Remembrance

It would seem that the world can be divided into four distinct groups, those who worshipped Michael Jackson, those who thought he was a joke or a very sad individual, those who couldn’t care less and those who have never heard of him. I suspect that the latter group may be found in remote locations and/or those ruled by mindless religious zealots.

Love him or loathe him, it has never been easy to ignore him and though I belong in the third group, I have to admit that he had a prodigious talent and an ability to entertain. He has always been seen as a victim of his success, and yet just like the rest of us he has made decisions that have steered his life and had to live with them.

The media will of course make he amounts of money from his early demise, and there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth when it comes to his funeral. I imagine that it will be rather like that of the blessed Diana, whose untimely death was used by the media to whip up mass hysteria in the tabloid reading sea of humanity, many of whom will be made to feel that they have lost someone that they actually know or who meant something to them.

In reality he was just a normal human male, blessed with a talent that fitted into the zeitgeist, and thanks to the manipulations of those around him, he found fame and fortune while losing himself along the way.


There are so many more individuals with different talents, whose work and ideas touch our lives in different ways, many of them more tangibly than mere pop singers and yet mostly they pass away unnoticed. Most of us will hardly be missed, except by those closely connected to us and our marks on the world will quickly fade. To be remembered is the only sort of afterlife that makes any sense and I guess that privilege is reserved for those who perish at the hands of the press.