by a tragic error, but rather as a noble soul who aspired to great humanitarian achievement but whose superstardom served to impede, rather than heal, a desperate and painful loneliness.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the founder of This World: The Values Network. The Michael Jackson Tapes: A Tragic Icon Reveals his Soul in Intimate Conversation was published in September. www.shmuley.com
Stephen Gyllenhaal: This is It: Michael Jackson's Transcendence
I went to see This Is It the way one might go see a horror picture. What I encountered instead was an artist at the absolute top of his game.
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I clapped at Reverend Sharpton's comments, because there was a truth to what he said. To me, it acknowledged that Michael Jackson was a human being who had to deal with extra-ordinary circumstances. That he wasn't as strange as many people portrayed him to be. That he wasn't some alien from Mars who had green blood. He was just like us. He was human. He was capable of greatness, yes, but that greatness was contained in an imperfect vessel. He was human, and everyday, MJ had to fight for his right to be human. I cannot imagine living everyday being pulled in a million different directions just to fight for my own humanity. As a human being, we make mistakes, do stupid things and sometimes we fail despite our best efforts. I think that is why we love Michael Jackson, because we connected with his humanity. Very few of us can relate to his fame,his success, or his talent, but we could connect to his humanity. The need to love and be loved, the longing to be accepted and appreciated, the desire to make a difference, the pain that goes with rejection and betrayal - those are universally human. You don't have to be the world's biggest superstar to understand what those things mean.
I think you underestimate the intelligence and heart of Michael Jackson's fans. We're not all a bunch of irrational, star struck sheep. You imply we can't see or don't want to see straight because as fans and supporters, we cannot recognize how broken MJ was. But the thing is, we do. Please don't imply that just because there are images of an active Michael in his element, we can learn nothing from his life and death. Please give us more credit than that. We saw his anguish, his pain, the many imbalances and inconsistencies in his life. Why do you think so many of us are so heartbroken that MJ is no longer around? Because somehow, we knew how profoundly sad, lonely and misunderstood Michael Jackson was. Amidst all that, though, we were rooting for him to be happy, to be healthy, and to succeed. We wanted him to find a measure of peace and joy in a world that had both blessed and been very unkind to him.
I wonder if it was always meant to be this way. That we would only understand that something brilliant, something beautiful had sat at our table, walked with us to school, danced with us when no-one else would, been there all the time - when it no longer was. Into the space he occupied, into the vacuum, somehow has flowed all the love we withdrew and all the love we forgot. All of us carried along on a journey since June 25th, a journey we had no idea we planned on taking. We were caught unawares, without the the right clothes. And now we find ourselves asking the questions we didn't ask before, because no-one was asking them. No-one said what if? What if that wasn't the way it was? We thought we knew. We didn't.
November 25th.
14:00 LA time.
http://www.majorloveprayer.blogpost.com
The truth Is Coming.
There was once some one who came thousands of years before Michael, who was misunderstood also. He was loved by the multitudes and had a great following. He was compassionate soft spoken ,kind and spent all of his time enlightening those who wanted to hear.he wanted us to come to him as children. He fed the hungry, healed the sick and loved the children.He encouraged us to give as Michael did(over 200,000,000.00 to charities) More than any of his fellow artist including Bono and I love Bono also. He was told that he shouldn't heal the sick.He was scolded for giving too much attention to the comon people and the poor. It made him very sad but he continued to good deeds. This man was also ridculed and mocked and was chastised for it. They hated him so much that they underminded all of his good works and eventually crucified him. I think you know who I am talking about.I think Michael did more than some gave him credit for. He was only human and made mistakes along the way but overall he was truely a good man. He will get his reward.
November 25th
14:00 LA time
http://www.majorloveprayer.blogspot.com
Hold the vision.
One more thing Rabbi, we do hear his voice and it is beautiful.
One day Michael's children will be confronted - on top of everything else, with the horrific and painful realities of the circumstances that drove their beloved father to need to medicate himself in order to sleep. They will ask the questions their family are already dreading. They will ask why their father died and what led him there. They will ask what their father did that made an entire country not only turn their back on him, but effectively take away his rights as a human being in the process. His children will deserve to know the answers to these questions. I believe those answers should amount to more than the ratings-driven sensationalism and biased hearsay that gave Diane Dimond, Maureen Orth, and Nancy Grace the careers they currently enjoy today. I am asking that we look for ourselves into the facts and actual transcripts of the trial - not just the quotes from Smoking Gun. Read about the history of the accusers parents and their profound non-crediblity, and recall for a moment - the relentless, rotated barrage of numbing distortion that infected the networks, papers and on-line sites for months and ask yourselves this? Are you convinced you know the truth? Because if you aren't; that makes what was done to Michael Jackson - nothing short of inhumane.
