Thursday, July 09, 2009

Aiding and abetting

Heard that many thousands were at the Michael Jackson funeral, and millions more watched on TV, and had the thought that these people--and even more, those in his entourage--are likely guilty, morally if not legally speaking, of aiding and abetting the circumstances of his death. Yes, he might have simply ignored those people, but perhaps if enough people challenged him, he might have had a chance. Instead, too many simply kept on buying his records and funding his demise.

The same thing applies to those around Gov. Mark Sanford; they, by not challenging his behavior (starting by not going to church), are guilty in the disaster which was inflicted on his family and his state. And, of course, the same thing applies to any number of other people who have gotten themselves into trouble. As the prophet Nathan would tell us, love loves enough to tell people things that hurt at the time.

Love.

1 comment:

pentamom said...

Coming back to this late...before reading this post, it had already crossed my mind that maybe this is an example of the rather puzzling (to me, at least) idea of someone being "given up" to their own evil desires.

For most of us, if we're being really (or even ideally, slightly) self-destructive, each destructive behavior only makes it more likely that someone, whether family, friends, ER trauma specialists, or the legal authorities, is going to point out to us that something is not right.

But for someone like MJ, the higher he got, the more he wrapped himself up in various kinds of perverse behavior, the more those very behaviors isolated him from susceptibility to admonition. If you or I do strange things to our features for no intelligent reason, first our families are going to call us on it, then our doctors are going to tell us that we're being stupid and they want no part of it, and so forth. When MJ did it, it just made him more MJ, just made his surgeons more famous, and just added to the notoriety he was seeking. The worse he got, the less the category "negative" meant to him. The stranger his behavior, the more insulated he became from the concept of "strange" or "harmful." And if you can mess with your face because it meets some twisted inner need, why not lethal doses of drugs? The idea that there's a line that if crossed brings destruction ceases to have meaning.

His situation was unusual because it was all based upon a highly unusual degree of fame and fortune. But I could imagine different circumstances putting a more "ordinary" person on a similar, almost incontrovertible path to destruction.

It's very sad and sobering, in a lot of different ways.