Too Hot for Fox News
by Michelle Goldberg
The host of Fox's Freedom Watch makes Glenn Beck look like Jim Lehrer. Michelle Goldberg on the online gabfest too outrageous for the network.
In the early 1960s, William Buckley wrote a 5,000-word evisceration of the John Birch Society and its founder, Robert Welch, in the National Review. At the time, the society was a major embarrassment for the respectable right. It called Dwight Eisenhower a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” the same conspiracy that, according to Bircher lore, put fluoride in the water in an attempt to poison Americans.
“How can the John Birch Society be an effective political instrument while it is led by a man whose views on current affairs are, at so many critical points... so far removed from common sense?” Buckley asked. The attack on the Birchers, he wrote later, “proved fatal over time.” After Buckley’s attack, the John Birch Society became unwelcome in mainstream conservative circles.
On the weekly, hour-long Freedom Watch, which began airing in February, Fox gives its imprimatur to the kind of rhetoric once confined to the short-wave radio broadcasts of militia movements.
That is, until recently. On July 1, John Birch Society President John McManus was a guest on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s online-only Fox News show Freedom Watch, which airs every Wednesday at 2 p.m. Their chat was friendly, ranging over the “abominable doctrine of collectivism,” the malevolent influence of “government schools,” and the fraud of manmade global warming. Napolitano seemed to be actively trying to rehabilitate the John Birch Society’s reputation. Untouchable as it once was, the group’s old-right ideology fits well with the tenor of his show, which is full of figures previously dismissed as cranks—not just Birchers but 9/11 truthers and secessionists as well.
The July 1, 2009 episode featuring John McManus of the John Birch Society
In its anti-Obama hysteria, Fox has mainstreamed voices once relegated to the fever swamps. This is most immediately clear in the apocalyptic buffoonery of Glenn Beck, and in the way the network has indulged the delusions of the so-called birthers, who insist that Obama was born in Kenya and thus can’t legally be president. Yet that’s just scratching the surface. On the weekly, hour-long Freedom Watch, which began airing in February, Fox gives its imprimatur to the kind of rhetoric once confined to the short-wave radio broadcasts of militia movements. After eight years of championing increased executive power, the network now hosts a show whose anti-government fixation sometimes leads to cheerful talk of dissolving the United States and dark warnings of impending tyranny.
Putting the show online, says Eric Boehlert, a senior fellow at Media Matters, gives Fox the “best of both words. They can really feed the far right all this paranoid stuff, but even folks at Fox realize they can’t go quite that far on TV.”
On the Internet, with fewer people paying attention, they’re willing to go quite far indeed. On March 18, for example, Freedom Watch did a joint broadcast with the prolific conspiracy theorist Alex Jones—or, as Napolitano introduced him, “the one, the only, the great Alex Jones”—so that the show aired simultaneously on the Fox News Web site and on Jones’s radio program. It was an extraordinary collaboration, because Jones is best known as a leader of the 9/11 Truth movement. In his documentary 9/11: The Road to Tyranny, Jones argued that the attacks on the World Trade Center were orchestrated by the U.S. government as a pretext for the “power-mad megalomaniacs” of the New World Order to “usher in their corrupt world government, a world government where populations, their own documents show, will be herded into compact cities, will be issued national ID cards, and yes, even implantable microchips.”
Freedom Watch gave Jones a mainstream venue to warn that the banks had engineered the financial collapse in order to establish a global government that would collect carbon taxes to fuel its evil designs. Rather than challenge him, Napolitano said, “I appreciate what you’re exposing.” There was a time, he continued, “when the types of things that you are warning against were not discussed openly and publicly.” Referring to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s call for a “global New Deal,” Napolitano asked, “What under the sun is a global New Deal unless it consists of the type of thing that you have just warned against?”
To be sure, Napolitano’s profound suspicion of the government has often been a salutary thing. As a commentator on various Fox programs, he was frequently a lone voice objecting to the constitutional trespasses of the Bush years and speaking out against torture. On Monday, he appeared on the network to argue that Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s rights were violated by the policeman who arrested him, a theme he took up again on Freedom Watch on Wednesday. He really does take liberty seriously.
A solidly built, silver-haired former New Jersey Superior Court judge, Napolitano can seem likeable and reasonable in much the same way as his political soul mate Ron Paul, who appears on his show nearly every week. Paul was one of the fiercest, most consistent critics of Bush’s ruinous foreign policy, which made it easy for some to overlook the far-right parts of his ideology. Likewise with Napolitano. He’s considerably less grating and authoritarian than bombastic bullies like Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity. Yet in some ways he’s even more radical. By giving him free rein, Fox seems to have decided that with Obama in office, no attacks on government are too outlandish.
On the July 29 episode, Napolitano hosted Sheriff Richard Mack, a popular figure on the militia circuit and a member of The Oath Keepers, a group of military and police officers who have sworn to disobey orders they consider unconstitutional. At times, The Oath Keepers’ subversiveness is almost refreshing. On their Web site is a list of commands they won’t follow, including, “We will NOT obey any order to detain American citizens as ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ or to subject them to trial by military tribunal.” More worrying is their sympathy for secessionist movements, and intimations of a second civil war. Should any state assert its sovereignty, they say, “[W]e will not obey orders to force that state to submit to the national government.”
Secessionism is a frequent theme among Napolitano’s guests. Fox was once the most ardent supporter of expanding government authority. Now, with Freedom Watch, it provides a platform for those who loathe federal power so much they’re willing to see the United States unmade. In a matter of months, outrage over Obama has driven the network to a flirtation with treason.
Thomas Woods Jr., author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, an Alabama-based think tank, has been a guest on Freedom Watch several times. Woods was a founding member of the neo-Confederate League of the South, and while he vehemently denies any racial animus, he doesn’t deny that he wants to see the United States broken up. “At this point the United States, to me it’s just obvious that it’s completely ungovernable,” he says. “It’s composed of people who have such dramatically different outlooks on the universe, outlooks on the role of government, on social policy, and everybody’s fighting over which nine of us get to make social policy for the entire country.” Woods continues, “I don’t believe the union of states is a god that I worship.”
Other Freedom Watch regulars share his antipathy to the union of the states. Lew Rockwell, the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s founder, is on almost every week. Rockwell, who describes himself as a “libertarian anarchist,” says, “I don’t believe in the nation state. I despise the nation state. I despise nationalism.” His politics mix unfettered capitalism with more than a little sympathy for the old Confederacy. On his Web site, LewRockwell.com, there’s a whole section, titled “King Lincoln,” devoted to articles excoriating the Civil War president.
Rockwell served as Paul’s congressional chief of staff between 1978 and 1982. When news of racist articles in Ron Paul’s various newsletters broke last year, the libertarian magazine Reason fingered Rockwell as the ghostwriter. He denies the charge. “That whole campaign against me was The New Republic, which is a major league war promoter,” he says. “Always in its entire history, they’ve promoted every single rotten war that the U.S. has been engaged in.” Pressed further, he says, “I’ve said all I’m going to say on that topic.”
Before Napolitano’s show started, Rockwell had been invited on Fox News a few times, but always by hosts who were attacking his views on American foreign policy. Now, he’s given a respectful hearing nearly every week. “I guess because their man is not in office, therefore they’re willing to consider dissenting voices,” he says of the network.
On the same March program that Alex Jones appeared on, Napolitano and Rockwell discussed secessionism. “I would love to see a state legislature secede and basically say to the federal government, get the heck out of our state, and see what happens!” said Napolitano. Rockwell replied, “As the crisis deepens, I think we’re going to see that… [W]e’re going to see parts of the United States seceding from Washington, D.C. It’s going to be a great thing.” During the last eight years, Fox News has made a mission of hunting down any hint of anti-Americanism, no matter how subtle or trivial. It no longer has to look very far.
Michelle Goldberg is the author of The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World and Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. She is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, Glamour, and many other publications.

