ジョー・ヴォーゲル: 私はあなたが言うデイブと同じですか?

作家のジョー・ヴォーゲルは、「私はあなたが視覚化した野獣ですか？マイケル・ジャクソンの文化的虐待」と題する記事で、マイケル・ジャクソンに対する社会の虐待について論じています。彼はこう書いています。

ここ数週間、私たちはこの点が何度も言われるのを聞いてきました。現在裁判を受けているのはマイケル・ジャクソンではありません。それはコンラッド・マレー博士です。しかし、もちろん、私たちは現実を知っています。それが「マイケル・ジャクソン死亡裁判」です。いつものように、彼はメインイベントであり、魅力的なスペクタクルです。マイケル・ジャクソンは顕微鏡の下で、彼の家、医療記録、体をもう一度覗くのです。そして、ジャクソン氏が亡くなった今、一般の人々は以前よりもずっと同情的になったが、彼は依然として際限のない精査と裁きの対象となっている。

男性自身が虐待を感じられなくなった今、それは何か意味があるのでしょうか？ジャクソンのような「有名人」が冷淡に扱われたり、無視されたりするかどうかを一般人が気にする必要があるのだろうか？ 「言葉と暴力」シリーズで私たちの社会的言説の不穏な軌跡を浮き彫りにするヴォイスのようなプロジェクトは、その通りだと答えている。言葉は重要です。ターゲットは問いません。若者のいじめや自殺に対する最近の注目で私たちが目撃したように、言葉は壊滅的な悲劇的な結末を招く可能性があります。

インスピレーションを与えたり、癒したりするためにも使用できます。

マイケル・ジャクソンはそれを知っていました。 1988年、彼はエイズ被害者ライアン・ホワイトと友人になった。ライアン・ホワイトは、執拗な言葉による暴行と暴力による脅迫のため、インディアナ州ココモにある学校から退学させられた少年だった。ジャクソン氏は、ジャクソン氏を普通の気分にさせてくれたとホワイト氏は語った。 「マイケルは、あなたがどんな人種であるか、どんな肌の色であるか、ハンディキャップが何であるか、病気が何であるかを気にしませんでした」とライアン・ホワイトさんの母親、ジャンヌさんは思い起こす。 「[彼は]ただすべての子供たちを愛していました。」

ホワイトさんは、ジャクソンさんが手を差し伸べ、友人となり、親切に接した何千人もの「部外者」の一人だ。彼は彼らと同一視した。彼は彼らの痛みと孤独を理解していました。彼は、病気、外見、人種、性的指向、その他の理由を問わず、ありのままの自分を受け入れることを拒否された世界で生きる彼らの苦闘に共感を覚えました。

ジャクソンは幼い頃からこの感受性を持っていました。 「ベン」という曲を聞いてください。ジャクソンの出産には真の痛みと思いやりがある（「彼らはあなたを私と同じように見ていない/私は彼らがそうするように努めてほしいのですが」）。この曲は、ジャクソンが社会から疎外され、誤解されている人々を代表して行った最初の芸術的声明の1つと見ることができます。さらに多くの人が続くでしょう。

ジャクソンのアウトサイダーとしての役割は幼少期に始まった可能性がある（ジャクソンが「普通」だと感じたことは一度もなかったし、そのように認識されたこともなかったからだ）。しかし、彼の違いによって引き起こされた激しさと敵意は時間の経過とともに増大しました。デビッド・ユアンは1996年のエッセイ「セレブのフリーク：マイケル・ジャクソンのグロテスクな栄光」の中で、マイケル・ジャクソンは現代の決定的な「フリーク」であると主張した。これほどの嘲笑、監視、過剰な尋問を引き起こした公人は世界に他にいない。 1985年の時点で、ジャクソンはタブロイド紙によって「ワコ・ジャコ」というレッテルを貼られていたが、彼はこの言葉を軽蔑していた（最近になっても、一部の主流報道機関は彼を「ジャコ」と呼び続けていた）。報道では、彼は「奇妙」、「奇妙」、「風変わり」であると頻繁に評されました。実際、1980 年代半ば以降、メディアによってこのような用語で説明されていない彼の言動はほとんどありませんでした。

Jackson was mocked incessantly for his skin disorder, vitiligo, which most people didn't believe was real until it was confirmed definitively in his autopsy. He was mocked for his love of animals; for his love of children; for his love of the planet. He was mocked for his marriages, for his three kids, for his Neverland home. He was mocked for his sexuality, his voice, his childlike behavior. Even reviews of his music couldn't resist filling up the majority of the space with pseudo-psychoanalysis and ad hominem assaults. Can there be any doubt that this treatment by the media and culture at large was abusive?

Certainly the victim of these dehumanizing attacks felt that way. Listen to the lyrics of his songs. In “Tabloid Junkie” he describes the mass media as “parasites” sucking the life out of him, while drugging/distracting the general public with a steady dose of sensationalism. In “Stranger in Moscow” he is an artist in exile, used up and spit out by his native country. “I was wanderin' in the rain,” he sings from the lonely role of vagabond, “Mask of life/ Feeling insane.”

