The Cuffed One

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Self-absorbed as Jackson might be, he may not have noticed that the world's opinion of him has diminished and soured. The mass audience is interested in him only when he exposes his weirdness on TV. His visit with Oprah Winfrey in 1993 was the highest-rated show in a decade, not including the Super Bowl, and ABC's airing of a British special on Jackson this February gave the network its biggest Thursday-night viewership in more than a decade. But these are sideshow exhibitions of a crippled creature like John Merrick, the Elephant Man — a figure Jackson has said he identifies with.

Jackson makes headlines with (to use the kindest phrase) unusual antics, like displaying his 8-month-old son outside an upper-floor window. Now he is accused, in effect, of dangling a 12-year-old's innocence over the ledge of his own confused sexual need. Many people think of Jackson as a pathetic predator. Many more don't think of him at all except as the albino freak who used to be Michael Jackson.

Perhaps Jackson is the last innocent in a cynical age. He may not be guilty of the current charges — we are obliged to assume so unless a jury decides otherwise — but it is hard not to think of him as a study in pathology. When he acknowledged to Winfrey that he had been abused as a child, he turned to the camera and said to his father, "I'm sorry. Please don't be mad at me." Jackson is still, everyone agrees, the world's oldest child star. If he could forgive and love the father who abused him, could he not forgive himself for bonding with the children who came into his Neverland bed? Could this lost boy even understand the difference between hugging and fondling, affection and assault, generosity and lechery?

Fans, not just children, have to ask one more question: Why must our stars fall so spectacularly and fail us so egregiously? The suspicion here is, Because we want them to. Indeed, it may be the prime instructive function of celebrities to show us, in their early radiance, what we could dream of being — and in the murk of their decline, what we fear, or know, we could become.