From The Sunday London Times
Barack Obama’s race dream is swiftly shackled
The ugly arrest of a black professor shows racial harmony is far from a reality
Andrew Sullivan

What do you call a black man with a PhD? The answer begins with an “n”. Yes, it’s an old and bitter joke about the resilience of racial bias in America, but it got a new twist last week. The black man with a PhD was Henry Louis Gates Jr, one of the most distinguished scholars of African-American history and culture at Harvard. His unexpected tormentor was a local policeman called James Crowley, a white, well-trained officer called to investigate a possible break-in.
The facts we know for sure are as follows. Ten days ago Gates got home from China in the afternoon to find his front door jammed. He forced it open with the help of his cab driver, another black man. A white woman in the area called the police to report a possible burglary. Crowley showed up and saw a black man in the hallway of the house through the glass door. He asked Gates to step out onto the porch and talk to him. Gates refused.
The police report — written by Crowley — says he told Gates he was investigating a break-in in progress and Gates responded furiously: “Why? Because I’m a black man in America?” Gates tried to place a call to the local police chief, while telling Crowley he had no idea who he was “messing” with. The interaction quickly degenerated. After Gates had shown his Harvard identification, Crowley said he would leave. Gates then followed him to his front door, allegedly yelling that Crowley was racist. On his own porch, at his own property, Gates was arrested for “disorderly conduct”, handcuffed and booked in at a local station.
The incident clearly struck a nerve. Boston has a fraught racial history. Gates, of course, is no underclass black man but among the country’s elite, friends with the president, chums with Oprah Winfrey, a man given a small fortune by Harvard to build one of the best departments of African-American studies in the world.
The affair got another lease of tabloid life when President Barack Obama was asked for his reaction to the incident and said that while Gates was a friend and he did not know the full facts, the police acted “stupidly” by arresting someone when there was proof he was in his own home.
So was this an example of excessive racial grievance on the part of Gates or excessive racial insensitivity on the part of Crowley — or a little bit of both? Such moments are fully understood only by the individuals involved — and even then the truth is murky in such emotional circumstances. But it is indeed unusual to arrest someone for “disorderly conduct” when he is on his own property.
Massachusetts law defines the perpetrators of “disorderly conduct” thus: “common night walkers, common street walkers, both male and female, common railers and brawlers, persons who with offensive and disorderly acts or language accost or annoy persons of the opposite sex, lewd, wanton and lascivious persons in speech or behaviour, idle and disorderly persons, disturbers of the peace, keepers of noisy and disorderly houses and persons guilty of indecent exposure”. Apparently Gates’s loud accusations of racism on a street in Cambridge at one o’clock in the afternoon in front of at most seven passers-by and neighbours was a qualification for the charge. It’s no big surprise that it was swiftly dropped.
Crowley gave an interview on Thursday after Obama’s remarks, refusing to apologise. When asked what he thought of the president’s comments, he smiled, paused and said: “I didn’t vote for him.” The way he said it, the contempt in his voice and pride in his actions, helped to illuminate for me why Gates might have perceived racism. But the second police report — from an officer called Carlos Figueroa — testified that Gates initially refused to provide Crowley with any identification, yelling, “No, I will not!” and, “This is what happens to black men in America!” and, “You don’t know who you’re messing with.”
Gates is not a merchant of racial grievance. He is a scholar who has won wealth and fame and respect for his work and who tends to eschew the kind of bald racial accusations he made that day. Maybe he was exhausted after a long trip and irritated by being unable to get into his home; to be confronted by an officer of the law asking if he was a burglar may well have been the last straw. He lost his cool. A black man should never lose his cool with a white policeman in America. Obama explained in his autobiography the unwritten code for black men in such situations: no sudden moves.
Would this have happened to a white man? That requires some unpacking. A white man seen breaking through the front door into a house in an affluent section of Cambridge, Massachusetts, might not have prompted a police call. Any suspected break-in, though, could justify a call to the local police station.
More importantly, a white man seeing a policeman call him onto his porch for identification would probably not have exploded the way Gates allegedly did. Nor, one might add, would a poor black man arrested on the streets of the largely African-American neighbourhood of Roxbury in Boston raise such a ruckus about “racism”. Gates’s response was a classic example of how successful black men in America feel when treated by the police in a manner used in the ghetto. That was also perhaps the reason for Obama’s solidarity. What do you call a black man with a PhD again? Equally, I’d wager that if the policeman had seen an older white man wielding a cane through the glass door of a posh house, he would not have demanded that the man come out onto his porch and identify himself. He would have knocked, explained the reason for his visit and instantly accepted a white man’s explanation. Is this racism? If it has never happened to you, no. If it has, yes.
On the web, the comments sections on various blogs and stories were the most honest. Here is one view: “Butt the hell out Obama. You don’t know the facts of the case, you weren’t there, you’re friends with the douchebag, you’re black. Taking Obama’s word is the same as judging a criminal by a jury of his fellow gangster peers.”
Here is another: “Professor Gates might not have been arrested if he’d been more submissive — let the cop win the masculinity contest. Every brotha has played that game as well: you don’t look the popo in the eye, you do say ‘sir’ a lot and maybe you won’t get locked up. Then you go home and stew in the stuff that gives African-American men low life expectancy.”
Yes, America has a black president. But some things haven’t changed that much, have they?

