What Michael Jackson's Life Teaches Us

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Scapegoat Par Excellence!

More about Michael Jackson.  Well, just about everyone else, soooo, why not me, too?  In "Howard Dean's "Primal Scream", Part Two," I talked about how we tend to scapegoat those that represent feeling and gentleness, and I used Michael Jackson as an example of that, simply in the way he is being talked about in the media.  I said, in particular:

"Feeling" People -- Lightning Rods for Abuse, aaaand . . . Michael Jackson

Still, this pattern of beating back, hating, and persecuting those who represent feeling or softness -- rendering them as "pervs" -- all in order to prop up one's own sense of manliness, especially among other men, is played out even in the social dramas of the day:  Witness the jocular Santa Barbara prosecutor in  the Michael Jackson case -- buoyed up by his own sense of being a  "manly man among men" at his press conference  -- going after a man who more than anyone in the world represents a soft-spoken, gentle, effeminate, or childlike, or at least not grown-up enough, man -- espousing love -- "Love you more!" -- and standing up for causes of compassion toward others and other such "not-manly" endeavors, rather than what men are supposed to do:  that is, be gruff-speaking, self-serving, egocentric, butterfly mashers.

Now, I don't know if Michael Jackson is guilty.  I only know that the gentlest souls among us -- Christ the perfect example -- are lightning rods for abuse:  Because we have been taught to hate in ourselves that which is gentle (lest we not be "loved" by Dad, or accepted into the male peer group) and so we are driven (not consciously, but totally without our realizing our motivations, surely by the time we are adults -- at least unless we go through Primal Therapy) to hate and abuse that same thing we've learned to hate, beat back, and abuse in ourselves when we see it represented by some person or other.  Simply put, we do to people who come across as being "feeling" and "soft" exactly what we've been forced, or chosen, to do to the feeling and softness inside ourselves.  We do this because in doing so, the world is made "right"; one's outer world coincides with one's inner world.  Our inner feelingness and compassion repressed, punished, ridiculed, and beaten back into our unconscious, the world too must repress, beat back, ridicule, and punish those who represent feelingness and compassion.  We simply cannot have gentle, soft-speaking, compassionate people mucking about (let alone being popular and loved -- Michael Jackson; or being powerful -- Bill Clinton), when we have not been allowed to have those things.  ("How dare they be like that, when I wasn't allowed to? . . . and wanted to!" says our unconscious self.)

And so the Pundits and Talk-Show Comedians pile it on, getting ratings galore from similar, cynical, repressed, compassion-deprived, love-deprived, pathetically shriveled up souls who need to express their hate, lest they feel how they've been screwed over -- which is too painful for them to want to look at.

Projection and Scapegoating by the Talking Heads

Now, back to this MusePaper:  I realized afterwards how the media distortions surrounding Michael Jackson are timely and salient examples of the patterns of projection and scapegoating that pervade our media and social consciousness.  Again, not being omniscient, I cannot say whether Michael Jackson is actually guilty of anything or not.  But what I can point out is what the patterns in the reporting about him say about us, and in particular, about those doing the "reporting."

Dangling Babies

As if it is some kind of evidence, the media show endlessly the clip of Michael Jackson holding his child over a railing for his adoring crowd to see as an example that Jackson is insensitive to babies, and by implication, is capable of child molestation, and indirectly, of child abuse.  Along with this tiring, incessantly overplayed image are the ones of Jackson's children's wearing veils.  And the implications we are supposed to draw from them are the same as that of his action on the balcony.

OK, folks, here is where I admit I am forced to pull rank.  As a Primal Therapist and Primal Breathwork facilitator, who has facilitated hundreds of people as they relived and expressed their traumas from the prenatal, the perinatal, infanthood, childhood, and afterwards, I have to say I have yet to hear anyone express any trauma whatsoever over being "dangled," or veiled.  Well, you might say that they are rare events.  But I daresay I should know a little something about what traumatizes babies.  In addition, one only need to read some of the other articles on this site, by other authors -- some of which I have links to at the bottom -- to get an idea of what constitutes trauma.

