Ups and Downs

Up: Is this a joke? I’m not normally the type of person that is shocked by what I see on television or read about in the news. You could sacrifice an adorable kitten holding a chocolate-shaped heart engraved with “I wuv you” using a wooden pike and it wouldn’t make much of a dent in my cynicism (thanks 90’s-era teen angst and disillusionment!). There are only a few things that really get me excited or emotional, including skeet shooting, landing on exactly $15.00 when I fill up my gas tank, and the movie “Love Actually.” Otherwise, I am a dense forest of solemn masculinity.

But every now and then something comes along that makes me go, “Did that really just happen?” Take this Schick Quattro commercial, for example:

Holy hell, did that really just happen? Are those plants meant to signify what I think they’re signifying? Yes, yes they are. It’s a commercial for a bikini-area trimmer, where nearby plants suddenly become less unruly and more appropriate for a hot day at the beach of sun-bathing and of coyly having a splash-fight with your friends in a see-through, barely-there vintage Rolling Stones t-shirt.

What was I talking about? Oh, the commercial…

It’s literally telling women that they can trim their bush with this device. That’s not me being crude—there’s no other sentence that can be drawn from this advertisement. You don’t watch a commercial for a bikini trimmer wherein literal bushes shrink and think “Oh! Their offering me the chance to discreetly groom a sensitive and private area of my body.” How does this ad make it on television? I’m pretty sure I once saw it air directly proceeding a commercial for “Dora the Explorer.” Seriously, someone tell me: How did this make it onto day-time television?

Down: The King of Pop: Hey, did you happen to hear that Michael Jackson died last Friday? Maybe not; After all, it was easy to miss the news—it wasn’t reported on by cable news networks with the same level of attention we might give the assassination of a president, it didn’t somehow push the electoral crisis in Iran off the frontpage of most major newspapers, and it certainly didn’t force MTV to interrupt an episode of “She’s Really Going Out With Him?” which, ostensibly, I was only watching because I was sick and had to stay indoors. So I can see how you might not have heard that the so-called King of Pop passed away.

I’m having trouble with this one. I’m trying to be mindful of that rule about not speaking ill of the dead, and I’m certainly not happy that Michael Jackson overdosed on Demerol and went into cardiac arrest. But the way that so many people on television and in newspapers talked about the ‘loss of a genius’ and the way they would miss the ‘talented but troubled’ singer kind of took me by surprise too. Michael Jackson had a lot of problems, most which—at their root—are not of his doing. He was abused by his father and thrust into the spotlight at an early age. More than that, he was extremely generous, giving yearly to almost 40 charities. And yet, the accusations of child molestation that were twice levied against him have to be weighed as well. He was acquitted of pedophile charges in two separate incidents, but also admitted in a television documentary that he slept in the same bed with sick children that he invited to his Neverland Ranch. On top of that, one of children who accused him was able to accurately describe Jackson’s genitalia. And yet, on the flip side, the first child Jackson was accused of abusing, Jordan Chandler, was recorded remarking how much money he expected to get from the trial, leaving the impression that the whole affair was a scam.

So, in all, I think it’s kind of impossible to figure out where to place Michael Jackson. He wrote some of the greatest pop songs in western music history, and not for nothing, also helped to break the color barrier that kept African Americans out of the pop music world. He also slept in the same bed as sick children, and may or may not have engaged in inappropriate sexual behavior with them. For me, one doesn’t outweigh the other—the facts of his life are just that. So maybe he was everything that everyone has said; maybe he was a troubled genius, maybe he was a generous man with peculiar tastes and the psyche of a child, and maybe he was turned into a pedophile by the very people that abused and exploited him when he was a child. But there is one thing I thing I know for certain, and I don’t meant it as a cheap shot: Jackson’s increasingly bizarre appearance over the last decade was a portent of his death—he fell apart on the outside trying to cover up the damage inflicted at a much deeper level. And I just don’t see how anyone can see that as anything  but sad.