As Officers Face Heated Words, Their Tactics Vary

By MICHAEL WILSON and SOLOMON MOORE NY TIMES
Police departments issue their officers Kevlar vests to stop bullets, and thick helmets and even shields to protect them from bottles and bricks. But there is nothing in the equipment room to give an officer thicker skin.
That tool — as vital to an officer’s safety and the public’s as anything clipped to his belt — is developed in training, and its strength differs from one officer to the next.
The issue of tolerance, in fact, lies at the heart of the dispute surrounding the arrest of the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in Cambridge, Mass.
The police say Professor Gates was arrested and briefly charged with disorderly conduct after he ignored warnings to stop haranguing an officer who had asked him for identification inside his home.
Though Professor Gates said he was not abusive and was the victim of racism, the police report said he told Sgt. James M. Crowley, “I’ll speak with your mama outside.”
Several officers interviewed in four cities on Friday said they tried to ignore such remarks. Others said they had zero tolerance for being treated disrespectfully in public.
The line of when to put on handcuffs is a personal and blurry one, varying among officers in the same city, the same precinct, even the same patrol car.
A mounted police officer who has been with the Los Angeles Police Department for 25 years said that taking verbal abuse was a regular part of his job.
“We don’t get to tell people what they want to hear,” said the Los Angeles officer, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid being quoted on duty. “Whether we’re giving them a ticket or responding to some conflict between a husband and wife, we’re not dealing with people at their best, and if you don’t have a tough skin, then you shouldn’t be a cop.”
The officer said he recently confronted a woman walking in the middle of the street and asked her to step out of traffic. She refused and became belligerent, using a string of four-letter words and ethnic epithets. He said he wrote the woman a ticket and went on his way.
But in Brooklyn, a 24-year-old officer, with three years on the force, seemed less inclined to walk away from verbal abuse.
“We say, ‘Back down,’ ” he said. “If they don’t back down and start making direct threats, that’s an offense. They don’t get a free pass.”
He said that threats could be defined in different ways, and he preferred to talk people down, but that the rules changed if a crowd formed, which was routine in New York and also occurred during the Gates incident.
“I wouldn’t back down if there’s a crowd gathering,” the Brooklyn officer said, in part out of concern of sending a message of weakness that could haunt another officer later. “We’re a band of brothers. We have to be there to help each other out. If there’s a group and they’re throwing out slurs and stuff, you have to handle it.”
A 13-year veteran of the Denver police force, who did not wish to give his name, said likewise. “We’re not going to take abuse,” he said. “We have to remain in control. We’re running the show.”
But Robert Anderson, with the same department five years, said he tried to “let people vent” if they grew irate. “People usually aren’t happy to see the police,” he said. “They’d rather see a fireman.”
In New York, State Senator Eric Adams, a retired New York City police captain and co-founder of the group 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement, said the rules for dealing with someone differed by setting.
“If it’s their house, they’re allowed to call you all sorts of names,” Mr. Adams said. “A man’s house is his castle. If they’re in the street, and they don’t listen to the officer’s warning, ‘Sir, you’re being disorderly,’ you can lock them up at this time.”
Not that the officer necessarily should, he said.
“Let’s say I do a stop,” Mr. Adams said. “I question, and it’s nothing. ‘Sir, I’m sorry, I apologize.’ What’s the reason for staying, if the anger’s directed at me? If it’s directed at a third party, a storekeeper, I stay.”
But if the officer himself is the provocation, the officer should leave, he said, and added that Sergeant Crowley did not use such common sense.
Michael J. Palladino, president of the Detectives Endowment Association in New York, took a harder line and said officers should not tolerate disrespect on the street.
“We pay these officers to risk their lives every day,” Mr. Palladino said. “We’re taught that officers should have a thicker skin and be a little immune to some comments. But not to the point where you are abused in public. You don’t get paid to be publicly abused. There are laws that protect against that.”
In Atlanta, Officer M. Tate, who would not give his first name, said he was trained not to lose his cool — or his job — by reacting to name calling. He recalled from memory the exact definition of when a person’s behavior crossed the line into being worthy of arrest: “The set of circumstances that will lead a reasonable and prudent person to believe that a crime has or is about to be committed and that the person in question is involved in a significant manner.” Anything short of that, he said, does not warrant handcuffs.
“I’ll take them yelling at me,” Officer Tate said. “Unless I’m hit or they get violent, I won’t arrest them for just yelling at me.”
But the training cannot be applied to every situation, one officer said.
“You want the training?” a detective in Queens asked. “Or how I train myself?”
He described a scenario he had faced many times: stopping someone who he just saw appear to slip drugs to someone else, only to learn that was not the case. “ ‘Oh, it’s a cigarette. Oh, O.K., sorry to bother you,’ ” the detective said.
And if the person then becomes verbally abusive?
“If you locked everybody up that was technically disorderly — you’ve got to know which battles to fight,” he said. “If this guy’s causing commotion, there’s a scene, you look for the level-headed person who’s a friend of his. Say, ‘Look, we’re out here cleaning up your block.’ When you leave, they’re going to talk to him.”
Senator Adams said black men were more likely to be locked up for what in police parlance is called getting “lippy.”
“The ‘uppity Negro,’ ” he said. “You may not have committed a crime, but you know what? You’ve got a big mouth.”
Michael Wilson reported from New York, and Solomon Moore from Los Angeles. Contributing reporting were Dan Frosch in Denver, Robbie Brown in Atlanta, and Jennifer Mascia and Rebecca White in New York.

