Two ends of the same spectrum: Michael Jackson and J&K+8

For over a week now I've been trying to figure out why I've been obsessed with the unseemly details of the demise of Jon and Kate Gosselin's marriage. For five seasons (over 2-3 years), they've let TV cameras into their home to document life with a set of twins and a set of sextuplets, and then kept the cameras rolling as they grew apart and eventually filed for divorce. There has been no end of pop culture analysis of what this could mean (just Google for examples, okay?), how terrible this is for the children, how selfish and immature Jon is being, how awful and controlling Kate is, and how the show has declined since the Gosselins are no longer a typical middle-class family with an unusally large brood (see: increasingly brazen product placement and cross-promotion, new $1 million house and acreage bought with proceeds of show, increased emphasis on the parents at the expense of the adorable children).

And then Michael Jackson died.

And the world exploded in mourning. (and went to Youtube. But that's a post for another day.)

But what, exactly, have we been mourning? As the Onion has astutely pointed out, what people want to remember is the cute, talented kid with a great voice and dance moves, not the increasingly odd, increasingly white eccentric who would be aquitted of child sex abuses charges a mere four years ago. I think it would be interesting to ask people at what point in time, what day/month/year, they would like to stop the Michael Jackson timeline and not know about anything that happened afterwards.

At first I thought the connection between Jon&Kate and the reaction to Michael Jackson's death was about time, specifically that clichéd yet universal and base need to stop time at the best moment. In our own lives, we don't know what that best moment is, so to try to pick a point in the middle of living would be like hedging a bet. But with Jon&Kate's marriage (and the show) and Michael Jackson's public image (because let's face it, that is all we're ever going to know), we have the benefit of retrospect, of seeing the finite end, and can locate what we think are highlights.

But I think it's more than just the need to freeze time at the optimal moment. I think both events and the public fascination therewith touch on a need to be optimist about time, to think that the world can be better tomorrow. And that both events demonstrate how that need is constantly unfulfilled. We want to remember things at their best, suspended in time, not because we are optimists, but because we are pessimists, because we fear that life might not get any better. The desire to stop at the highlights is rooted in the deep, gnawing fear that time forward is not necessarily time better.

Jon&Kate Plus Divorce and the death of Michael Jackson represents the two extremes of how that desired optimism is dashed. On the one hand, we have a marriage of two rather banal people falling apart on television, though with unusual stressors (big family of multiples, reality-show-level celebrity). On the other hand, we have the protracted demise of Michael Jackson, whose physical death was preceded that of his music career and the protracted erosion of his public image. If regular people like Jon and Kate can't make it work, and if someone as talented and rich as Michael Jackson can die hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, then where's the hope for the rest of us?

And finally, it seems only appropriate to bring it back to the children, the "hope" for our "future". Specifically, to one child, a 12-year-old on the Ed Sullivan show singing "I Want You Back" with his four brothers. What if it had stopped there? What if his voiced had changed, if an injury prevented him from dancing as well, if he had left show business? What if he really had died at 12? Would people have mourned the lost potential, wondering about the records he could have made when he'd matured as an artist, the future he could have had?

What if they knew everything that was to come? Would they still be mourning then?