None of us can really say we didn't see it coming. When Michael Jackson died last week, I didn't feel shock in the least. After all, this wasn't just a train wreck -- one can jump from a train, this was a plane crash -- we heard the engines conking out long ago, we all saw the fuselage hurtling faster and faster to the ground below, probably even Michael did, but there wasn't a thing any of us could do about it. And there certainly wasn't anything he could do. After all, he was and has always been trapped inside himself.
My emotions, rather, centered in the areas of sadness and relief. Sadness that someone so talented, who has given the world so much culture- and generation-transcending music, was gone forever. And relief that this tormented soul, whose life was destroyed first by his abusive and demented parents, then by the cockroaches who circled around him all his life, was finally free of all of them. At last.
I don't want to deify Michael. He wasn't perfect: he was probably a child-molester, certainly a drug abuser and clearly addicted to needless plastic surgery, which disfigured a once adorably handsome young man. And he was almost certainly gay, even if his own demons never allowed him to be who he really was. Regardless of any of this, no one doubts his musical legacy is secure. When the memories of his eccentricities and failings are long forgotten, we'll still be humming his music and (no doubt unsuccessfully) attempting his moon walk.
If I believed in a god, I'd say he's in a better place. I don't, and he's not. But the torture is over. And the vultures who circled him for 40 years will soon disperse in search of someone else to torment. Michael Jackson has left the building.
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