Obama rushes to quell racial uproar he helped fire
By NANCY BENAC (AP)
WASHINGTON — Knocked off stride by a racial uproar he helped stoke, President Barack Obama hastened Friday to tamp down the controversy. Obama, who had said Cambridge, Mass., police "acted stupidly" in arresting black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., declared the white arresting officer was a good man and invited him and the professor to the White House for a beer.
Obama conceded his words had been ill-chosen, but he stopped short of a public apology. He personally telephoned both Gates and Sgt. James Crowley, hoping to end the rancorous back-and-forth over what had transpired and what Obama had said about it. Trying to lighten the situation, he even commiserated with Crowley about reporters on his lawn.
Hours earlier, a multiracial group of police officers had stood with Crowley in Massachusetts and said the president should apologize.
It was a measure of the nation's keen sensitivities on matters of race that the fallout from a disorderly conduct charge in Massachusetts — and the remarks of America's first black president about it — had mushroomed to such an extent that he felt compelled to make a surprise appearance in the White House briefing room to try to put the matter to rest. The blowup had dominated national attention just as Obama was trying to marshal public pressure to get Congress to push through health care overhaul legislation — and as polls showed growing doubts about his performance.
"This has been ratcheting up, and I obviously helped to contribute ratcheting it up," Obama said of the racial controversy. "I want to make clear that in my choice of words, I think I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department and Sgt. Crowley specifically. And I could've calibrated those words differently."
The president did not back down from his contention that police had overreacted by arresting the Harvard professor for disorderly conduct after coming to his home to investigate a possible break-in. He added, though, that he thought Gates, too, had overreacted to the police who questioned him. The charge has been dropped.
Obama stirred up a hornet's nest when he said at a prime-time news conference this week that Cambridge police had "acted stupidly" by arresting Gates, a friend of the president's. Still, Obama said Friday he didn't regret stepping into the controversy and hoped the matter would end up being a "teachable moment" for the nation.
"The fact that this has garnered so much attention, I think, is testimony to the fact that these are issues that are still very sensitive here in America," Obama said.
Obama wryly took note of the distraction from his legislative efforts.
"I don't know if you've noticed, but nobody's been paying much attention to health care," the president said.
Obama, who has come under intense criticism from police organizations, said he had called Crowley to clear the air, and said the conversation confirmed his belief that the sergeant is an "outstanding police officer and a good man."
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs refused to say whether Obama had apologized to Crowley.
Asked repeatedly about that, Gibbs said if Obama "doesn't want to characterize" his remarks to Crowley, "I'm not going to get ahead of him."
The story had taken on a life of its own, and the White House scrambled to keep up.
Gibbs said just Friday morning that the president had probably said most of what he was going to say, and that the only problem was media "obsession."
Hours later, Obama showed up to try to put the issue to rest.
There were signs both that Obama's statement had helped to ease tensions and that his critics were not about to let that be the end of it: A trio of Massachusetts police organizations issued a statement thanking the president for his "willingness to reconsider his remarks." The statement said Crowley was "profoundly grateful" Obama was trying to resolve the situation. But a Republican congressman from Michigan, Thaddeus McCotter, said he would introduce a House resolution calling on Obama to apologize to Crowley.
Obama tried to lighten his tone in his public remarks about his phone conversation with Crowley.
He said the police officer "wanted to find out if there was a way of getting the press off his lawn."
"I informed him that I can't get the press off my lawn," Obama joked.
In his conversation with Gates, aides said, Obama and the professor had spoken about the president's statement to the press and his conversation with Crowley.
The case began on Monday, when word broke that Gates, 58, had been arrested five days earlier at the two-story home he rents from Harvard.
Supporters including Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson called the arrest an outrageous act of racial profiling. Public interest increased when a photograph surfaced of the handcuffed Gates being escorted off his porch amid three officers, two white and one black.
Cambridge police moved to drop the disorderly conduct charge on Tuesday — without apology, but calling the case "regrettable."
That didn't end the national debate: Some said Gates was responsible for his own arrest because of his response to Crowley, while others said Gates was justified to yell at the officer.
Obama's criticism of the police only added fuel to the racial debate.
Meanwhile, the police union and fellow officers, black and white, rallied around Crowley, a decorated officer who in 1993 tried to give lifesaving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to Reggie Lewis, a black Boston Celtics player who collapsed at practice. Lewis could not be revived.
Crowley, 42, had been selected to be a police academy instructor on how to avoid racial profiling.
A multiracial group of officers and union officials stood with Crowley on Friday at a news conference to show support and to ask Obama and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who is black, to apologize for their comments. Patrick had called Gates' arrest "every black man's nightmare."
Obama's take on the situation: "My sense is you've got two good people in a circumstance in which neither of them were able to resolve the incident in a way that it should have been resolved."
Democratic activists around the country were hopeful the president's latest remarks would quell the uproar.
"Let's concentrate on the business at hand — fixing the economy and health care for everybody," said Florida state Rep. Luis Garcia, a vice chair of the state Democratic Party.
In Michigan, 19-year-old Mitchell Rivard, the president of the Michigan State University College Democrats, expressed hope the controversy would indeed be a learning experience for the country.
"I think it's going to make people talk about race relations around the United States and in their hometowns," Rivard said. "This will be something that people are going to talk about across the nation in terms of how we can have better race relations."
Associated Press writers Bob Salsberg in Cambridge, Mass., Charles Babington, Ben Feller and Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington, Brendan Farrington in Tallahassee, Fla., and Tim Martin in Lansing, Mich., contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

“When I was born the speed limit was two miles an hour. They’d only just repealed the law where a man had to walk in front of every motor car waving a flag.”

Rachel Lucas
The world’s oldest man, who was a British veteran of WWI, died yesterday. I’d never heard of this man until then; I was again at the gym on the elliptical (it was actually the same day I discovered the song I last blogged about), and the BBC had giant Breaking News headlines that said “Henry Allingham has died.” I thought to myself that he must be some UK celebrity of little note or else I would know about him as an American. I was incorrect; he was of much, much more note than I’ll ever be.
He was born in south London in June 1896 and brought up by his mother and grandparents following the death of his father, from TB, in 1897.
…In 1914 he tried to join the army as a despatch rider but his mother, who was ill, persuaded him to stay at home and nurse her. She died a few months afterwards, age 42, and Henry, who later remembered feeling completely alone and with no purpose in life, joined the fledgling Royal Naval Air Service as a mechanic.
After his training he was posted to Great Yarmouth, where he maintained sea planes involved in anti submarine patrols in the North Sea and acted as an air gunner in operations to counter German Zeppelins.
He was drafted onto HM trawler Kingfisher which headed north, in May 1916, as part of the British force sent to intercept the German High Seas Fleet at Jutland.
…In what became the only major naval battle of the war, the British lost 14 ships and more than 6,000 lives, but the German fleet never again threatened to put to sea against the Royal Navy.
Allingham later recalled watching shells flying across the sea. “There were a lot of dud shells and that saved us from a lot of harm.”
In 1917 he was posted to the Western Front where the RNAS was tasked with supporting squadrons of the Royal Flying Corps which was operating sorties over the battlefields of the Somme.
He found himself in the trenches where he was ordered to neutralise the booby trapped bombs left behind by the retreating German soldiers.
From The Guardian:
It was his experiences during the war that defined the man, but for more than 80 years he refused to speak about it. After the war, Allingham went into the motor industry, eventually joining the design department at Ford before retiring in 1961.
He was finally persuaded to talk about the past by Dennis Goodwin who, as founder of the First World War Veterans’ Association, organised reunions and trips for old soldiers.
“He’d answer the door and not let me in,” recalled Goodwin, his carer and the ghost writer of his memoirs. “He’d say, ‘I want to forget the war, I don’t want to talk about it’. But I sent him letters about the reunions and gradually he let me in and we got talking. Eventually I got him out of his flat in Eastbourne and took him to the pier. He met other veterans and started to think, ‘I could do this’. It was a very slow process – he’s essentially a very private man.”
Once Allingham started talking, it became clear that the scenes he witnessed of soldiers waiting to go over the top at Ypres never left him. “They would just stand there in 2ft of water in mud-filled trenches, waiting to go forward,” he said. “They knew what was coming. It was pathetic to see those men like that. I don’t think they have ever got the admiration and respect they deserved.”
He remembered spending a night in a shellhole in Flanders. “It stank,” he said. “So did I when I fell into it. Arms and legs, dead rats, dead everything. Rotten flesh. Human guts. I couldn’t get a bath for three or four months afterwards.”
This is why I love reading about people who live so long:
In recent years, Allingham attended remembrance events at home and abroad, gave interviews to the media, visited schools to talk to children at least 100 years his junior and completed an autobiography, published last October.
He and his wife, Dorothy, were together for more than 50 years. “I’ve only ever kissed one girl: my Dorothy,” he said. “We met in 1915 and married in 1918. She died in 1970. I never gave my cherry away when I went to the front. I know a lot of men who did.”
Allingham leaves a family that includes five grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren, 14 great-great grandchildren and one great-great-great grandchild.
Until the end of his life, Allingham’s memory was sharp. Born the year the first modern Olympics were held and Queen Victoria’s became the longest reigning monarch in British history, he was able to recall times that are long lost history to most of us.
“When I was 15, I came downstairs one morning, picked up mother’s newspaper and, oh, what a shock! The Titanic had gone,” he recalled. “The ‘unsinkable’ ship – but it had gone down so simple.”
The former Ford worker remembered a time when cars were a rarity. “People drive fast today,” he said. “When I was born the speed limit was two miles an hour. They’d only just repealed the law where a man had to walk in front of every motor car waving a flag.”
He had two explanations for his longevity. The first, which proved age had not dimmed his sense of humour, was “cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women”.
The second, however, was perhaps more thoughtful. “How have I lived so long? I never worried. In the 20s there were millions of men out of work. You couldn’t get a job anywhere. I wasn’t worried. I’m not worried now,” he said. “I was cycling along Rotten Row one day when I saw George V come along on his horse. I took my cap off, and the King tipped his riding crop. And I said, ‘Give me a job, sir, I’ll do anything for you.’ But it was lost in the clatter of the hooves.”
Max Arthur, author of the first world war oral history Last Post, had yet another explanation: “He was a very dignified, very gentle man. He was so surprised to survive the first world war that he saw whatever came next as a reward. He made the most of his life. It does exemplify in my mind that, whatever age you are, never give up, and when in doubt, sing, which is what he still does. Sheer defiance is the reason he keeps going.”
Last month, Allingham seemed to agree: “I’m not the kid I used to be, but I still get around. You make your own happiness, whatever age you are. Seeing the funny side of life is useful, and I’ve always had a sense of humour. People ask me, what’s the secret of a long life? I don’t know.”

