They Come in Threes

What's the difference between Michael Jackson and a grocery bag?
One is white, plastic, and dangerous to children, and the other you carry groceries in.
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Deaths, so they say, come in three's (though I'm not sure who "they" is in this case). And this week we've had three deaths of famous people who were prominent in the late 1970's: Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, and Michael Jackson. Fawcett and Jackson even died on the same day, yesterday.

I honestly was never all that attached to Fawcett and McMahon. I didn't have a Farrah poster as a kid, I didn't watch Charlie's Angels and never saw The Burning Bed, and honestly has Fawcett done anything else of note? And though I do remember McMahon from four shows (1. The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, 2. TV's Funniest Bloopers and Practical Jokes with Dick Clark, 3. Star Search, and 4. The Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes commercials), I never really gave him much thought. He was just a pleasant enough sounding announcer and the guy you could hear laughing off camera at Johnny Carson's bad jokes.

Michael Jackson, though, is another matter. I was genuinely sad when Lisa called me on the phone last night to tell me that Jackson had died. I don't guess anyone should be too awfully surprised by his death--one could tell by looking at the guy that he hadn't been taking care of himself for decades. But I still was caught a little off guard by his death. And like I said, I was sad.

Maybe the sadness stems from the fact that he died, at least as far as we as outsiders can tell, unredeemed. He went from being this super cute little kid in the early '70's who could sing and dance like nothing we'd ever seen to an absolute pop icon in the early 1980's to a plastic surgery joke in the late '80's to a pariah in the last few years. And no, I wouldn't have allowed him to spend ANY time with my kids, but still, I can't help feeling sorry for the man. Here was a guy that you didn't need a degree in psychology to tell had been damaged by his upbringing, someone we got to watch rise to astronomical heights and then fall hard right in front of our eyes, and we couldn't do anything to stop it. It's classic Greek tragedy, the only difference being Greek tragedy is a fiction, and this was a real person's real life we watched fall apart. And that's what made the difference.

I looked at my Facebook page last night and found post after post after post of people lamenting Jackson's death. And get it straight: most of these people TWO days ago would have as soon made a joke about Jackson as praise him, but his death means that there will be no redemption, and the jokes aren't funny anymore, if they ever really were.