Michael Jackson; artistic genius, Black hero, and desperately sick individual, died at age fifty of a drug overdose, general exhaustion, and societal neglect.  America's ethical floor has a big fat crack and he fell straight through it.

What can we learn from the life and death of Michael Jackson?  A great deal — though whether we will depends on how much we want to.

There are many elements in contemporary American culture that combined to create the tragedy that is Michael Jackson's life story.
 

To begin, elements from the Left: 
Jackson's peculiar behavior, became conspicuous to the public in his twenties, was excused on the grounds of subjectivism; the view that he was acting from his inner promptings, and, therefore, somehow, what he did had deep validity.  An exaggerated conception of civil libertarianism gave subjectivism supposed legal-philosophical legitimization.

 
The radical androgynism that become fashionable in the seventies, gave further support to Jackson's expression of "individuality" at that point in his life.  That he went from having a normal African American male appearance to, in stages, a cross between his older sister LaToya and a young Elizabeth Taylor was regarded in the words of a popular song:  "It's your thing–do what you wanna do."

 
Jackson, first with the Jackson Five–with his father Joe in a major managing role, and later as a solo act, was a Black superstar of show business.  Political correctness dictated that criticizing Blacks, especially popular ones, was unacceptable and suggestive of racism.  A hands-off posture was thus dictated by the spirit of the times, regardless of how bizarre his persona became.

 
As Jackson's fan following illustrates, celebrity deification applies transracially.  We can expect to hear more about Sonny & Cher's daughter, the aspiring transgender man Chastity "Chaz" Bono, in future months.

 
And, while much of the public in general distrusts the world of psychotherapy, Blacks have an additional measure of distrust, having been historically abused by whites in authority and resistant to the idea of revealing the emotional and factual depths of their lives to people they don't know; people who are either demographically and culturally unlike themselves or trained by those who are.  Jackson, if he were an ordinary person in all likelihood, would have been involuntarily committed for psychological care, but for a major entertainer, and for his family this would have created such a negative stigma and none of the Jacksons wanted Michael's career interrupted. 

From the Right, insofar as the Right was at all interested in Jackson except as a vague object lesson, an ethical obstacle was found in their valorization of parenthood.  To declare Michael mentally ill, and to assign causation to his family's dysfunction; to Joe's narcissistic abuse of the family both before the Five's music career began and after, pre-teen Michael's repeated exposure to his older brothers' overnight trysts with groupies while the group was on the road, the overall pressure on Michael to sacrifice his youth and his very self-concept on the altar of show business success and Black heroism; this was something the Right was not prepared to do.  Parents, after all, had rights regarding their children and people have their own individual rights.  The background facts seldom reached the public, and Michael's own ambivalence about his life and self, as well as his continued artistic and popular success, undercut his status as a victim.

Further, the Right found it difficult to accept the possibility of both moral judgment toward peculiar conduct; Michael's reclusiveness and Peter-Pan syndrome as well as his sexual and racial destructiveness required recognition of it all as an automatic defensive reaction of what was once a helpless child.  The choice "Sickness or Sin?" is presented with the assumption that unwholesome conduct has to be one or the other, not both. Related to this is the tendency of the Right to favor a harsh "law-and-order" approach to antisocial and illegal conduct, including that of sex offenders.  To them, a therapeutic approach, forced or voluntary, is often morally "soft," Dr. Laura, notwithstanding.  Lastly, the Right, increasingly overwhelmed by the Left, was reluctant to seem "mean" in calling for legal intervention against the adult Jackson or against his father.

 
There were other factors applicable to both Right and Left.  One was the provincialism of the professions.  With rare and obscure exceptions, lawyers don't learn developmental psychology, and psychologists don't learn more than the most basic law applicable to the mentally ill and their parents.  The press, for its part, doesn't learn either. 

Another was simply the power of the rich and famous to use legal and financial firepower to resist intervention from outside.  Certainly, that was seen in Jackson's handling of the several child molestation accusations directed at him.  And the family would have likewise repelled any earlier attempts to heal or just contain Michael's craziness.  His fitness as a parent has certainly been questionable but has rarely been questioned. 

And so Michael Jackson; artistic genius, Black hero, and desperately sick individual, died at age fifty of drug overdose, general exhaustion, and societal neglect.  America's ethical floor has a big fat crack and he fell straight through it.