Roger Kimbal lays in to the eulogies of the late Walter Cronkite, and Michael Jackson:
First Michael Jackson and now this. A little over a week ago, I was captive in a local car repair shop for over two hours as one absurdity after the next dribbled out from the non-stop television coverage of Michael Jackson’s funeral. A phalanx of commentators paused to reflect solemnly on Jackson’s manifold contributions to the world of pedophilia–er, I mean, to the world of pop culture.
It is possible, I’m told, for a kind-hearted person to experience pity when contemplating the wreck that was Michael Jackson’s life. But could anyone really take him seriously as an cultural figure? (His place as a cultural symptom raises a different question.) I found nausea competed heartily with irritation as the assembled news casters marshaled superlative after superlative to describe the career of someone whose entire life was a monument to voracious commercial exploitation, on the one hand, and artistic nullity fired by unstopped narcissism, on the other.
Now, apparently, we are going to be treated to the same cloacal cataract of sentimentality about Walter Cronkite. One had to have a heart of stone, said Oscar Wilde, [to] not laugh at Dickens’ account of the death of “Little Nell.” Similarly, one has to have a cast iron stomach to withstand the adulation accumulating around the name of Walter Cronkite in the aftermath of his death at 92 last week. “Hero, role model, friend” ran a typical headline. Almost all of the scores, nay, hundreds of stories about Cronkite that have appeared in the last few days solemnly cite a poll that denominated that homely, mustachioed news reader “The most trusted man in America.”
The truth is that both Cronkite and Jackson were trivial historical figures – people who will be utterly forgotten in half a century’s time. We are agog over them now because we are a society which desperately wants both lies and titillation. Cronkite gave us lies, Jackson gave us titillation and thus upon their deaths, we are bereft. We prefer lies because truth is hard, we want titillation because it allows us to pretend we’re not as bad as we are. All of us can say that we’re at least not as bad as Jackson, and we want that smooth-voiced lie because it gets us off the hook; as long as the lie is playing in our ear, we don’t have to confront reality.
Think about it – “and that’s the way it was”…as if the events of the day – complex events involving masses of people and untold preliminary events – could have been described, even in a cursory manner, in a half hour news cast. It was Cronkite – a man of limited experience and no discernible military knowledge – who pronounced our effort in Vietnam a failure right after the enemy has suffered a crushing defeat in the Tet Offensive…and yet, years later, when he was close to retirement, he was rated in a poll as the most trusted man in America. What for? Because he looked like your uncle and he was on TV and, of course, back in those days there was no blogoshere or talk radio to point out the nakedness of the Emperor.
Michael Jackson’s musical genius – yeah, right: we listen to Mozart and he’s more two centuries in his grave…who will listen to “I’m Bad” even 50 years from now? I can assure everyone that if any of our civilization survives a thousand years from now, they’ll still listen to Mozart. Michael Jackson was a freak show, and we lapped it up and cast aspersions upon him and used him (as one of dozens) to hang on to our sins so we could pretend we hadn’t any.
In Michael Jackson’s sad life and Walter Cronkite’s un-earned glory is the commentary on what is wrong with us. We must free ourselves from lies and start to deal with things as they are, and ourselves as we are.
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