Source: Black Agenda Report
Michael Jackson is dead, and we are told the cause of his death is a mystery. But there’s no mystery. This enormously gifted and sad man died of a lethal Amurrikan disease many call TMTS (Too Much Too Soon), and the terminal qualities of his chronic disorder began to manifest long before he actually passed. Many who denied the immensity of the man’s talent will cry crocodile tears now, and many of those folks are people who, just a week ago, were more than eager to castigate his outwardly bizarre behavior, which, even at a glance from this far away, was clearly a symptom of an isolated emotional and mental illness which went untreated all the man’s days.
But that’s Amurrika. Amurrika has always set up its idols for a moment, only to make a public spectacle of their human frailty when Amurrika believes it can sell enough trash magazines and other forms of cultural offal. Michael Jackson, like Freddie Prinze, John Belushi, Janis Joplin, and many others before him, fell into the workings of TMTS, and got ground up in the gears of the machine. Not that the machine really cares. You can hear the scavengers gnawing on bones all the way to the bank from any vantage point where you stand.
There are those who tell us that Michael’s fate came to him because he was just too powerful a figure on the cultural scene and too black to be allowed such power in Amurrika. There’s no denying the importance of these cultural factors, but they weren’t decisive in the end. The fact of the matter is that Jackson, while at the top of his game as a performer, was as brilliant a talent as anyone who ever stood center stage in Amurrika. A lot of the artist’s most brilliant work with his brothers as lead for the Jackson 5, Off the Wall,Thriller, Bad, were bones in the throat of his most bile-ridden Amurrikan critics, and that’s why they hated him so. “Whacko Jacko,” as the New York Post called him, my ass. Many people familiar with that style of journalism know what’s actually whack, jack.