One Giant Leap to Nowhere
By TOM WOLFE NY TIMES

WELL, let’s see now ... That was a small step for Neil Armstrong, a giant leap for mankind and a real knee in the groin for NASA.
The American space program, the greatest, grandest, most Promethean — O.K. if I add “godlike”? — quest in the history of the world, died in infancy at 10:56 p.m. New York time on July 20, 1969, the moment the foot of Apollo 11’s Commander Armstrong touched the surface of the Moon.
It was no ordinary dead-and-be-done-with-it death. It was full-blown purgatory, purgatory being the holding pen for recently deceased but still restless souls awaiting judgment by a Higher Authority.
Like many another youngster at that time, or maybe retro-youngster in my case, I was fascinated by the astronauts after Apollo 11. I even dared to dream of writing a book about them someday. If anyone had told me in July 1969 that the sound of Neil Armstrong’s small step plus mankind’s big one was the shuffle of pallbearers at graveside, I would have averted my eyes and shaken my head in pity. Poor guy’s bucket’s got a hole in it.
Why, putting a man on the Moon was just the beginning, the prelude, the prologue! The Moon was nothing but a little satellite of Earth. The great adventure was going to be the exploration of the planets ... Mars first, then Venus, then Pluto. Jupiter, Mercury, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus? NASA would figure out their slots in the schedule in due course. In any case, we Americans wouldn’t stop until we had explored the entire solar system. And after that ... the galaxies beyond.
NASA had long since been all set to send men to Mars, starting with manned fly-bys of the planet in 1975. Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who had come over to our side in 1945, had been designing a manned Mars project from the moment he arrived. In 1952 he published his Mars Project as a series of graphic articles called “Man Will Conquer Space Soon” in Collier’s magazine. It created a sensation. He was front and center in 1961 when NASA undertook Project Empire, which resulted in working plans for a manned Mars mission. Given the epic, the saga, the triumph of Project Apollo, Mars would naturally come next. All NASA and von Braun needed was the president’s and Congress’s blessings and the great adventure was a Go. Why would they so much as blink before saying the word?
Three months after the landing, however, in October 1969, I began to wonder ... I was in Florida, at Cape Kennedy, the space program’s launching facility, aboard a NASA tour bus. The bus’s Spielmeister was a tall-fair-and-handsome man in his late 30s ... and a real piece of lumber when it came to telling tourists on a tour bus what they were looking at. He was so bad, I couldn’t resist striking up a conversation at the end of the tour.
Sure enough, it turned out he had not been put on Earth for this job. He was an engineer who until recently had been a NASA heat-shield specialist. A baffling wave of layoffs had begun, and his job was eliminated. It was so bad he was lucky to have gotten this stand-up Spielmeister gig on a tour bus. Neil Armstrong and his two crew mates, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, were still on their triumphal world tour ... while back home, NASA’s irreplaceable team of highly motivated space scientists — irreplaceable! — there were no others! ...anywhere! ... You couldn’t just run an ad saying, “Help Wanted: Experienced heat-shield expert” ... the irreplaceable team was breaking up, scattering in nobody knows how many hopeless directions. •
How could such a thing happen? In hindsight, the answer is obvious. NASA had neglected to recruit a corps of philosophers.
From the moment the Soviets launched Sputnik I into orbit around the Earth in 1957, everybody from Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson on down looked upon the so-called space race as just one thing: a military contest. At first there was alarm over the Soviets’ seizure of the “strategic high ground” of space. They were already up there — right above us! They could now hurl thunderbolts down whenever and wherever they wanted. And what could we do about it? Nothing. Ka-boom! There goes Bangor ... Ka-boom! There goes Boston ... Ka-boom! There goes New York ... Baltimore ... Washington ... St. Louis ... Denver ... San Jose — blown away! — just like that.
Physicists were quick to point out that nobody would choose space as a place from which to attack Earth. The spacecraft, the missile, the Earth itself, plus the Earth’s own rotation, would be traveling at wildly different speeds upon wildly different geometric planes. You would run into the notorious “three body problem” and then some. You’d have to be crazy. The target would be untouched and you would wind up on the floor in a fetal ball, twitching and gibbering. On the other hand, the rockets that had lifted the Soviets’ five-ton manned ships into orbit were worth thinking about. They were clearly powerful enough to reach any place on Earth with nuclear warheads.
But that wasn’t what was on President Kennedy’s mind when he summoned NASA’s administrator, James Webb, and Webb’s deputy, Hugh Dryden, to the White House in April 1961. The president was in a terrible funk. He kept muttering: “If somebody can just tell me how to catch up. Let’s find somebody — anybody ... There’s nothing more important.” He kept saying, “We’ve got to catch up.” Catching up had become his obsession. He never so much as mentioned the rockets.
Dryden said that, frankly, there was no way we could catch up with the Soviets when it came to orbital flights. A better idea would be to announce a crash program on the scale of the Manhattan Project, which had produced the atomic bomb. Only the aim this time would be to put a man on the Moon within the next 10 years.
Barely a month later Kennedy made his famous oration before Congress: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.” He neglected to mention Dryden.
INTUITIVELY, not consciously, Kennedy had chosen another form of military contest, an oddly ancient and archaic one. It was called “single combat.”
The best known of all single combats was David versus Goliath. Before opposing armies clashed in all-out combat, each would send forth its “champion,” and the two would fight to the death, usually with swords. The victor would cut off the head of the loser and brandish it aloft by its hair.
The deadly duel didn’t take the place of the all-out battle. It was regarded as a sign of which way the gods were leaning. The two armies then had it out on the battlefield ... unless one army fled in terror upon seeing its champion slaughtered. There you have the Philistines when Little David killed their giant, Goliath ... and cut his head off and brandished it aloft by its hair (1 Samuel 17:1-58). They were overcome by a mad desire to be somewhere else. (The Israelites pursued and destroyed them.)
More than two millenniums later, the mental atmosphere of the space race was precisely that. The details of single combat were different. Cosmonauts and astronauts didn’t fight hand to hand and behead one another. Instead, each side’s brave champions, including one woman (Valentina Tereshkova), risked their lives by sitting on top of rockets and having their comrades on the ground light the fuse and fire them into space like the human cannonballs of yore.
