"Absolute Superstar"

There, the world has suffered yet another societally destabilizing tragedy. We are one in an agony of suffering at the unsustainable loss of one beloved by millions. A mass entertainer of immense talent and prodigious proportions. A self-styled regent who sired princely beings who may in due time inherit the talents that their fabulous father unleashed on an adoring public.

A man whose electric presence, divine voice and singular physical being transfixed his vast audiences of music lovers, entertainment devotees. Princess Diana's death and the grief that followed it had no counterpart in the popular imagination until now, this moment when people fondly recall their first encounter with the Prince of Pop.

Whose legendary abilities and performances electrified audiences the world over. If nothing else, no social construct, no religion, no ideology, no communal needs, were able to unite the world as one; it can be said with truth, that the inestimable talents and showmanship of Michael Jackson performed that function.

He sang, and the world was one. This white black man who defiled his inheritance with one cosmetic operation after another in a desperate bid to vanquish his birth colour, the shapes of his defining facial features, his very bodily covering, the largest human organ, skin, transformed him into an androgynous mess.

His gender confusion, his chronological dysfunction, his denial of time and age and meaningful human relations marked him as a pathetic relic of denial gone awry.

The Reverend Al Sharpton mawkishly eulogized him as a social revolutionary, a seeker-after-justice, a black man insisting on equality for all races, when he was, in fact, an abject failure as a proud black man, a near-miss as a man, a mewling infant whose elusive search for the fantasy of Everland and Lollipops ended in a delusional sense of self as victim.

One social charlaton giving voice to another. Each of these men lived in a world of their own making. For the Reverend Sharpton it is a world of discriminatory misery; one inflicted on his race, and one he is happy to lob back at those he claims are his tormentors. For Michael Jackson, whom the best can be said of is that he was a lost soul, the eternal search for the authentic Disneyland.

When in fact, he victimized himself, succumbing to drug dependency, finding that all the money in the world could not buy him contentment with himself and with his place in the world. He spoke of love and revelled in self-hate, in sad delusion and sociopathic habituation. For him nothing quite succeeded like excess.

If there is anything to mourn, it is the failure of a promising human being to become more than a failure as a human being. To elevate this failure as an icon of culture, even pop culture, speaks to the sorry state of our own social mediocrity.