Once again, and almost sublimely ignorant of the fact, the media were on trial during the recent court case against Michael Jackson, as indeed, were the media-consuming public. A man was found not guilty, but his life was nonetheless laid waste, and the American media who would have triumphed at a guilty verdict nonetheless exulted at an innocent one. This was not democracy, or law, or decency, or honour, or justice: this was the hang 'em high school of due process.
Michael Jackson is a tragic figure, an autistic child who knows nothing of the real world. Where the rest of us might have seen grey and doubt and confusion, he merely saw things with infantile clarity. And only a celebrity-demented culture such as ours has now become could have turned this poor creature into a publicly jeered-at grotesque, whose torment took new turns upon acquittal, as he continued to be hounded by sneering, bullying American comedians like Jay Leno.
No clear evidence has been adduced that he sexually assaulted any of his fondlings. His relationship towards those children he slept with is clearly bizarre - but with equal clarity, many of those children have insisted that his behaviour was playful and platonic. One exception - aided by a few disgruntled domestics - provided the spuriously evidential case against Michael Jackson.
Injustice is a common thing in human affairs, and injustice to a multimillionare is hardly a repetition of Auschwitz. But the net effect of intent is not the issue, but the intent itself. And quite clearly, large numbers of people were delighted at the thought of Michael Jackson being personally, morally, and financially ruined - even to the point that jurors in his trial were later seduced into saying he might possibly have been guilty of charges they had heard nothing about. Thus those who acquitted him then stabbed him in the back, for it was not sufficient to do legal justice; only lynch-mob law matched the need of the hour.
For Michael Jackson was the perfect target, the little black African-American boy who yearns for a face of Caucasian Carrera marble. In all his ambitions, in all he was, he found himself not in his fantasy home of Neverland, but a world of his own devising: Borderland, where the ordinary parameters of boy and man, male and female, black and white, celebrity and nonentity, met like the waters of the maelstrom, and became indistinguishable.
In the righteously vicious attack on his life, logic was abolished and decency abandoned. One NBC commentator observed: "Not guilty, but American parents have no proof of his innocence". That is right. And they have no proof that Bill Clinton is not a Martian, or that the Pope is not Martin Bormann, or that Queen Victoria is not alive and well and living in Alabama. One can never "prove" such things: all that the rule of common law can do is conclude that the prosecution failed to make a case which could be accepted beyond all reasonable doubt.
But there can seldom have been such a prosecution in which the state went to so much trouble, and with so little evidence. After all, the investigation was triggered by Jackson's own pathetic admission in the course of a television interview that he likes to go to bed with boys, not for sex, but for whatever bizarre companionship he found there. Even this did not trigger a complaint - but it did cause a Los Angeles therapist to violate the rules of his profession and report allegations by a patient, Gavin, that there had been sexual episodes between himself and Jackson.
Welfare officials tracked Gavin down, but both he and his mother denied Jackson sexually molested him. The case was passed to the District Attorney of Santa Barbara, Tom Sneddon, who clearly is no better than he ought to be. He spent eight weeks talking to Gavin and more especially, to Gavin's mother, who, equally, is no better than she ought to be. At the end of which, mother and son changed their story, enabling Sneddon to lead a raid by 70 officers on Jackson's house, which was then torn asunder: mattresses shredded, wardrobes ransacked.
The ensuing case must rank as the very nadir of jurisprudential hokum, with some details deserving a grim little smile indeed. Prosecution evidence included the allegation that he once licked a clothed boy on the head. A couple of staff-members, who apparently had the run of the Jackson bedroom, regardless of the presence of his guests, reported signs of an erection beneath the bedclothes. Yes, indeed gentlemen of the world, erections are apparently entirely voluntary things, which is probably news to Viagra, and constitute proof of criminal guilt: in which case, they'd better start building prisons everywhere, and building them big - very big indeed. So, girls, your big day has finally come: this is where you take over.
Michael Jackson mutilated himself in pursuit of some weird personal goal, and made himself the perfect target for the lynch-mob of celebrity culture. He has been harried through the courts and the media, and been damaged beyond all recovery. So look at him now, a broken, wizened torso of a man-boy, with his bleached skin, his straightened hair and his sad little fragment of a nose. He is the albino rook that is driven from the rookery and seeks sanctuary at the beach, only to be mobbed by gulls.
Thus his life, his soul a stranger to all peace, now and for the rest of his days: God help him indeed.