*****WALL OF TEXT ALERT*****WALL OF TEXT ALERT*****WALL OF TEXT ALERT*****My wife is sort of one of those people who didn't really give a crap about him until he died. She is very much an 80'sphile and as he was a considerable part of the culture back then, she started getting all M.J. centric after his death. As for me, I wasn't really "with it" until the mid 90's so much of what I think about him was shaped by word of mouth and the media. When I heard that he had possibly molested children I honestly thought that "Ok, so another celebrity has gone off the deep end with fame, what else is on..."
I didn't pay attention to the trial, but I like psyche profiles, so when they gave his, I felt that, given his up bringing and his path to fame, he had a natural distrust for adults. That's not to say he didn't have adult friends. Many of his celebrity friends sympathized with him; hell, many had gone through the same thing. It's just that he may have felt that children were "safe" to love, that they were more acceptable to love, because of their innocence. Here is where there was my mental split. On the one hand, one could say that this predilection towards children cold have fed off of his very adult desires, and led to his ruin. But this raises the problem that if he loved children for their innocence, could he bring him self to destroy that innocence by raping them? If it had been proven that he was
sexually abused as a child, I might have bought that argument; he was
physically abused, but I don't think that would have been enough for him go to the dark side. Love him of hate him, Joe Jackson was the architect of Michael's success. With out him Michael wouldn't have been where he is today...
*pauses to appreciate the sublime irony of that statement*
...*Ahem*, I mean, in a "business" sense.
This means that he respected his father, so even though his father took advantage of him, Michael was rich enough TOO take advantage of...
Wait...what if Joe PAID the doctor to kill Michael? Seriously. Michael has been Joe's golden goose for three decades, After the child molestation case, Michael wasn't ready to give up and even bad record sales are record sales. So put it together, your an old business man, and your golden goose is still laying golden eggs, just not very big ones, and then the goose announces that he is going to lay a HUGE one and then quit laying them all together. Now suppose that your golden goose had a diverse stock portfolio and holds the rights to rights to all the eggs of the
last great golden goose. Now suppose that the golden gooses kids are getting older and if they get much older, all those eggs are gonna go to them. If I were a man like Joe Jackson, I might start to think it would be more profitable to use the hype of the up coming tour to increase sales of all of Michael's back catalog, and then right before he goes on tour, (of course done in support of a new album and music videos, which will generate MILLIONS)(and I mean, they've-already-sold-out-all-of-the-shows-he's-about-to-hop-on-a-plane-to-London, RIGHT BEFORE,) you kill that golden goose, and have your self, an albeit ever so slightly smaller HUGE golden egg, and (but more importantly) one damn fine goose dinner. In fact, for Joe Jackson, this movie was probably like after eating his fill, burping and finding out he really
did have room for the Jell-o, or some friends unexpectedly dropping by after the feast with an extra bottle of wine.
But I digress;
back to the point, if Michael viewed adults as people who took advantage of him, then it could be argued that he could have transferred that in to a sexual means. But look at Michael's father; He trained Michael not to do any thing that would jeopardize his fame, and hey, lets face it, up until that point, this way of doing things had proven effective.
So this brings us to the other hand; He didn't have sex with those children. Doing so would have been insane as a business move, and as for Michael's moral code, well, he named his estate Neverland. If that's not a cut and dry case for him having a Peter Pan disorder I don't know what is. And furthermore, he saw other children as playmates, something he was denied growing up, and I mean he wanted to PLAY with them, not have sex with them. To Michael, playing a good game of Yatzee or a particularly good game of soccer with a child would have been infinitely more emotionally gratifying than any sexual release. More to the point the thought of doing that to a child would have been the ultimate betrayal of his nature and the suggestion of it most likely repulsed him to the core. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if threw up a little when they told him what he was being charged with. For Michael, the money fame brought was used in the way most kids want to use it, to acquire that which he has up until now been unable to have, or has been denied. For Michael, that was the platonic companionship of like minded individuals, and many of those just happened to be children.
Still, I thought the crude jokes were funny, and for a time I did wonder. More because, despite his moral code, he was a bit of a nutjob, albeit an understandable one.
At the time of the second trial, I thought, "Oh, well, I guess he really COULD make the leap," but as time wore on and the facts came out it became blatantly obvious that this was just a money grab by this poor childs' mother, designed to use Michael tattered public image as collateral in a poor attempt at blackmail. What's more pathetic is that it almost worked.
After watching the movie, it was obvious to me that at the end of the day Michael Jackson was the consummate entertainer, and as ever great entertainer knows, "the show must go on." So if anyone says that Michael would not have wanted this movie to come out, they either did not see "THIS IS IT" or they weren't paying attention.
Heh heh... Sorry for the wall of text.