One of the reasons people read Kierkegaard, as well as one of the reasons that Wittgenstein was right to call him the most profound thinker of the nineteenth century, is that he understood how Media works, to such an extent that the last hundred years have only corroborated his contributions. His legacy has not been overshadowed by his personal life nor his public image during life, since his contribution was precisely this: to expose the utter irrelevance of one to the other. While both the Individual and God must live with both the private and the Public, how one might appear in mortal media is hardly how one's legacy will be immortalized, and least of all will one's own, private life affect one's immortality in quite the way it operates in gossip which one hears about one's self. As Carl Jung would put it: what a man is and what he represents are often polar opposites of one another.
This realization is, of course,
demoralizing, but for different reasons depending on the Judge. By MacIntyre's
evaluation of Heroism, what a man is and what he represents ought to be One and
the Same, yet this is ONLY POSSIBLE WITHIN A HEROIC *SOCIETY*. It's not that a
man cannot profess a set of virtues honestly in modern Life, but rather that
when he is heard he is not UNDERSTOOD, for what has since antiquity been sacred
to Mankind, for which the evidence is overwhelming, though conflicted, is quite
alien to modern philistines and upstarts who are all too happy to lead
fruitless lives.
Consider Michael Jackson. Growing
up, he was a meme to me; as Bart said on The Simpsons, he was like the
boogeyman, invented to scare little boys and girls. The nickname "Wacko
Jacko" was his calling card on VH1, and while my friends considered Thriller
to be legendary, it was not without some irony each time they played it on the
Stereo; they knew that what the man became was far more frightening than any
zombie he portrayed back in the nineteen-eighties.
Be all that as it may, when Michael
Jackson died, the tears came down like waterfalls. Not even J.D. Salinger
enjoyed that sort of send-off; only Robin Williams came close in recent years.
Girls who were not yet out of high school posted videos and covers of their
favourite Michael Jackson songs. The generations came together in a sort of
bitter mourning; there was even fervent speculation he was murdered.
No one seemed to think that he
deserved to go the way he did, pedophilia notwithstanding.
That's how it ought to be, at any
rate. It does not matter whether you were five years old or fifty when he died.
A Culture Hero unifies the People and transcends their loneliness. We all waved
Michael Jackson as a flag, even when we were joking. He was neither black nor
white, nor man nor woman; as the joke I heard in Grade School went: Jackson was
God. If his few moments of Humanity appeared perverse, we saw ourselves in his
perversion. You could say the man was great without your having to read off
your own biography, since there were Common Standards by which to judge
Greatness, and all personal accounts were weaknesses. Nobody cared if you were
five years old or fifty, black or white, a victim, target, or immune. It was
not ABOUT you, nor should it be. It was about the Artist, his Work, and his
Legacy. One had not even to separate the Artist from the Work, nor the Work
from the Legacy, nor the Legacy from the Artist. One would never KNOW the
Artist, intimately, and for that we who grew up with stories of his
"intimate" relations were quite grateful. We had his Music. That was
enough.
It ought still to be enough, and
that it does not satisfy us is a far more grievous sin upon our part than
anything this one man did within a tragic life cut short.
In recent years, though not yet ten
years after Jackson died, I visited a bookstore in my neighbourhood: the same
one I've been going to for more than fifteen years by now, and maybe nearly
twenty. I was in the Record Section, hardly worthy of a Borders, though this
Barnes and Noble stocked the basics. Somewhere close at hand some girls, most
probably in high school still, perused the Classics and found one of Jackson's
Records, maybe Thriller.
One girl, who reminds me now of
Asuka from Evangelion, said to the other that her teacher talked about
this man in class. The Teacher told her students that, regardless of the
Artist's sketchy lifestyle, we must see his Art for what it is.
The girl recited this in such a
mocking tone I might have skipped a beat in hearing it. Not only was this
adolescent blatantly DISMISSING what a TEACHER told her, as if she knew
"better", by some source most probably corrosive to her character. It
also was mere years ago, not yet a decade, that the man died and I'd hear his
music at this self-same bookstore.
No: I never cared for it as much as
everybody else appeared to. I don't like the Beatles, either.
But how can she claim to KNOW him?
Those he hurt never achieved what HE achieved. He MADE something of Life; he
EARNED his rights. The triumphs of the Strong must never bow before the
weaklings' tears. Did these girls not yet know it? They'd be spending all their
lives attempting to come CLOSE to what he did for Our Society. Their lives were
nearly utterly expendable, except that, being female, they might be protected
in the hopes that they'd give birth to a Great Man.
Of course, I did not tell them
that. I simply went my way, back to my parents' house, disturbed.
Each day, I wonder: "When will
my Life matter? Will it ever? Will I leave behind a legacy? Or will I have
regretted living?"
It's absurd to think that there are
those who do not ask themselves these questions. Feeling like a failure each
day is not enough to get you down; it motivates you to keep going. That which
kills me is the thought that other Failures will render your Success a Joke,
that, even after Death, the memes won't stop, and all because you hurt someone
who really, up until he touched your hand, was of no worldly consequence.
The Real Question is: WHY? Since when
do Ordinary People matter, so much so that their appeals subvert the Great
Ones?
It’s important to remember that a
Legacy comes First; the value of a Human Life is measured BY that Legacy,
especially in Men.
That Legacy is sacred. It is not
comparable to private interests, nor can accounts of private lives undo the
Legacy.
The Legacy is one Man’s contribution
to Society. The Power he enjoys as a result is Social Power, indistinguishable
from the Common Good.
The question ought not to be, “by
what authority can a Man of Power abuse the powerless?” but rather, “what
purpose do the powerless fulfill for Our Society by protest?”
Both Life and Culture teach us this: that no one has the "right to fail". If you are powerless, it's your own fault.
Grow up.
[({R.G.)}]
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