The Soviets rocketed off to an early lead. They were the first to put an object into orbit around the Earth (Sputnik), the first to put an animal into orbit (a dog), the first to put a man in orbit (Yuri Gagarin). No sooner had NASA put two astronauts (Gus Grissom and Alan Shepard) into 15-minute suborbital flights to the Bahamas — the Bahamas! — 15 minutes! — two miserable little mortar lobs! — then the Soviets put a second cosmonaut (Gherman Titov) into orbit. He stayed up there for 25 hours and went around the globe 17 times. Three times he flew directly over the United States. The gods had shown which way they were leaning, all right!
At this point, the mental atmospheres of the rocket-powered space race of the 1960s and the sword-clanking single combat of ancient days became so similar you had to ask: Does the human beast ever really change — or merely his artifacts? The Soviet cosmo-champions beat our astro-champions so handily, gloom spread like a gas. Every time you picked up a newspaper you saw headlines with the phrase, SPACE GAP ... SPACE GAP ... SPACE GAP ... The Soviets had produced a generation of scientific geniuses — while we slept, fat and self-satisfied! Educators began tearing curriculums apart as soon as Sputnik went up, introducing the New Math and stressing another latest thing, the Theory of Self-Esteem.
At last, in February 1962, NASA managed to get a man into Earth orbit, John Glenn. You had to have been alive at that time to comprehend the reaction of the nation, practically all of it. He was up for only five hours, compared to Titov’s 25, but he was our ... Protector! Against all odds he had risked his very hide for ... us! — protected us from our mortal enemy! — struck back in the duel in the heavens! — showed the world that we Americans were born fighting and would never give up! John Glenn made us whole again!
During his ticker-tape parade up Broadway, you have never heard such cheers or seen so many thousands of people crying. Big Irish cops, the classic New York breed, were out in the intersections in front of the world, sobbing, blubbering, boo-hoo-ing, with tears streaming down their faces. John Glenn had protected all of us, cops, too. All tears have to do with protection ... but I promise not to lay that theory on you now. John Glenn, in 1962, was the last true national hero America has ever had.
There were three more Mercury flights, and then the Gemini series of two-man flights began. With Gemini, we dared to wonder if perhaps we weren’t actually pulling closer to the Soviets in this greatest of all single combats. But we held our breath, fearful that the Soviets’ anonymous Chief Designer would trump us again with some unimaginably spectacular feat.
Sure enough, the C.I.A. brought in sketchy reports that the Soviets were on the verge of a Moon shot.
NASA entered into the greatest crash program of all time, Apollo. It launched five lunar missions in one year, December 1968 to November 1969. With Apollo 11, we finally won the great race, landing a man on the Moon before the end of this decade and returning him safely to Earth.
Everybody, including Congress, was caught up in the adrenal rush of it all. But then, on the morning after, congressmen began to wonder about something that hadn’t dawned on them since Kennedy’s oration. What was this single combat stuff — they didn’t use the actual term — really all about? It had been a battle for morale at home and image abroad. Fine, O.K., we won, but it had no tactical military meaning whatsoever. And it had cost a fortune, $150 billion or so. And this business of sending a man to Mars and whatnot? Just more of the same, when you got right down to it. How laudable ... how far-seeing ... but why don’t we just do a Scarlett O’Hara and think about it tomorrow?
And that NASA budget! Now there was some prime pork you could really sink your teeth into! And they don’t need it anymore! Game’s over, NASA won, congratulations. Who couldn’t use some of that juicy meat to make the people happy? It had an ambrosial aroma ... made you think of re-election ....
NASA’s annual budget sank like a stone from $5 billion in the mid-1960s to $3 billion in the mid-1970s. It was at this point that NASA’s lack of a philosopher corps became a real problem. The fact was, NASA had only one philosopher, Wernher von Braun. Toward the end of his life, von Braun knew he was dying of cancer and became very contemplative. I happened to hear him speak at a dinner in his honor in San Francisco. He raised the question of what the space program was really all about.
It’s been a long time, but I remember him saying something like this: Here on Earth we live on a planet that is in orbit around the Sun. The Sun itself is a star that is on fire and will someday burn up, leaving our solar system uninhabitable. Therefore we must build a bridge to the stars, because as far as we know, we are the only sentient creatures in the entire universe. When do we start building that bridge to the stars? We begin as soon as we are able, and this is that time. We must not fail in this obligation we have to keep alive the only meaningful life we know of. Unfortunately, NASA couldn’t present as its spokesman and great philosopher a former high-ranking member of the Nazi Wehrmacht with a heavy German accent.
As a result, the space program has been killing time for 40 years with a series of orbital projects ... Skylab, the Apollo-Soyuz joint mission, the International Space Station and the space shuttle. These programs have required a courage and engineering brilliance comparable to the manned programs that preceded them. But their purpose has been mainly to keep the lights on at the Kennedy Space Center and Houston’s Johnson Space Center — by removing manned flight from the heavens and bringing it very much down to earth. The shuttle program, for example, was actually supposed to appeal to the public by offering orbital tourist rides, only to end in the Challenger disaster, in which the first such passenger, Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher, perished.
Forty years! For 40 years, everybody at NASA has known that the only logical next step is a manned Mars mission, and every overture has been entertained only briefly by presidents and the Congress. They have so many more luscious and appealing projects that could make better use of the close to $10 billion annually the Mars program would require. There is another overture even at this moment, and it does not stand a chance in the teeth of Depression II.
“Why not send robots?” is a common refrain. And once more it is the late Wernher von Braun who comes up with the rejoinder. One of the things he most enjoyed saying was that there is no computerized explorer in the world with more than a tiny fraction of the power of a chemical analog computer known as the human brain, which is easily reproduced by unskilled labor.
What NASA needs now is the power of the Word. On Darwin’s tongue, the Word created a revolutionary and now well-nigh universal conception of the nature of human beings, or, rather, human beasts. On Freud’s tongue, the Word means that at this very moment there are probably several million orgasms occurring that would not have occurred had Freud never lived. Even the fact that he is proved to be a quack has not diminished the power of his Word.
July 20, 1969, was the moment NASA needed, more than anything else in this world, the Word. But that was something NASA’s engineers had no specifications for. At this moment, that remains the only solution to recovering NASA’s true destiny, which is, of course, to build that bridge to the stars.
Tom Wolfe is the author of “The Right Stuff,” an account of the Mercury Seven astronauts.

