It’s Us In The Mirror

The ticker on Sky News was saying, “Michael Jackson Dies”. For a couple of hours at least, it was surreal, because in our speeding age truth can sometimes be the first roadside casualty in the rabid race to be the first to break a story. But, it wasn’t a mistake or a hoax or a joke and suddenly the world seemed a little bit stranger, something, no doubt, that would have pleased the wacko in Jacko. In the few days that have followed it’s felt like that culture-reconfigurating week after Diana died.

It’s the shock, of course, because we never expect icons with such burn-bright lives to die mundanely in a car crash or on a hospital gurney like the rest of us. It’s also about grief, not necessarily grief in the traditional sense but a type of grief that has emerged post-Diana. It isn’t intrinsically about personal pain, sorrow or loss. You don’t have to even have met the deceased to mourn their death. In fact, it’s probably a requirement that you haven’t. No, this new kind of grief is about something deeply collective.

We can see it in the aftermath of Jackson’s death. People have taken to the streets. Seas of flowers have tsunami’d up. Vigils have been held. Strangers have bonded with other strangers over how they feel they’ve lost a close friend though it’s likely they never knew the so-titled King Of Pop. It makes no odds anyway because this is the public’s way of expressing their grief, not just for Jackson himself, but for every person they’ve loved and lost.

It’s even more complex than that, though. It’s about communion. Just look at the footage of the residents of New York’s African-American-dominated Harlem district when they heard of Jackson’s death – they literally started making like the Motown anthem and danced in the streets. When did a place that has more than its fair share of problems unite in such exuberant tribute? It may have been for one night only, but a divided community came together. No matter that the person responsible was a black man who, for whatever reason, became white. It wasn’t about him. It was about them. Jackson may have sung about the man in the mirror, but it’s our reflection that’s shooting back at us now.

Because events like this give the invisible, the voiceless, the lonely, the lost –more or less all of us at one time or another – centrality. People who are usually kicked to the curb of the margins are part of a mass reaction to a cultural experience that not only speaks to them, but allows them to speak. It’s actually pretty moving because what it’s really doing is reminding us about the power of shared humanity, reminding us that humanity is like some great, untapped reservoir that runs through us all.

A lot of commentators have carped on ad snobbery about this New Age grief being fake and merely media-generated, a sort of karaoke mourning that has nothing to do with real feeling. Its expression may be new, but it’s actually about ancient rites of tribalism. It shows we need ritual, connection, blind, besotted faith. We need some belief, however naïve, that rejects this worn-out, worn-down world with all its tarnished politicians, cynical wars, its mindless and manmade apocalyptic horrors. We need to embrace something kinder, more inclusive and optimistic. After years in decline, it’s not for nothing that religion is having something of a mini renaissance with more and more people turning to it for succour and solace.

Dismiss the people who turn out to cry tears and lay flowers for people they’ve never met or known as much as you like, but it says something extremely significant about the current state of our collective minds and the world we live in.