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Amongst the items due to go under the hammer is a signed letter to the King of Pop from Ronald Reagan in 1984. As well as commiserating MJ’s bonny black locks getting frazzled during the making of a Pepsi commercial, it thanks him for being a great role model for America and embodying its spirit:
"Dear Michael, I was pleased to learn that you were not seriously hurt in your recent accident […]All over America, millions of people look up to you as an example. Your deep faith in God and adherence to traditional values are an inspiration to all of us, especially young people searching for something real to believe in. […] Keep up the good work, Michael. We're very happy for you."
Why would someone pay an estimated $500 for this piece of junk?
As the Frankenstein of capitalist reform, giving private corporate industries like Pepsi the unstoppable power to run their businesses unabated, Reagan’s letter to Michael Jackson (the epitome of the 1980’s brand of MTV consumerism) can be seen as him acknowledging perfection in the monster that the spark of his science brought to life. (Fitting as the spark that instigated the writing of the letter was in this instance a very literal one.)
[It wasn't your fault, Michael.]
If we assume the letter will be acquired by a private individual, in coughing up for the honour of owning this icon of our indulgences (and by extension our demise) they border on commiting an act of masochism. It is a delusional act of commodity fetishism made even more empty and irrelevant by the contemporary global context that no longer supports it. Whoever pays $500 for this framed piece of memorabilia is a bridled fool.
With the beastly legacy of Reaganomics having run rampant for nearly three decades, it is only now during the onset of a fierce global recession, a depletion of world resources, an exposure to the extent of corporate entities’ destructive business practices and the gradual emergence of a social mindset that factors in aspects beyond the desires of the individual, seeking a fresh pluralistic model of creating social liberty and sustainability, that the monster has come to destroy itself.
Yet what vengeance has it wrought on us in the mean time? What that we need for our sustenance and deem irreplaceable – like Frankstein holding his wife Elizabeth’s dead body after it has been mauled by his monster – have we lost for good? The environment? Our resources? Our stability? Our sense of being? It is too early to tell the extent of damages done…
Thinking of the futility of the individual wishing to hold on to such empty historical flotsam as the Reagan/Jackson epistle I am reminded of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, or ‘The Angel of History’ as it was potently re-read by Walter Benjamin:
"His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
In our current state of transition is it not up to us to adopt the role of the angel? Time blows us forward so why do we still seek to narrativise the past in a way that will always be myth-making, always broken and incomplete? Always leaving us lost and detached from ourselves, a fetishised popular culture destabilises our self-control and we are left open to the manipulations of others that are more powerful.
For us to make progress we must acknowledge that the past is out of reach and that any legacy that we envision having brought us to where we are now is in fact temporary and incomplete. The trade off we make when we choose to move forward is that we cannot take everything with us and may only tentatively look back. We must learn to foreground this in our minds as we seek new ways to interpret and understand the perpetual present that circulates around us.
If we are going to make the transformation successfully into the next phase of global socio-economic development we must cease to be the citizen fascinated with the wreckage at our feet (be it a historicised pop culture, politics or otherwise) and instead stand up straight and mould the storm of what is current as it passes through our hands.
Coinciding with the auction is Jackson’s announcement of him playing fifty final live shows at the O2 arena in London – his first full gigs since 1997. He shakily tells us at the press conference for the event launch that ‘THIS IS IT! THIS IS IT!’
[The number of rhinoplasties it will take to get Michael through all fifty shows in one piece.]
Let us hope that it really is ‘it’. Let us enjoy these shows for what they are and hope that the songs still sound as good performed live today as they did the first time around. But also, let them act as the apex of a transition into something new – a marker of what we are letting go of. It is the end of the postmodern narrative that we started writing over fifty years ago, that reached its dramatic mid-point in the 80s and is now scribing its own stunted epilogue and resigning itself to the past.
Let’s listen and learn once and for all what poor Jacko’s been trying to get us to understand all along. As a torch-bearer of an era that manipulated the equilibrium of our world beyond easy reconciliation:
He’s bad.
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