Overkill

Did you ever say something critical about someone who had just died, and another person told you that you should be more respectful because the person "wasn't even in the ground yet"? Well, now that Michael Jackson is presumably in the ground or headed there very shortly (unless his head is being frozen somewhere, a la Ted Williams), I'd like to say that the amount of attention paid to his death by the media was beyond ridiculous. I do understand that he "did Thriller" and was a music icon. But the level of fawning and hyperbole at Jackson's memorial service boggled the mind. Magic Johnson, who has never been the sharpest tool in the shed, said that watching Michael Jackson made him a better basketball player. Huh? And then there was this from the Rev. Al Sharpton: "Those young kids grew up from being teenage, comfortable fans of Michael’s to being 40 years old and being comfortable to vote for a person of color to be president of the United States. Michael did that. Michael made us love each other." Now, Sharpton is an idiot of epic proportion, and he and the truth have not always been on the best of terms, but really? A co-worker heard someone else say - and they weren't kidding - that Jackson was "the greatest figure of love and peace in the history of the world." Sorry, Jesus. You're No. 2 now. But I saved the best for last, and it's once again from Sharpton, who told Jackson's three children that "your daddy wasn't strange." OK, I have to call "shenanigans" on that one. What we had with Jackson was one of THE strangest people to inhabit the Earth during my lifetime. We can debate all day whether he was a child molester. But it's pretty clear that he was a druggie who probably took so much "legal" dope that he killed himself. He also was a guy who was once good-looking and black, and at the end of his life, he was a circus freak who made Clay Aiken look like 50 Cent. And while I give the guy his props as a onetime "King of Pop," those days were long gone. Jackson hadn't been a major player on the music scene for close to 20 years, during which time he became a public joke. Some called him the greatest and most influential artist in the history of popular music, but wouldn't you think the greatest artist ever would have continued to be productive and relevant past the age of 35? And there are plenty of other people - Lennon and McCartney, Buddy Holly, Kurt Cobain, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Brian Wilson, to name a few - who were every bit as influential. It's sad that Michael Jackson is dead, and that his life since the mid-90s had been a downward spiral. But there's really no one to blame for that but Michael Jackson, and maybe those who raised him and enabled him. Just a sad story with a final act that was way too loud and long.