But, let's address it this way:  I saw the clip of the dangling (ooooh, did I see it!).  The look on the baby's face was one of confusion.  One might say there was terror there.  But primarily I saw confusion, probably at the crowd below.  A natural reaction facing a multitude of people.  But if it was even bordering on traumatic, the baby would have started to cry.  Everyone can see that did not appear to be even beginning to happen.

I'll tell you what trauma would have been, the kind I hear about:  a baby is hurt or frightened and starts to cry, and then the trauma comes when the baby is slapped, to stop he or she from crying.  That's trauma.  The baby, until he or she gets to Primal Therapy, will feel from then on that even when scared or confused, he or she is not allowed even to cry.  And so the baby "determines" never to cry again.  Of course it's extremely rare that one event like that causes such repression, but the event of crying and being punished for it is usually not something that the parent does only once, it is usually a pattern of doing so.  So crying very often, over time, gets associated with physical abuse -- which is totally terrifying to an infant in that she or he does not know if this hitting will actually kill him or her.  And yes, far more terrifying than being lifted over a balcony is a baby's real fear of dying; one might say that fear of death is "biologically wired," and forget the complications of where that comes from (or see Falls From Grace for the spiritual-psychodynamic roots of the fear of death).  At any rate, we do have that fear of dying at that early young age, very much so.  And it is not all that unrealistic either, considering the many incidences we hear of where child abuse, hitting, for example, actually leads to the death of the child.  At any rate, that is the kind of trauma I hear about from my clients -- that concerning hitting, the fear that they might actually be killed, and especially when it is made worse by not allowing even the crying that naturally comes from that, when, that is, the crying is followed by more hitting, to shut up the child.  (See "Tears For Trauma:  Birth Trauma, Crying, and Child Abuse" by Aletha Solter, PhD, on this site for her making this case from the experimental and academic literature.)

But, in the "dangling" incident with Michael Jackson, the baby didn't cry, not at all.  And for a few good reasons:  For one thing, babies are not aware of relative distances and do not have a fear of falling; that is "learned" later.  It has been demonstrated, in child psychology experiments, that they are aware of differences in height and will shy away from going off a height, even when they are on a glass table and it might be thought that they might not be able to tell the difference between the table, which they can see through to the floor, and the end of the table, where they see the floor directly.  They will shy away from the end of the table, thus demonstrating an awareness of height.

But they are not terrified of the end of the table nor do they staunchly, petrified, steer clear of it.  They are simply aware of a difference in height.  I can't prove it, but I think it can be said that infants at that age do not know much about the differences in height -- if they can even perceive them -- for there is some evidence that the baby's field of vision is limited to a rather small radius, starting out with only about 18 inches to a couple feet, a little while after birth, little more than the distance from a baby's face to its mother's when being held, and expanding slowly over time.  Therefore, a difference in height is simply a difference in height; and as mentioned from the experiment, is no huge deal . . . just something to be avoided.

The crucial thing to the child is, "Am I being held?  Firmly?  And by someone I trust?"  These are much more important to the child.  And in the Jackson incident, the baby was in his male caretaker's arms; Michael had one arm solidly around the waist of the child.  I think the baby knew those arms very well; they were quite familiar to him or her.  The baby, I believe, was more concerned with being in her or his father's arms, held firmly, and this new stimulus of being held a slight bit about and away from his father's body was something he or she had undoubtedly experienced before.  The only new element was that of the spectacle of the crowd.  I say "only," because it has to be assumed that the baby, when it is carried, is aware of being a distance from the floor.  And for the reasons mentioned earlier, I don't believe the baby perceived any difference between being held a story or two up from the ground and simply being held above a floor.

As for the spectacle of the crowd, even that is suspect as being terrifying, as children take a while to discern and understand complex perceptual stimuli, like the crowd.  The crowd was probably perceived as just some unusual blur of sight and sound.  It may have been only as confusing as a new but complex mobile placed in his or her crib to play with, or as terrifying as a strangely shaped and unfamiliar mask or drawing of an unusual face.  We've all seen how babies react to strangers, sometimes they cry.  It is simply because that sort of face is farther off in familiarity to what the baby's experience has been so far -- which is usually the faces of his or her mother, father, caretakers, family, and friends -- of which more so, depending upon the baby's age and experience with different faces.

