Thank you Tanveer Ahmed for the wonderful perspective on Michael Jackson. You provided the context and the balance to the complexity of the reactions to Jackson's death.

I will not read the article. I was hoping this was one place i could get away from the circus of this persons death. No such luck!

It is a genuinely sad reflection on society's own inability to see past its own crumbling, much-surgeried nose, that we make such a fuss about people like this.

In a few days, there will be nothing left, except endless lawsuits, bizarre death theories (possibly involving alien life forms), hints of financial conspiracies and a rather sordid exposition on the depths to which "prescription" drugs can take you.

Oh, and the music. But that has been around for a while, and will be no more special tomorrow than it was today. Or a good few yesterdays, come to that.

I, for one, refuse to accept that the life of Michael Jackson has had any impact on mine. Or that he was...

"...a figure through which, as abnormal as he was, our own flaws and dreams were filtered."

I'm sorry, but I cannot think of a single flaw or dream of mine that can be remotely considered "filtered" by this extremely unhappy person.

>>He came across as an asexual figure... forcing us to question our own assumptions about race, gender and sexuality.<<

Hardly. Had he been even remotely "normal", in the sense of having a point of contact with the world that did not involve his own bizarre fantasies, a case might be made for his validity as a role model.

But the only thing that he "forced" on me, that I recall, was the sight of his constant crotch-grabbing dance moves, which for some weird reason became de rigeur for any aspiring pop practitioner.

His music, in the grand scheme of things, was certainly a little better than ok.

But life-changing? Nope.

I guess we will have to put up with a week or so of this kind of pop-analysis.

But I'm afraid I'm already over it.

Hmmm, it's rather sad that 'some' people can be that consumed with angst and bitterness towards another human being - - - a human being that they never met, didn't know and only read about in tabloid newspapers and gossip columns.

For all those that praise Michael Jackson
I have one question
Would you let a mature man sleep naked with your children?
He admitted to this.

The deepest meditations we might indulge over Jackson are by way of seeing him as a mirror. Jackson unwittingly caricatured all the aspirations and contradictions of western culture, from his Tayloresque coiffure and his pixie nose, down through his svelte gyrating form. The whole burlesque was the product of yearning distinctiveness, of transcending the everyday in a rarefied aestheticism of body and mind. The body seeming to confound what keeps the rest of us earthbound, and the music parodying the corporeality of sex, violence and death. Indeed, the music is merely popular without the images of the consummate performer. Jackson was the realised dream of millions, but he spoiled the show by innocently impersonating the dark side of western narcissism. That is the obsession with the me--the empty signifier that consumer culture turns into a fetish. But this cosmetic representation of western yearning is edifying not merely for being ridiculous, which ought to give us pause enough, but for its utter want of conscience. Jackson's sensitivity, love and compassion were just another adornment, no doubt worn in all seriousness, but not felt in any material way. Just so western culture, which Jackson so brilliantly embodied, has little genuine conscience for the misery and death that are the by-products of its self-indulgent lifestyles. Like Jackson, a great many of us profess our concern and wear our emotions on our sleeves, but we are rarely capable of truly humbling our cosmetic selves, that is of turning away from that empty space we spend our lives adorning at such cost and impoverishment.