Please spare us a Michael Jackson postage stamp

July 8, 11:48 AMSpiritual Life ExaminerRabbi Ben Kamin

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He was, undeniably, impossibly talented, hopelessly gifted, uncannily dexterous and other-worldly in music and dance.  And while even the most hard-boiled among us might point to his little girl’s genuinely tragic moment of uttered grief yesterday at the otherwise choreographed bereavement drama as evidence that “Yes, he was a father,” the fact is that, yes, he was a father.  So were a lot of men who died at the age of fifty.

Let’s hope the madness—and the commercial exploitation—does not seize the corporate copperheads at the ever-in-the-red and always disingenuous US Postal Service within the allotted grace period and push them to sell a Michael Jackson Neverland Postal Stamp (the new “Forever” print?) at first beat.  It recalls the Elvis stamp:  While tapping their feet to his incomparable music and lyrics, they forgot, or looked away from the drugs, the indulgences, the poor personal role model that Elvis Presley was in his own brief lifetime and just opted to make a mint off the American bill-paying public—though the Post Office has still never still seen a surplus nor been known for stellar service.

But in the case of Michael Jackson, the situation is actually even more treacherous.  Here are some of the concerns that will not exonerate the international cyber memorial euphoria that Rev. Al Sharpton (an alleged felon and unrepentant opportunist) is co-hosting, as usual:

• Michael Jackson’s personal life remains a deep labyrinth of unresolved and mind-bending scandals, some involving serious personal charges of deviant behavior.  The clinging doubts about his character cannot be dismissed with the tap of a foot or the wave of a glove.
• Michael Jackson was an adult when he was a child and a child when he was an adult.  In this sense, he may have been to some extent victimized by the national gossip culture; sealing him into a stamped image will not help the millions of young people suffering from this kind of disorder and, like Jackson, also recovering from abuse, in childhood, and in post-syndrome, at the hands of parents.
• Michael Jackson, though he did profess in his music to long for a world beyond color, nonetheless betrayed a serious disinterest, if not contempt, for his own African-American heritage.  The manifest powder-white dyeing of his skin can only be viewed as pathological.  Unlike other black entertainment icons of previous eras, such as Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier, Michael Jackson did not undertake any particular efforts in behalf of civil rights or political inclusiveness.  Unhappily, he betrayed some vociferous anti-Semitism in a 1996 recording, “They Don’t Care About Us,” which included lyrics such as “Jew me, sue me,” and “Kick me, K-ke me.”  He apologized for these, but never actually removed them from the album.
• In between hyper-ingestion of killer drugs and narcotics, Michael Jackson likely never in point of fact sat down and wrote a letter nor used an actual postage stamp himself.

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