The evidence from child psychology is that babies react to the unfamiliar and the overly complex, even if it happens in the baby's crib.  And the further removed from familiarity the object presented happens to be, the more likely the baby will cry.  But, it should be pointed out, even this is not "trauma."  One does not end up in Primal Therapy having to heal the wounds of being presented with unfamiliar objects!  In fact, this process of gradually presenting increasingly complex and increasingly stranger and stranger objects to the child is what allows the child to grow.  It is one of the things that good parents do for their children, to stimulate their sociocognitive processes, and even social "skills."  The main thing that gives the child the courage to approach more complex and stranger stimuli, and eventually include them in the safe arena of the familiar, is always:  the presence of the loving caretaker during this process.  As long as that familiar loved one is around, the baby much more easily accepts the strange and the unusual.

OK, quite a bit of child psychology there, but bear with me.  The point should be obvious:  Michael Jackson was that baby's refuge of the familiar, and he was being held firmly by him, was very much "in touch" with him.  And the stimuli the baby was presented with was perhaps strange, complex, and unusual; but note that the child did not even cry!

And as for this ridiculous notion that Michael Jackson might have dropped the baby: oh, let's get real!  Let's give the guy a little credit for caring enough to hold the baby tightly and not project such bizzarro possibilities into the mix.  If nothing else, the tape showed that he was firmly holding the baby with one arm fully around him; his feet were dangling but, come on!  How often do parents hold their children that exact same way when standing up, and the baby's feet dangle.  It is not something that the baby is not used to!  Still, the way the critics would have you think, using a term like "dangling the baby," you would think that Jackson had been casually swinging him over the crowd, holding him only by an arm, a hand, or patch of the baby's jamies!

But the way Jackson did it, and his reason for doing it -- "I wanted to show my loyal fans my new baby!" -- are both harmless and reasonable, though you won't hear anyone say that.  In fact, I will venture to say I might have done the same thing with my own baby, as long as I, like Michael, was holding him or her firmly.

Most of all, this particular assault on Jackson, to me, demonstrates projection -- i.e., we see in others what is actually in ourselves.  I have this feeling, from listening to the folks who are haranguing Jackson on these events, that they are the types who probably would not hesitate to "lay the lumber" to their own child -- under the ruse of "discipline," of course.  He has been criticized by right-wing Talking Heads, and these people typically believe that "sparing the rod" actually does harm a child, that the only way to instill a sense of right and wrong is to abide by such an Old Testament adage.  No doubt these same people are in favor of the death penalty, "no-tolerance" policies in schools (See "The Only Important Education"), and stiffer penalties for juvenile offenders, among just a few of the harsh right-wing causes and proposals for dealing with, what used to be considered, simple juvenile acting out or, at the most, "delinquency."

What it comes down to is that  a vast number of parents are not good, loving parents.  I see the results of their harsh parenting in my session rooms and primal box.  And these people "know," at some level, that they are not good parents.  At least subconsciously they are aware of it.  But rather than face that, it is easier to find scapegoats, easy scapegoats . . . and Michael Jackson has set himself up as the perfect one.

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_{In honor of Michael Jackson, a sensitive soul who for that reason shared the same kind of persecutions that primal people know of, I am featuring the article I wrote at the time of Michael's prosecution and persecution, in 2004. Also, to honor this authentic, talented person, I have recorded a reading of the article for the audio clip site, Entertonement.com. It was uploaded Wednesday, and received more "listens" that first day, by far, than any day for any of the other 20 audio readings I have on that site.}

 

_{And I have made that rendition available here, you can click on the embedded audio player at the top of this column to hear it.}

 

_{This audio rendition, as it turned out, is a bit different than the text of the original article, although all of the article is in the reading. The audio ended up including some updates and comments, some personal asides of my own, and some unplanned eulogy type comments that came out of me, as I got caught up in remembering how Michael had been scapegoated, how he had lived his life with the un-self-conscious boldness and absolute commitment to his unique, real self -- more so even than most primalers are able to yet -- and for that he had been singled out, hounded, ridiculed, and laughed at; and these things no doubt diminished his life and then took it.}

 

_{So I became a bit reflective then, and I still am, as I recall how I'd also experienced persecution for being different - and for me, like Michael, it had to do with being more sensitive or more talented or intelligent. or all three. than males are supposed to be.} 

 