From The London Times
Michael Jackson: Not the final chapter
Michael Jackson had been dead for less than 24 hours before the race started to get his biography on to the streets
Luke Leitch John Blake is no slouch at rushing out books to anticipate public demand: this March, for instance, the day after Jade Goody’s death, Blake’s imprint released Jade Goody: Fighting To The End, a hastily updated edition of her second autobiography. It went straight to No 1 in the paperback bestseller list. Even Blake, though, has never seen a race quite as fierce as that now straining every sinew of the British publishing industry — to be the first to market with a title marking the demise and celebrating the life of Michael Jackson.
“It’s extraordinary,” Blake says: “I’ve never known anything quite like this.”
Just over three weeks after Jackson was pronounced dead in California, the first newly released Jackson book should be on sale today. Books that predated Jackson’s death have already enjoyed a huge spike in sales, just like those of Jackson’s albums. Sales of A 2004 edition of Michael Jackson: The Magic and The Madness by Randy Taraborrelli increased from eight books in the week before his death to 1,673 in the ten days after it. The Bookseller has reported that retailers have pre-ordered more than half a million copies of the new titles.
One of those titles will be Blake’s. On June 26, the day after Jackson’s death, he was called by an author named Emily Herbert. “She is good at writing fast and she was desperate to do a book,” he says. Blake, though, wasn’t keen: “My initial thought was that there are loads of titles around, why do a new one?” Then his sales manager called to say that two major retailers had contacted him and that they were “desperate for a paperback”. Blake called Herbert, commissioned the book, and by midday had secured 30,000 pre-orders for Michael Jackson: King of Pop 1958–2009, which goes on sale next Monday.
But Blake will be beaten to it by HarperCollins, whose Michael Jackson — Legend, Hero, Icon: A Tribute to the King of Pop has an official publication date of this Friday, July 17 — although Carole Tonkinson, the company’s Publisher for Non-Fiction, says that some copies may be in the shops by tomorrow. “Being first is the key,” she says. “We need to get that slot in the retailers. If our competitors sell them their Jacko book, then we’re out in the cold. We need to be in the supermarket before anyone else.”
Tonkinson’s author, James Aldis, was given 48 hours to write 10, 000 words, while the picture researchers were given a window of 72 hours to choose 250 images. Tonkinson describes it as “the tightest schedule in the history of our company”. The printing presses started rolling last Friday and yesterday afternoon Tonkinson reported that she was holding one of the first copies in her hands. “We’re really proud of it,” she says. “To be competitive, we have to be able to move quickly. In a way we acted like a magazine or a newspaper, putting together something beautiful and enduring — at speed.”
Despite this effort, the HarperCollins title is not favourite to take the checkered flag. Headline’s pictorial offering (Michael Jackson: Life of a Legend by Micheal Heatley) is also due out on Friday. Carly Cook, Headline’s publisher, says: “I have never experienced anything like this. I don’t want to sound cynical, but as soon as I heard the news I was already thinking about it. This is a once-in-a-lifetime moment. You’re talking icon status: there was Elvis and Diana and there’s this.”
Yet both HaperCollins and Headline will be beaten by Simon & Schuster, which has pulled off a masterstroke. Its title, a warts-and-all biography by Ian Halperin entitled Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson, has been five years in the writing. Originally commissioned for a Canadian publisher, S&S stepped in to buy the UK rights only last week and the final copy (including updates from Jackson’s memorial service, where Halperin was working for the US broadcaster NBC) was delivered on Friday. After a few hours for proof- checking, it was sent to the printers — and the first copies go on sale today. “We believe we have the best book on the market,” says a perhaps justifiably smug-sounding spokesman for the publisher. “And we wanted to get it out there as soon as possible. We are the most up to date, too. This has certainly been the quickest turnaround that I’ve known.”
John Blake, however, is not convinced that Jackson fans will rush to buy Halperin’s and Simon & Schuster’s work. The book, which was serialised in The Sun yesterday, is far from a dewy-eyed homage (See box). Blake says: “One lesson I’ve learnt is that people do not want to read books that are nasty, salacious or critical. You might read that in The Sun but you wouldn’t go out and pay your £10 for a book with that kind of thing. [Our book] is a very affectionate tribute.”
The alacrity with which British publishers have reacted to Jackson’s passing is impressive and may also say something about the pressures they face to produce sales in a shrinking market. But compared with the Chinese publishing industry the tempo of ours is more Earth Song than Smooth Criminal: the first Chinese instant biography — Moonwalk in Paradise — took just nine days to write, design, print and ship to the shops. Shamon!

Additional reporting by Chloe Lambert
Thrillers or fillers?
Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson
Author: Ian Halperin
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Date: July 17; Price: £10
According to author Ian Halperin: “Even those who are his most ardent defenders, people who maintain he is innocent of the molestation charges, insist that he is homosexually inclined.” Halperin claims that Jackson would sometimes disguise himself as a woman to avoid being recognised en route for his assignations. It’s fair to say that this biography might alienate some of Jackson’s conservative fanbase. Yet it will be the first to hit British bookshelves.
Michael Jackson — Legend, Hero, Icon: A Tribute to the King of Pop
Author: James Aldis
Publisher: HarperCollins
Date: July 17; Price: £12:99
Ten thousand words, 250 pictures, 196 pages and 72 hours – HarperCollins put together this glossy, tribute to The King of Pop at top speed. Includes a free poster. “We’re offering the fans a beautiful book that’s tremendous value at exactly the right time,” says the publisher Carol Tonkinson.
Michael Jackson: Life of a Legend
Author: Michael Heatley
Publisher: Headline
Date: July 17; Price: £17.99
The music journalist Michael Heatley — who wrote a well-received John Peel biography — says: “We hope fans of all generations feel we have paid tribute to a musical icon.” As much a pictorial tribute as a written one, Heatley’s book includes never-before-seen (according to the publisher) family pictures.
Michael Jackson: King of Pop 1958–2009
Author: Emily Herbert
Publisher: John Blake
Date: July 20; Price: £7.99
A first print run of 150, 000 copies will hit shops on Monday, making it the first significantly text-based, newly written assessment of Jackson’s career to go on sale. Publisher John Blake says that while Herbert has covered all the controversy and rumours that marked Jackson’s career it is, at heart, an “affectionate tribute”.
Michael Jackson: The King of Pop 1958–2009
Author: Chris Roberts
Publisher: Carlton
Date: TBC – but definitely by the end of this month; Price: £14.99
Originally due for September to coincide with Jackson’s O2 concerts in London, Carlton have rushed forward publication of this pictorial biography, which will include pictures from the singer’s funeral concert and unseen pictures from Jackson’s Thriller tour. The words have been written by experienced music writer Chris Roberts, and UK printers are being used to get the books into the shops faster.
Michael Jackson: Legend 1958-2009
Author: Chas Newkey-Burden
Publisher: Michael O’Mara Books Ltd
Date: September 2009; Price: £14.99
Amy Winehouse biographer Newkey-Burden was commissioned on the day of Jackson’s death, and was yesterday interviewing subjects for his biography. It will be published at around the same time as his biography of Simon Cowell. Ana Sampson, from Michael O’Mara Books, says: “This is an unusually quick turnaround but we’re confident that it will do well.”

