Andrew J Lederer: My life wasn't defined by Jacko, neither was yours, so get over it

Published on Sunday 28 June 2009 21:59

MY FIRST thought on learning of Michael Jackson's death was that it was somewhat shocking and very sad. But rapidly, the coverage (that brought down the internet, for God's sake) really started to annoy me.

Both mainstream media and the online community framed the death as a world-changing event, as serious as the demise of a sitting leader. NBC News even reported that Jackson's passing would leave an "entire generation" without one of its "defining figures", as if the members of that generation would now careen inexorably toward the sun and certain immolation.

I mean, was your life or that of anyone you know actually defined and or guided by the talented and unusual artist's continuing existence?

One news outlet even failed at making the case that Jackson had been a fashion trendsetter, following the assertion with pictures of theatrical get-ups it would be hard to imagine even the flashiest citizen strolling down the street in. And commentator Francesca Biller-Safran went so far as to call Jackson's end the "death of our childhood".

Give me a break. Your childhood, my childhood, our collective childhood is only as dead as it was last Wednesday.

In fact, someone in my audience on Saturday night suggested that Jackson's death had brought the 1980s back to life. MTV was playing music videos again, the soundtrack of an era was throbbing through the airwaves. I walked down the street and saw a woman dancing to Jackson as she washed her car, then turned the corner and heard him singing through windows.

If anything, Jackson's death has resurrected childhood.

You know who should really be upset about Jackson's death and our societal shift of focus – the people of Iran, who have become last week's social networking phenomenon.

Here's where our inflated reaction to Jackson's passing has had real consequences. We're not talking about dead retrospective childhood, we're talking about dead people.

It's disturbingly clear that narcissism and hyperbole have metastasised throughout the body of our media-obsessed society. If these characteristics died, that would mark a real death to childhood, a true loss of generation-defining characteristics – and it would be all to the good.

Of course, it's reasonable to grieve over the untimely passing of someone who gave us pleasure but Jackson was not Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Kennedy or Lincoln.

As an audience, we've lost the opportunity to experience the best of what he might still have had to give. And as voyeuristic tabloid followers, we've lost the opportunity to gape at the excesses and travails that made his life the stuff of our lives; his troubles our entertainment.

But that being the case, we may, ironically enough, benefit from the loss. Perhaps we'll have no choice but to live for real, inside our own skins.

&#149 Andrew J Lederer is a comedian and regular Fringe performer