_{Certainly it was why my father hated me growing up - he, ignorant and struggling; me, bright and athletic without trying or even wanting to be, having everything come easy for me whereas for him he was desperately trying to show his father (dead, of course) that he in fact COULD take care of himself, and a wife, and six children. So it must have galled him no end that I was able to do and understand things, without hardly trying.}

 

_{And my emotional, sensitive side, my caring side that enabled me to be equally at home with guy groups as well as female, and indeed to always be the one guy hanging out with the women in the kitchen and talking, at family gatherings, while the men were in the living room smoking cigars, playing cards, getting drunk, and arguing and putting each other down.}

 

_{After that, in the counterculture, I found my sensitivity made me like the others; and together we were scapegoated, ridiculed, laughed at, and made fun of, until we too slowly, so slowly, largely disappeared. I even had the experience of being persecuted as recently as last year for being too caring with the emotionally disturbed and developmentally delayed boys I worked with at a group home. It was said that the boys had never developed such obvious fondness, and extreme liking for anyone in my role before, and I was advised to be harsher "more parental." I see now that it was jealousy of how easily I could get down on these kids' levels and make connections with them, as opposed to themselves, that led to the persecution.}

 

_{So yeah, I'm thoughtful, but it all started when I was reading what I had written about what they had done to Michael Jackson in 2004, and realized now, more even, I think, than I did at the time. How obviously it was a witch hunt, it was an attack on a guy for being too much not like a "real guy" and standing out and making an example of that, and the most galling thing of all, being extremely successful along with it. Well I can't say I didn't realize it was persecution of him for being different; after all, I titled the piece, at the time, "It's the Attack on Uniqueness, Stupid!" But I never saw the connection between us until just the other day.}

 

<sub>Still, knowing defenses and when people are acting out and scapegoating, etc., I was pushed to write, as a MusePaper in 2004, a defense of Michael. I did  not do it on the grounds of knowing anything about his guilt or innocence on the charges, because I had no knowledge about that, but I did it, like I said, mostly on the grounds of the idiocy of the roots of the claims against him.

The things spouted and touted in the media had all the trappings of a witch hunt or a scapegoating. They demonstrated nothing bad about Michael and said lots more about the people making the charges. I say this as a trained therapist, with many decades of experience observing people, their defenses, the feelings and trauma that they are hiding beneath them, and the way they act them out when they are not accessed.

Michael's attacks had all the characteristics of the kind of attacks that have been hurled against all sensitive men going back to Jesus. Michael was sensitive and loving and innocent, and I point out how that is what did him in in a world where people are not, and they cannot understand that anyone could possibly be not like themselves, which means having secret desires, hidden agendas, constantly searching for the right word to advance or at least not hurt their prospects, and so on. In a world of wolves, Michael hurt no one, so he was a prime target to be the sacrificial lamb.

But Michael had two strikes against him. Ironically, in America, the supposed land of the free, which the right-wing is constantly bannering, especially his second "crime" should have been applauded. But that is the hypocrisy of the right-wing -- espouse freedom, but you better not be too different from everyone else or you're gonna be mighty suspicious and we're gonna have to keep a watch on you.

The same thing happened with the counter-culture. That had to be crushed because corporations cannot make money if people go around being free, being unique, authentic, or individuals. God makes humans as different as snowflakes, thereby expressing the beauty of superb harmony of a universe with infinite complexity. Right-wingers use free spirits, individuals, like Jesus, to beat out the individualism in others. No, it doesn't make sense; but then talk to them sometimes and you tell me if you ever hear anything that is a rational sequence of thoughts lasting for more than a few seconds, if that.

So Michael's crime was in doing what God and even America would espouse, be an individual, carve out your unique destiny, succeed by finding that thing in you that God gave you making you like no other, and express it to the world. And now it occurs to me that there was a third thing that made him a target to be hated, that I didn't put in the article.

You see, Michael succeeded in exactly that way -- that way that our religious and our American values say is ideal for a human. But in a culture that is full of unhappy people, particularly men, who have given up their ideals to become zombies in the corporate machine, and have rationalized that they had no choice…. Well, Michael is the stick in the eye, the poke in the face, the constant bee sting reminding them that they just might have sold out, they just might have given up too soon, they just might have been happy, and they just might have wasted their lives.