Michael Jackson was and remains a deeply misunderstood personality. But it is highly misleading to think or to lead others to think that Michael Jackson ever considered himself a deity. This was not the case. Michael had a great respect, understanding and humility for the notion of a higher authority, and just like someone else who surely does not need mentioning - he saw it as vital that a person try to cultivate that god-like-ness within themselves. It is a subtle distinction, and one that can get people in theological hot water with those who still think people need an intermediary to reach that aspect of themselves - but it is a distinction. Michael Jackson's message was We Are The World. It means we are all equal in the true reality of things and that the responsibilty for changing what we don't like or what it is not working better - lies with all of us. The sacrifice and the gifts Michael gave here are beyond the understanding of many, but that understanding will come in time. So take heart all who grieve now - and keep the faith. The truth is coming.
The love that exists worldwide for Michael was never really just about the music he made. It is about who he was as a person. This human being, despite being afflicted with Vitiligo, lupus and the scars of an extreme childhood, extended himself and helped millions of children for years. The simple truth is, Michael reached out to children because he understood their pain. That his ' reaching' would later be abused by the parents of two such children is a tragedy, and it speaks to the nature of humanity itself. Michael had his issues for sure, but until the first allegations traumatized his confidence and sense of self, his career was in orbit and he was ploughing back significant amounts of the money he earned into the Heal The World foundation. I think people underestimate the effect such a public cauterization had on him. As we all know, it's next to impossible to prove a negative; and conversely it's relatively easy - weapons of mass destruction anyone?- to get people to believe anything; if you sell it hard enough. That goes for fairweather ' former friends' too.
Michael overcame many things and left a beautiful legacy for his family, friends, and fans.
MJ was a wonderfully complex and complicated human being who deserved much more respect in life and in death then he has received from the press and from former friends.
In the end, I have faith that the truth will prevail and that misguided and false tales and those who spin them will be relegated to the dustbin of history.
Michael Jackson may not have chosen how he was treated as a child,but he certainly chose to pursue the entertainment business as an adult. He was probably intelligent enough to seek therapy for his "troubled childhood"; he certainly had the money to pay for it. It's time for us to acknowledge that he was responsible for his life,and he was responsible for his death as well.
Wow, myles, so that means I can abdicate my sacred duty as a physician, sell my services to the highest bidder, and if a customer - I mean patient - dies, oh well, he asked for it! And to just think I had it all wrong, taking that dumb Oath seriously.
I choose Michael Jackson in all his beauty and magic.
Click on the link below and experience the "JOY MICHAEL JACKSON":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD6uz7BrBvU&feature=fvw
Beautiful, thanks for posting!
It really strange that in one way we expect artists to more than human. Alot of us had painful childhoods inwhich we haven't dealt with totally and have to face constantly in interpersonal relationships with friends and love one. I guess because of his fame and money we demanded Michael to get over it. Strange. I don't think Michael had a happy and balanced life. I don't think most great artists do. It as if the pain they suffered fuels their creativity. You can name the artists in any field that had a happy and balanced life. Tom Hanks, Paul Newman and Paul McCartney. Even the artists I cited struggled to fine that balance. I too don't think that Michael was a pedopile. But his gravitational pull was toward children that he saw himself in. He wasn't just trying to relive childhood but was trying to heal the hurt of a child as if he was healing the hurt in him. Watching the This Is It movie just confirms that this was a great artist who was able to give it his all even with the chains that binded him.
I guess we all see Michael Jackson through our own eyes and thoughts. Even if you read what a former friend has to say you will believe only what you want to believe.
Actually, people tend to believe what they are spoon-fed by the media, particularly if they have no motivation to dig deeper. That's understandable. However, in the case of MJ, the media has a long history of ignoring documented facts in favor of sensationalism.
Very eloquently stated Rabbi. There is a lesson, a deeper spiritual message on the life and death of Mr. Jackson. The very fact that his death received "world-wide" attention is not about the "man" but the state of our world and what do we truly value? I once asked my great grandmother what did she want most out of life and she said "peace". Many years later, I finally understand that peace is indeed priceless. What is more incredible is that she told me about his sadness around the time that ABC was released.
The worldwide attention Michael Jackson received was not about "the man?" Then what was it about? We truly value generosity, kindness, humility, talent, love and a sterling example of fatherhood--all of which Michael Jackson embodied. That's why Michael Jackson is mourned today and will always be a part of our collective remembrance. Shmuley? Here today...gone tomorrow. Big deal.
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