In “Scream” he is so weary of being bullied, he pleads, “Oh brother, please have mercy 'cause I just can't take it.” The song, however, also serves as a vehicle of strength and resolve (“Kickin' me down/ I got to get up”). Michael and sister Janet deliver a fierce counterblow to a system they rightfully see as corrupt and unjust. “You're sellin' out souls,” Janet sings in one verse, “but I care about mine.” It is a defiant song about standing up to cruelty, even when the pain and indignation is so deep it can only be expressed in a guttural scream.

In numerous songs, Jackson uses his music as a rallying call for others who have been mistreated. In “They Don't Care About Us,” he witnesses for the disenfranchised and demeaned. “Tell me what has become of my rights,” he sings, “Am I invisible because you ignore me?” “Little Susie” draws attention to the plight of the neglected and abandoned, telling the story of a young girl whose gifts go unnoticed until she is found dead at the bottom of the stairs in her home (“Lift her with care,” Jackson sings, “Oh, the blood in her hair”); “Earth Song” offers an epic lamentation on behalf of the planet and its most vulnerable inhabitants (represented by the choir's passionate shouts, “What about us!”). Through such songs (as well as through his life and persona), Jackson became a sort of global representative of the “Other.”

The mass media, however, never held much regard for Jackson's other-ness, just as they held little regard for the “others” he spoke of in his songs. Rather, they found a narrative that was simple and profitable—Jackson as eccentric “freak”—and stuck with it for nearly three decades, gradually upping the stakes.

Perhaps Jackson's most compelling response to the public perception of him that resulted comes in his trio of late Gothic songs: “Ghosts,” “Is It Scary,” and “Threatened.” It is here that Jackson holds a mirror up to the society that scorns him and asks it to look at its own grotesque reflection. “Is it scary for you!” he demands. The songs, and their accompanying visual representations, are not only keenly self-aware, they demonstrate a shrewd understanding of the toxic forces that surround and haunt him.

In the short film, Ghosts, the Mayor of Normal Valley (a conservative figure of authority inspired, in part, by Santa Barbara District Attorney, Tom Sneddon) taunts Jackson's character: “Freaky boy! Freak! Circus freak.” Interestingly, it is Jackson himself (disguised as the Mayor) that delivers these words, and one can feel the way they have been internalized. They are slurs intended to mark, marginalize and humiliate (which was ultimately the purpose of the witch hunts of 1993 and 2005). For the Mayor, Jackson's presence in the community is intolerable. It is not that Jackson has done any harm; it is simply that he is different and that difference is threatening.

In such artistic expressions, Jackson clearly recognizes what is being done to him. He is being defined by outside forces. He is a phantom they have constructed in their own minds. As he sings in “Is It Scary,” “If you wanna see/ Eccentric oddities I'll be grotesque before your eyes.” He will be grotesque, in other words, because that is what the public “wants to see.” It is how they have been conditioned to see. Later in the song, he anticipates his audience's reactions, asking: “Am I amusing you/ Or just confusing you/ Am I the beast you visualized?” Has he become something less than human? Why is this? Is it his physical appearance? His ambiguous identity? His unusual life story? There is no question マイケル・ジャクソン was different. The question is why this difference incited such fervent disparagement and abuse.

One of the remarkable qualities of Jackson's life and work, however, is that he refuses to compromise his “difference.” He never becomes “normal,” as the term is represented by, say, the Mayor of Normal Valley. He doesn't conform to expectations. Rather, he is true to himself and flaunts his unique, multi-faceted identity, to the frustration of those who would like him to fit in more predictable boxes. His differences, as Susan Fast notes, were “impenetrable, uncontainable, and they created enormous anxiety. Please be black, Michael, or white, or gay or straight, father or mother, father to children, not a child yourself, so we at least know how to direct our liberal (in)tolerance. And try not to confuse all the codes simultaneously.”

Even over two years after his tragic passing, it seems, many people don't know what to make of マイケル・ジャクソン. He is reduced, therefore, to easy labels like “drug addict.” A picture of his lifeless body is callously plastered on news sites. It is cruel, abusive behavior masquerading as “normal.” Perhaps this is why Jackson chose the medium of the Gothic to fight back. It was a way to turn the tables, to symbolically represent the world as it often felt to him: monstrous and grotesque. His “horror stories” certainly weren't intended merely to entertain.

“Freaks are called freaks,” observed author James Baldwin, “and are treated as they are treated—in the main, abominably—because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.” In Jackson's case those “terrors and desires” were manifold, including race, sexuality, money and power. Yet as much as Jackson became the symbolic magnet onto which many of these cultural anxieties were projected, he was also an actual person trying to live his life. Toward the end of “Is It Scary” he explains, “I'm just not what you seek of me,” before revealing to the compassionate listener: “But if you came to see/ The truth, the purity/ It's here inside a lonely heart/ So let the performance start!”

Ironically, it is in the “performance” of his art that we find “the truth, the purity.” This is where he exorcizes his demons, where his anguish is transfused into creative energy. This is where the walls come down and the mask comes off. To the outside world, he may be a spectacle, a caricature, a freak; but here, finally, inside his music, he bares his soul. He is a human being.

The question is: What do we see?

This article is cross-posted at Voices: Education Project as part of the “Words and Violence” curriculum.

Joseph Vogel is the author Man in the Music: The Creative Life and Work of マイケル・ジャクソン, released worldwide November 1, 2011.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-vogel/michael-jackson-trial-_b_1068750.html