And worse still,  in their unconscious, these macho, zombie robots of the corporate culture, are thinking like "Michael Jackson...how can such a weak, effeminate "pussy" like him succeed but not strong, blah, blah, blah, me; and blah blah blah."

But they are too weak themselves, actually, to be able to live with that, so they can't let themselves even think it. So Michael Jackson has to die. When he's out of sight, or punished severely proving that "we" were right to choose the path " we" took -- so their subliminal chatter goes -- " well then, we'll be reassured that these are the only choices men really have in life."</sub>

 

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The Family Bed

In Michael Jackson's unusual innocence, he even admits that children sleep in his bed.  All the Talking Heads agree it was foolhardy for him to admit such a thing.  Not once have I heard it mentioned that the reason that he didn't hide that fact is that maybe he just is innocent; and that his sleepovers are exactly what he claims they are:  sweet, kindly sleepovers.  The Talking Heads without fail spin his words to say that he admitted to "sleeping with these boys," which is exactly not what he said.  For the record, and the record seems always to need to be affirmed here, for, like I said, without fail these folks have, in their hatred at what Jackson represents, feel it their (unconscious) right to skew his words . . . for the record, Michael Jackson said he slept on the floor, that there were people in adjoining rooms at all times, and even that they would be coming in and out during the night.  Indeed, one might ask, if he was so stupid as to admit that he lets children sleep in his bed, why wasn't he also so stupid to say that he slept in the bed with them . . . that is, if he had.  I mean why wouldn't he have avoided the topic altogether if he had anything to hide?  That is why the "experts" we hear on the tube think he was stupid; they assume he does have something to hide.  And there's a lot to be said about them from that assumption.

Specifically, the fact that everyone agrees that he should not have admitted he had children sleep in his bed, once again, says, about the people saying that, that they have things in their own lives that they are trying to hide, and they live a life where they have to watch their words lest they be found out.  So, they themselves, having a hidden agenda, it never occurs to them that someone else might not.  I've discussed this at length elsewhere in describing how the Pundits cynically impugn the motives behind every good action by a Democrat, seeing each and every, on the surface, good statement, good proposal, or good action as having some ulterior motive:  If Hillary Clinton goes to visit the troops in Iraq, well it is politically motivated.  If the Republican President does the same thing, it is a noble and humanitarian thing.

But not to get off the subject (for that topic is endless with examples), let's get back to Jackson.  From a primal perspective, and looking cross-culturally, it has been common for parents and children, up to an age that would seem obscene to Puritanical, "dirty" minded Westerners, to share the same bed.  It has been known that this sharing of a bed for a good deal of childhood, whilst at the same time allowing the child to sleep alone whenever he or she wants to, forms a basis of self-regard and a strong emotional foundation.  Primal parents, knowing this, have been known to implement this in their own child-caring; and the results have been astonishingly positive for the mental and emotional and overall health of the children.  These children, unlike the average Western infant, are not traumatized, and this time I do really mean it.  Because when the opposite occurs, it is the kind of thing that does come up in Primal and Holotropic relivings.  By opposite, I mean being forced to sleep alone, not long after coming out of the safe, totally enclosed, totally familiar space of the mother's womb.  The usual thing that is done is that a nice, pretty little nursery is set up for the child -- with bunny and teddy pair and cutesy pink-toned baby rattles and such type of wallpaper (as if the baby can see or cares).  And then in this room is installed the CRIB -- what the baby perceives as the prison bars keeping him or her from the familiar feel, smell, and taste of the only really familiar thing in this world to the baby -- its MOTHER!

And what do we find?   The baby cries all night long.  Parents can't get any sleep.  How can they?  The baby is crying out for some solace from the terror of being separated into this strange, cage-like environment, with her or his whole familiar world -- the Mother -- nowhere in sight!  This is real trauma.  Holding babies above and slightly over a railing for a second is not!  But the nightly separation, for those long, endless periods which seem not to ever be going to end is deep enduring trauma.  For the baby's sense of time is still so much in the Now, and that almost eternal Now will not begin being chopped up into a foreseeable patch of future for quite a while.  Until then, night after night the baby endures the gut-churning fearsome estrangement and exile, not knowing if it will ever end.

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