He joins a list of other musicians and artists
Who died early: Jimi Hendrix, Judy Garland,
Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Elvis Presley,
Karen Carpenter, Kurt Cobain, Lenny Bruce,
Vincent van Gogh, Scott Fitzgerald.
Here’s an observation that may sound a little bitter.
It's not based on medical understanding,
Nor on medical facts about Michael Jackson's life.
It's based on understandings about suicide,
About life and what sustains it, about what happens
To you when people reject you and put you away.
First, have look at these two photographs:
Now I want to ask you,
Which image shows a person who wants to live,
And which image shows a person who know longer cares to live?
Dumb question, right?
Now I'm going to ask another dumb question:
Who killed Michael Jackson?
You want me to say we all killed him, right?
Or his doctor killed him, guilty as charged.
Perhaps you believe he killed himself.
People have a lot of ways to kill themselves, you know.
You can do it slowly or you can do it suddenly.
We have the news reports on Jackson's death
Telling us again and again, the coroner performed an autopsy,
But the results of the investigation, the cause or causes of death
Won't come out for several weeks.
All we know is that Michael's heart stopped
Around midday on June 25.
All we know is that the medics couldn't get it started again.
All we know is that Michael was declared dead
At the hospital some time later.
Why should that surprise us, why should we be shocked?
When Michael was married to Lisa Marie Presley
Fourteen years before he died, he confided to her that he feared
He would die the same way her dad did.
Elvis also died slowly, right before us.
He also died from taking too many prescription drugs.
We're not sure why, but you get lonely when people idolize you.
Michael's decline was a little more clear-cut.
Let's see if we can trace the history.
The first sexual abuse charge against Jackson occurred in 1993.
They came from a guy named Jordan Chandler.
The second sexual abuse charge came from Gavin Arvizo in 2003.
He went to trial for that one in 2005.
If we can find twelve people who say you did it,
You’ll go to prison for a long time.
He was acquitted in June 2005 after a trial of five months.
We vacationed near Acadia National Park up in Maine,
When we heard the news over the television in the lobby.
I wonder how many people thought he was guilty anyway.
How many people thought that Wacko Jacko
Had committed the crimes, whatever the jury said.
Of course they let him off, he's Michael Jackson.
So many people decided about his guilt or innocence
Before the verdict came in.
Why did the law treat him that way?
He settled the first suit out of court for twenty-two million dollars.
I could see why he wanted end that business.
That bad publicity could not be easy.
If you settle out of court for that much, though,
You're asking for another suit later on.
Sure enough, the second suit came.
Yes, it took ten years, but it came.
When you have that much money, people want it.
People will do anything to get it.
Remember the anxious hysteria
About child sexual abuse in the 80s and early 90s?
Remember Fells Acres and Gerald Amirault?
Child molestation was in the air back then.
Could these things really happen?
We seem to need certainty about these things.
I didn't hear a lot of doubt about the charges against Michael.
People made up their minds pretty quickly.
You're guilty or you're not guilty.
Once the charge is made, people don't like uncertainty.
They make up their minds based on a lot of things,
Those things don't include first-hand acquaintance
With what actually happened.
Here's what we know:
The accusations and proceedings against
Michael Jackson caused him a lot of stress.
He began to take prescription painkillers
And other drugs to deal with the stress.
He became addicted to those drugs.
He also went through a lot of weight loss.
Here are some of the drugs Michael took,
See if you can find them in your medicine chest:
Valium, Xanax, Ativan, morphine, and Demerol.
What a list, what a powerful package of modern medicine's best.
Reminds you of Judy Garland, doesn't it?
Uppers, downers, barbiturates, and speed.
Pain killers and sedatives to fill every need.
What would you do without your next pill?
Karen Carpenter had injections of some kind of thyroid stuff
To speed up her metabolism – that helps you lose weight.
I read Michael had an injection of Demerol shortly before he died.
Charge the doctor who gave him that one!
So did Michael bring it on himself,
Or did he die early because we ostracized him?
Don't get too rich, because people will go after you.
Don't become notoriously rich,
Because one way or another,
Someone's going to come after you.
Michael spread that story about sleeping
In a hyperbaric oxygen chamber
To slow down the aging process.
He spread that story about
Buying the bones of the Elephant Man.
Then people started calling him Wacko Jacko,
And he realized his mistake.
He stopped leaking stuff for the tabloids,
But it was too late by then.
The tabloids know a good thing when they see one.
Now they could print just about anything
They wanted to about Michael.
The audience was primed, ready to believe,
Ready to read whether or not they believed.
Here's what Michael said about truth and falsity,
Belief in the stories about him that spread everywhere:
“Why not just tell people I'm an alien from Mars? Tell them I eat live chickens and do a voodoo dance at midnight. They'll believe anything you say, because you’re a reporter. But if I, Michael Jackson, were to say, ‘I’m an alien from Mars and I eat live chickens and do a voodoo dance at midnight,’ people would say, ‘Oh, man, that Michael Jackson is nuts. He's cracked up. You can't believe a damn word that comes out of his mouth.’”Does this gentleman have insight into
The public's belief and disbelief, or what?
If you’re a rock star, you have the best of times,
The worst of times, don’t you think?
Well this poor man had
The worst of times after 1993, that's for sure.
The decline has lasted for sixteen years,
From the time Michael was only thirty four.
He was born on August 29, 1958.
He didn't have a regular childhood,
And he certainly didn't have a regular adulthood.
From 1978 to 1988, when he was in his twenties,
He was a superstar, a genius and a performer without compare.
He gave a lot to charities,
Put a lot of energy into his entertainment,
His dancing and his music,
And brought people a lot of joy.
Then from age thirty-four on, for sixteen years,
He lived a different kind of life.
