Michael Jackson and Peter Pan

Perhaps I cannot say the same thing again, now that Michael Jackson is back in the dock to face charges for molesting another boy. It is hard to believe that one would be repeatedly accused of the same offense if it were only one's failure under an occasional temptation of the flesh. This time more people seem to be convinced that Michael is in the habit of doing hanky-panky with children and that he is guilty as charged. Personally I don't give a damn if that is true, although I wish he knew that adults were much more fun.

But my admiration for Michael Jackson is not going to diminish. He is an entertainer, and his art is his reputation, reputation is not his art. We know him for his artistic ability, not for his moral austerity, and let us not mix the virtuoso with the virtuous. A French writer once wrote that Jean Genet was a bad thief because what he stole could not compare in value with what he left behind. Genet was a terrible freak. He was at once a supreme stylist in French literature and a homosexual, a wacko and a thief. Arrested repeatedly for thievery, he spent more than four years in jail.

Tap here to add The Daily Star as a trusted source

If taken in the same light, Michael Jackson makes a pathetic case. The world treated him kindly when he was a kid and rose to his fame. It now appears that he took that success and used it to build a snare to systematically entice and abuse children. The Neverland, where Michael lives, is kind of a Hugh Heffnerian set up to seduce children. It has everything children would ever dream and, if the charges against the pop star prove right, one could also conclude that it has everything parents would never want in their worst nightmare.

Too bad some of Michael's repressed memories are coming back. By his account, his father was a terrible man, who used to beat him up with the belt and call him ugly for his knobby nose. We would agree it wasn't child psychology at its best. But then what happened to other things he experienced as a kid? What about his brothers, who used to sleep with girls in the same room with him, sometimes even in the same bed? How come that didn't affect him? Why couldn't he grow up to be a womaniser like rest of the pack?

Instead he has grown up to be a complete mess. He has gone through anti-aging chamber, numerous surgeries, several divorces, pigment transformation, and scandals. People also talk about his financial hardship, that he owes more than some eight billion dollars he owns. A great career that shook the world now seems shaky in its foundation. It has happened to other famous men before. Oscar Wilde comes to mind right away. He was accused of homosexuality at the height of his fame and sent to jail. He never regained his fame, and even adopted the name of Sebastian Melmoth to hide from his past.

Fame is like a sea, which, at the end of the day, returns some of the garbage thrown into it. Michael Jackson took his fame for granted and did strange things with it. People use money and fame to overcome hurdles, but the pop star continuously propped them higher around him. Long after he became a celebrity and one of the wealthiest performers in history, he started to worry about his complexion, his nose, face, things, which didn't matter.

He got married and divorced to prove his manhood. He fathered children to convince those who still doubted him. He even dangled his baby from hotel window to show the world that his claim was real. But nothing stood him in good stead in the end. Instead his image became more fuddled as he sank deeper into the crisis. He confined himself to the Neverland, started inviting more kids to stay with him, climbed trees on the compound, and basically killed his time feeding his babies, playing pin-balls and worrying more about his nose.

Michael Jackson reminds us that fate works in mysterious ways. One may get everything but keep nothing. If anybody has watched his interview with Martin Bashir aired on ABC's 20/20 exactly one year ago, one would know that Michael Jackson goes on shopping spree and spends big time money. But he could never spend enough to get happiness. It's amazing how he liked all things childlike, yet every time got sucked into adult complexities.

We don't know if Michael ever realised that he hasn't always behaved in a normal way. He has produced children through surrogate mothers and his sperm cells. His children don't know their mothers, yet he wishes to give them normal life. He hides his children in masks to conceal their identity. When one of his children had a difficult birth, he ran home with the baby with placenta all over her, while the mother still stayed in the hospital.

We can judge Michael Jackson in many ways. We can ignore his contribution to music and concentrate on the nasty thing he may have done. Or, we can ignore the silly aberration and focus on his gifted mind. We can even do both like the French do, holding together creative impulse with criminal instinct, while keeping them separate in praise and punishment. Marquise de Sade spent 27 years in jail for sordid crimes, yet he has been immortalised in French literature as a great writer.

We can love Michael Jackson for his music and hate him for molesting the child, if he is found guilty. But how will Michael cope with the truth that he has bluffed the world? He told Martin Bashir during the interview that his dream was to adopt two kids from each continent around the world. He then said, "Like I said before, and I shall say it a million times: I am not afraid to say it. If there were no children on this Earth, if someone announced all kids were dead, I would jump off the balcony immediately. I'm done! I'm done!"

In the story of Peter Pan, the boy who never grows up, a fairy drops dead every time a child is sad in Neverland. It now appears that quite a few children may have been sad in Michael Jackson's Neverland, and each time a fairy must have dropped dead somewhere in this 3000-acre California ranch. The Peter Pan, who lives there, has lost the fairies, which once used to bring him luck.

Here is a lesson for the rest of us. Even fairies don't last unless one learns to grow up with time.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.