No Glove? No Love

So I was at work and I heard my first Michael Jackson is Dead joke. I take no credit for it, but I thought I'd share:

Farrah Fawcett dies and goes to Heaven. God asks "Now that you have earned your way into My presence, what is the one wish you would make for the world you left behind?"

And Ghost Farrah says "That all the world's children will be safe."

The next day, Michael Jackson died.

Ba-dum-bum.

Not exactly the height of hilarity, but the point there is that for every wailing tragedy, there is always a parallel track of humor, perhaps gallow's humor, perhaps earned derision, perhaps schadenfreude or maybe just a contrarian reflex to hagiography in the public sphere. I remember the weird mixture of horror, relief and cavalier discordance the first post-Challenger joke I heard lo these twenty-some years ago.

Actually, there were two.

One was from this kid Darryl. They wheeled the VCR/TV combo trolley into my sixth grade classroom so we could witness the grainy VHS horror of our space shuttle exploding. To this day I'm not sure why; maybe to instill in us the sense of historic moment out teachers of that generation had known with the Kennedy assasination; maybe as part of any regular socializing program in public school to imprint patriotic reaction, making sure we understood this machine disintigrating in a fireball was actually a triumph of Duty and Country; maybe it was the frustrated sadists in charge of us from 8 to 2:30 every day working out the jones they were lugging around since they weren't allowed to make us play dodgeball. Who knows?

Anyway, the tape starts and the thing happens and the boys go "Whoa!" and some of the girls cry and Darryl says, clear as day, "Looks like the Fourth of July came early."

I've never seen a teacher strike a student. But I've seen a parent strike a child. I know the face. I know the tone of voice. I know the subtle sideways jaw quiver. I know the booming, loping steps to target. Most of those things happened. Darryl was gone very quickly and for the rest of the day.

On the playground, maybe that day but certainly by the end of the week, I heard this one:

How did they know Christa McAuliffe had dandruff?
They found her Head and Shoulders on the beach.

Ba-dum-bum.

It took my 11-year-old brain a minute to process the pun (oh, I get it, like the shampoo brand...) but I remember not daring to laugh. I remembered the teacher's face when she rounded on poor, idiot, survival-instinct-retarded Darryl. The monkey bars had ears. I think I did what I did in most public school social situations through high school: I started to cry and blamed it on the fat kid. I guess in retrospect I'd have been fat too if I had to spend all my recesses inactive in detention.

Now that I'm well past ear-shot and arm's length of my sixth grade teacher, or any public school administrators of stature, I can be a little more circumspect in my reaction to the non-tragedy of Michael Jackson's unexpected(?) death.

If anyone actually read this blog, I'm sure I'd take heat for not subscribing to the tragic-osity of the event, but people who call it that (hysterical fans, TV news Chyron writers, etc.) are missing the definition slightly. A middle aged man sliding slowly to emotional, financial and (finally) physical oblivion over a torturous 20 year stretch is more sad--in many colorful senses--and even a bit tedious than tragic.

Remember, "tragic" things have to be preventable or otherwise cognitively incongruent. Children with cancer are tragic because children are supposed to be healthy and growing and the poetic eptiome of both physical life and spiritual innocence, untouched by the concerns of wracking pain and looming mortality.

A tragic thing in the Shakespearean sense is disaster from easily preventable circumstances. If only the messenger found Romeo, or if Macbeth had just told his wife to shut the hell up one time or Desdemona had hewed to the 16th century social norms about interracial dating, think of the unnecessary blood that wouldn't have been spilled.

I'm not really seeing how the Michael Jackson thing fits in either category.

I will admit I did get sucked up into the nostalgia feedback loop for about 12 hours or so. I was 8 when Thriller came out and, yes, I DID think it was awesome. Plus: dude had a monkey! Although in retrospect, I guess it's good I never got to visit his magic castle-like home. For more than just the obvious reason.

But the fuzz rubbed off the nostalgia peach pretty quickly and I'm left with one lasting impression about Michael Jackson: he's going to be to child molesters what Barry Bonds is to steroids and OJ Simpson is to bloody, near-decapitation double homicide. We can't prove it, but we're all pretty sure...

Or maybe, if you consider the common denominator in the above list, that's just history trying to keep a black man down.

Although, in fairness (no pun intended), we couldn't really say that about Mike anymore at the end, could we?

And we always try to keep the falsetto-voiced noseless albino frog-man freaks down, don't we? We do. Because that's where they belong. Otherwise they will eat our children.