A lot of people thought he was
The most sordid kind of criminal – a child molester.
He knew what they thought.
I didn't see many people stepping up
To defend him during that time.
You can rationalize your doubt – let the jury decide.
The bad publicity was relentless, it truly was,
Just as relentless as the good publicity he received
When he ruled during the 1980s.
Once the bad publicity starts,
It's hard to stop the damage to your reputation.
You and your good name just go into a nosedive,
Like an airplane headed for the ground,
You can't do much to arrest the descent.
You can't do much to prevent the crash.
You just crash and die, crash and die
A thousand times until the inevitable overdose.
The way you die doesn't matter that much.
Who cares whether it was Demerol,
Cardiac arrest, or some other thing.
We know why Michael died,
But we don't want to think about that too much.
We don't want to think about
Why more people didn't come forward to defend him,
When he needed someone to speak up,
When he needed someone to say, wait a minute.
So the easy answer is that we all killed him,
But who likes easy answers?
Another easy answer is that he killed himself,
And that would be true enough.
But becoming addicted to painkillers
Because you need to alleviate pain
Doesn't seem so much like regular suicide to me.
Perhaps the addiction itself makes you want to die,
Perhaps the addiction itself is the means of death,
Perhaps the addiction itself makes you not care
Whether or not you die or live.
You have to have hope, don't you?
What kills hope faster than anything?
When society puts you away,
Puts you out beyond the pale.
Ostracism is a death sentence.
We are all one organism.
The cell cannot live without the body,
The individual cannot live without society.
When the individual is put out from society,
It dies, just as the cell,
The living and life-sustaining cell,
Dies when it is put out from the body.
Body and soul lose the will to live
When ostracism is so clear and so severe.
Pity the body that had to go through
What Michael went through.
Here was a sensitive soul,
And we could see the pain with every court appearance.
He settled the first suit to keep it from killing him.
He went to trial for the second suit,
And he kept missing sessions
Because he was in such bad shape.
He made it through to acquittal,
But man the cost was heavy – more pain killers,
More dependence on all those damn pills.
Compare the way he looked at the end
With the vital, vigorous dancer from Thriller –
The moonwalking, spinning,
Fantastically talented dancer of Thriller, Billy Jean and Beat It.
He was only in his twenties then, a genius and master.
Wow, people said. They couldn't take their eyes off this man.
No one could believe the way Michael danced,
The musical artistry of his productions
Just blew people's minds away.
I wish I could do that!
As with so many pros, he made it look super easy, super smooth.
How does he do that? How dies he slide along the floor like that?
What a song! There's Billie Jean! Do you hear it?
I can't wait till he does that moonwalk again!
We had a videotape about Michael,
A videography about Thriller and his career.
Elizabeth Taylor talked about Michael's vulnerability,
About how he seemed kind of like
A little child who needs protection.
Others noted that quality about him,
You could even say it led to the child abuse charges.
He regressed to the behavior of a ten year old,
Having sleepovers with Gavin,
Watching Disney movies with him on the bed.
Not surprising for someone who never had a childhood,
For someone who built an amusement park
For an estate he called Neverland.
People couldn't believe it, though,
Wacko Jacko must be touching the guy's penis.
Why would Gavin say it if it weren't true?
Why would anyone make up a charge like that?
It has to be true – Jackson's a danger to society.
Take him to trial.
Search Neverland. Strip search him in his home.
Humiliate him and make him break.
He'll break if we put enough pressure on him.
We'll get him, whatever it takes.
We won't let this guy go free,
Because we have to protect our children.
This guy's a dangerous child molester,
And we have to lock him up.
Show us the evidence, says the jury.
The evidence isn't there.
Just a charge from another guy who wants to extract
Twenty-two million dollars, like the other family did.
Twenty-two million dollars is a lot of money for us,
But it's not much for you.
Hand it over, and we'll keep quiet.
Hand it over, and we'll leave you alone.
Give me some of that hush money, my dear friend,
And I won't come back to Neverland.
I'll leave you alone there,
You'll know the damage is done,
You'll know what people think of you now:
A pervert with plastic surgery and white skin.
You look like a freak now, Michael,
We wish you didn't.
We want the old Michael back,
We wish you hadn't changed yourself.
We want the old Michael back,
We don't like what you've become.
Give us the old Michael back,
The star we knew in the 1980s.
Can't you give us back the old Michael?
No I can't, and what's more,
The new Michael is partly your creation.
I didn't want to become a freak, you know.
I wanted to look normal, I wanted you to think I was normal.
But people brought charges against me,
My friends didn't stand by me
The way I thought they would.
Now I'm dead, and that's that.
Now I'm dead, and everybody
Stands up for me now.
That's the interesting thing.
You don't hear much about
The child molestation charges now.
Now we remember Michael's talents
As a singer, a dancer, a performer,
A super-world-class entertainer.
Yeah, some people say he raped that ten-year-old,
Or touched him or whatever it was he did.
But mostly we remember the good things,
How sweet and strong he was.
We want to remember the positive when we say goodbye.
He could have used some of that praise a little earlier.
I didn't hear much of that praise during the trial four years ago.
He went to the courtroom almost every day,
Looking sicker and sicker.
The man was dying right in front of us,
We knew that pervert deserved it.
The wonder is he actually lived four more years,
Testimony to the vitality of the body
That moved so lithely almost thirty years ago.
What a dancer, what a performer, talent destroyed forever.
Now he's gone.
We love you, Michael. We loved you then, too.
We love your superlative, matchless skill,
Your passion, energy, inventive genius.
We love you – our king, our incomparable king.
We crave our entertainers and stars,
But if you step outside proper bounds,
If someone accuses you, falsely or not –
Watch out. Give up.
We won't love you any more until you're dead.
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