Pathos and Tragedy

Good Monday morning, Bush! You must have woken up all bright and… um, bushy-tailed. I haven't yet tuned in on the news of the day, but initial reports on the Iraq elections on last night's late night local TV suggest a great step forward there. Good news! I couldn't be more delighted, and only hope that this one day of optimism will lead to many others. Of course, there is the matter of how many had to die along the road... But let's not mar the good news of the day.

While I know your mind is on far weightier matters, I'm thinking today, on the first day of his long-awaited trial, of Michael Jackson. From the sublime to the ridiculous, no? But I have to tell you that I'm genuinely conflicted in my thinking. On the one hand, if he really did what they accuse him of, he needs to be held accountable in some appropriate way. I myself, however, am not convinced that the peculiar form of torture to which this obviously shy and emotionally damaged boy-man has been subjected for months now, even years, is appropriate to a crime he only possibly committed. Nor, if found guilty and convicted, are the twenty years of jail time that he stands to earn.

For once, as you might say, I do know a little bit whereof I speak: I was "molested" as a little boy--as Jackson's accuser claims to have been, at the age of twelve. And I've had the opportunity, in recent years, to hear the stories of countless men who have had similar experiences. It's simply astonishing how many of us there are--and I believe the same is true of an extraordinary number of women. Priests, teachers, relatives and parents--we seem unable to keep our hands off children. For myself, it was a case of what I can best describe as attempted fellatio: I did not have the physical maturity to provide the teacher who inveigled me into his bed--nor myself--with the satisfaction I somehow knew I was supposed to give.

Well, there was fear, and shame--and, yes, guilty pleasure--at the time. But damage? I have to say that I suffered far, far more at the hands of my peers in the twelve years I spent at boarding school. In the range of indignities to which I was subjected in childhood, being diddled by a lecherous teacher ranks pretty low, frankly, on the scale. I have to recognize, of course, that many experiences of molestation are far more psychically and emotionally damaging than mine, and that different children will respond to them in different ways, some very severe. Still, understanding that this might be an heretical position, I wonder from this very personal perspective if one's earliest sexual encounters--even if illicit and abusive--merit the kind of hysterical alarm they're met with in our cultural climate today. A surprising number of us have experienced something of this nature, and most of us managed to grow up relatively well adjusted.

This is not to say, clearly, that we are not obligated to take care of those who were indeed deeply wounded by such experiences; or that the abuse of children, when uncovered, should go unpunished. But let's not react as though all "inappropriate touching" were either uncommon--it's not--or so heinous as to arouse the kind of mass hysteria that surrounds the so-called King of Pop. Let's see things in some kind of sane perspective. Let's bear in mind that there is, after all, a common-sense distinction between pathos and tragedy, between distress and disaster. It's something we tend to forget amidst the hyperbole and sensationalism that we're offered by ratings-hungry media.

So that's my own, admittedly conflicted thinking, Bush. I wonder what you're thinking about the media circus now pitching its tents in Santa Maria, ready to give us minute-by-minute coverage of this earth-shattering event?