Bleached-out Michael Jackson is no role model for me

No role model: Michael Jackson is being reclaimed by the very black community that in life he sought so symbolically to shun
12 April 2012

It is exactly a week since the ridiculous mass hysteria first erupted over the death of MJ (as he is now being called). For seven days the nation has been deluged with little else but the ceaseless outpourings of grief.

From comparisons with Jesus (the most offensive), to Orpheus (the most erudite) and of course Diana (the most inane), to my favourite soubriquet, The People's Paedophile, the ensuing Jackson-induced global mental meltdown is at best deeply problematic and at worst reminiscent of his imploding, molten face.

Sadly, the sheer mawkishness of the whole spectacle is among the least disturbing things on show here.

Interestingly, in death, Jackson is being reclaimed by the very black community that in life he sought so symbolically to shun.

Jamie Foxx's cloying comments at the BET Awards show in LA last Sunday night, in which he said, "We want to celebrate this black man - he belongs to us and we shared him with everybody else" are the perfect verbal enema for this farce.

Tributes at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem and pronouncements by Spike Lee, Jesse Jackson and the Rev Al Sharpton have also reinforced this notion of reclaiming a prodigal son.

Are we, both here and in the US, so completely bereft of real heroes that we need to embrace a man whose life, seen in its totality, resembled much more the darker acts of a Shakespearean tragedy than an innocent fairytale, and whose every cosmetic gesture over the past 25 years clearly demonstrated a pathological hatred of his blackness?

Are we so desperate for role models that we now need to trip and fawn over the coffin of a man whose rabid self-loathing and glaring psychological imbalances made headline news for decades?

Never did Black Skin, White Masks - Frantz Fanon's classic book on the psychology of colonial racism - seem more appropriate for the title of Jackson's autobiography than the somewhat anodyne Moonwalk.

In fact, such slavish genuflexion before the Jackson altar actually debases us, and makes us look as devoid of a grip on reality as the man himself.

As a ground-breaking musician, dancer and popular entertainer, he was without doubt a colossus. That Jackson could "kick foot" like no other mortal is also a given.

To say that he danced as if clothed in the robes of God is probably a hyperbole we can just about allow. But there the idolatry must end. A venerable saint? A paragon of virtue and a shining bastion of purity and moral rectitude? Puh-lease!

Prophets, philosophers, philanthropists - truly great men whose lives have been a beacon to humanity and whose time on earth has served to elevate the human spirit - these are the real role models we should be craving.

People like Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Mandela, Bertrand Russell and Shakespeare - these are the people I would like the kids I mentor in Peckham to admire and emulate, not some bleached-out, gyrating, sexually ambiguous prima donna.

Surely the last word in pleasure

Relaxing in the park with a good book in the sunshine must rank as one of life's greatest pleasures. So simple and yet so satisfying.

So what a stroke of genius on the part of the Royal Parks to commission eight top authors, including Will Self, William Boyd and Ali Smith, to create new short stories for each of its vital, verdant lungs.

From Regent's Park to Richmond, and from Kensington to Greenwich, many of my favourite open spaces in the capital now have their own personal tributes.

Having attended William Boyd's reading by the bandstand in St James's Park on Tuesday, I now intend to buy the complete set and duly make the bucolic literary pilgrimage to all eight parks this summer.

I'm even going to get the regulation white handkerchief with knotted corners to keep my bald brown pate cool while I'm in my deckchair, and I'll remember to bring a dictionary when reading proud logophile Will Self's offering in situ.

Cherish the gift of the gab

Yes it does. You can almost hear the cadences of Obama's famous refrain in that bold and uncompromising assertion.

This weekend I am helping to judge the Institute of Ideas junior debating competition, where teenagers from around the UK and India will be gathering in London to compete for the kudos of winning the title.

The ability to influence public opinion by our use of language is a rare and remarkable gift. From Demosthenes and Cicero to Churchill and Martin Luther King, the way we speak and present intellectual arguments in public has always been important to the way we live.

Great oratory undoubtedly has the power to mobilise millions. And never has the way we speak in front of an audience been under such intense scrutiny as in today's sound-bite saturated media age.

Here's hoping the young debaters have been practising with pebbles in their mouths and that we are treated to some pyrotechnics to rival Denzel Washington's team of young stalwarts in The Great Debaters.

A stone's throw from where the poet William Blake had his vision of angels, Rye Lane in Peckham has often been said to resemble mini Lagos.

But on Tuesday night the doyens of the art world, imperiously clad in their white linen suits and black-rimmed Hoxton specs, braved the local hoodies and the miasma of feral delinquency that they normally associate with the mean streets of SE9 (which is, of course, far from the truth) for the opening of a summer art installation on the rooftop of the Peckham multiplex car park.

The view across the city was truly spectacular - one of those Damascene moments where cityscape and soulscape seamlessly merge, and which illuminate your perspective on our great metropolis.

Call me a philistine but I just wish the art and the painfully monochromatic crowd - in Peckham of all places - had had the same effect on my soul as the peerless vista.

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