Michael Jackson: Goodbye, or See You Soon?
By James Poniewozik TIME
The most striking statement at Michael Jackson's memorial service was not his daughter Paris' tremulous and wrenching goodbye. It was not Berry Gordy's declaring Jackson "the greatest entertainer that ever lived," nor was it the Rev. Al Sharpton's assertion that Jackson's fame made a generation of white kids comfortable with electing a black President. It came before the encomiums and music began, after Motown singer Smokey Robinson took the stage, read testimonials from Diana Ross and Nelson Mandela, walked off —
And there was silence.
There was a long gap between Robinson's reading and the rest of the ceremony. The networks hesitated to step on the quiet with commentary. So for a minute or so, there was a TV rarity: an utter hush. Broadcast and cable news alike took a breath — for the first time, it seemed, in a week and a half — and let the darkened arena and the stilled crowd tell the story. It was an unintended tribute, and a blessed relief. (See TIME's full Michael Jackson coverage.)
It says something about our media culture that it took a mammoth event held in a sports arena to demonstrate the power of a moment of quiet. Jackson's memorial was an outsize spectacle, befitting an entertainer who engaged the world through outsize spectacles. The performers and eulogizers were A-list, the music anthemic, the casket gold-plated. And yet the service was also cathartic and tasteful, especially compared with the media frenzy that preceded it.
Indeed, between the memories and goodbyes, much of the memorial was about the media. A clip reel displayed tabloid headlines, and several speakers portrayed the singer as the victim of sensationalism. "Maybe now, Michael, they will leave you alone," his brother Marlon said. "Wasn't nothing strange about your daddy," Sharpton told Jackson's children. "It was strange what your daddy had to deal with." (See the top 10 Michael Jackson moments.)
People can debate whether that's true, whether Jackson was a victim, whether the media persecuted him during his child-molestation trials and other scandals or soft-pedaled his history after his death. But certainly in death, Jackson served the media the way he did in life: as a limitless draw for audiences. (And yes, I know I write this in a magazine that rushed out a special commemorative issue the weekend after Jackson died.)
Jackson was the most famous entertainer on earth; his sudden death was real news, huge news. His memorial 12 days later was a mammoth, global event. It was during the in-between, as it always is, that the coverage went into high-speed idling mode. For a good week, there was little news — about his estate, the toxicology tests, his final moments — so the talk became about how little news there was. There were the prime-time specials, the morning-show reports, the commentators and endless clichés. (He was a barrier breaker, a chameleon, a Peter Pan — I've used some of those myself.)
Given the big ratings, clearly not everyone thinks the coverage is too much. The traffic on Twitter showed that the public was generating its own Jackson media. That's the easy media defense: People want it! To paraphrase Michael, we can't stop 'til you get enough. (See 5 media myths that Jackson's death debunked.)
But that ignores the effect journalists' choices have on what people want. The media don't brainwash people into wanting MJ 24/7; millions deeply loved him. But once a news frenzy gets momentum, it becomes its own justification. The spectacle becomes the reason for the spectacle. It becomes The Thing That Everyone Is Talking About.
And the media are as susceptible to this as anyone. Journalism isn't a single-minded monolith that decides what to foist on the public. It's a collection of individuals, who are just as easily affected by the feedback loop, while feeding into it.
Jackson's farewell service was, in a sense, a rerun. For days, TV had been cycling the same clips, remembering the same songs; some speakers had been on TV sharing the same thoughts. Yet hearing brother Jermaine deliver "Smile," Michael's favorite song, to a crowd whose hearts were breaking had an entirely different effect than Jermaine's singing it to Matt Lauer. Hearing Gordy recall Michael's childhood audition was more moving than the dozens of bio reels that had sought the same response.
The news is a poor vehicle for catharsis; it thrives on maintaining tension, not relieving it. And a memorial is a poor medium for objective assessment, which we needed after Jackson's death, and will need if and when there is more news in its aftermath. But in a perfect world, it would provide the media with an end point, a reason to pause and move on.
At this time, though, it doesn't look like that has happened. The showman is gone, but the show — as his life proved, for better and worse — goes on.

From The London Times
Jackson death may have been 'homicide', says L.A. police chief

(Rusty Kennedy/AP)
MIchael Jackson is reported to have been taking a cocktail of drugs
James Bone in New York The Los Angeles police chief has raised the prospect of a homicide charge over the death of Michael Jackson.
Homicide does not necessarily mean murder — it could mean a manslaughter charge against a doctor.
Jackson, 50, died last month in mysterious circumstances but is reported to have been taking a cocktail of drugs including the potent anaesthetic Diprivan, also known as propofol. Los Angeles police are investigating Jackson’s prescription drug history and have subpoenaed medical records from doctors who treated him, including psychiatric records.
“We are still awaiting corroboration from the coroner’s office as to cause of death. That is going to be very dependent on the toxicology reports that are due to come back,” William Bratton, the city’s police commissioner, told the broadcaster CNN. “And based on those, we will have an idea of what it is we are dealing with. Are we dealing with a homicide? Or are we dealing with accidental overdose?
“We’ve got very good investigators. They will be prepared to deal with whatever the coroner’s findings may be.”
The singer’s father said yesterday that he suspected foul play in his son’s death. Joe Jackson, 79, said that he was dumbfounded when he learnt that his son was being taken to hospital on June 25. “I just couldn’t believe what was happening to Michael,” he told ABC News. “I do believe it was foul play. I do believe that.”
He said that a second post-mortem examination requested by the family had yet to yield answers about what killed his son. “I did not know anything about the drugs. I didn’t even know the names of them. I do know that whatever he was taking was to make him rest because he has been working so hard.
“That drug was supposed to make him relax and sleep. But anyway, he did not wake up. He never woke up. Michael died in his sleep.”
The actress Roseanne Barr said in her blog that she had been asked to call Jackson to discuss relaxation techniques.
She also described him as a long-term drug addict. “I was given his cellphone number the night before he died and asked to call him and I didn’t, I was too afraid — I thought I would wait until shabbat [the sabbath] to call him and then he was dead. He wanted to know about meditation,” she wrote. Sending her best wishes to Jackson’s three children, she added: “Their dad was a drug addict for many, many years. What makes a drug addict is someone who has too much pain in the memory banks.”
A 2004 police document, obtained by CNN, alleges that at one point Jackson was taking up to 40 pills a night of the anti-anxiety drug Xanax.
The document cites interviews with two Jackson employees in preparation for his child abuse trial, in which he was acquitted.
One of the employees, a security guard, later left his job after Jackson “fell on his face” in a hotel room. The guard said that he was not comfortable getting prescriptions for the singer, the document says.
Jackson’s body is understood to be in storage in a crypt at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Hollywood, which is owned by Berry Gordy, the Motown Records founder, who helped to launch the Jackson 5.
The family is said to be split on the Jackson’s final resting place. His brother Jermaine wants to bury him at the Neverland Ranch, which could become a tourist magnet like Elvis Presley’s Graceland. Katherine Jackson, the family matriarch, opposes the idea because her son vowed during his child abuse investigation not to go back to Neverland.

Michael, a Foreign Affair

By GAIL COLLINS (NY TIMES)
“It has this sense of finality,” said a CNN reporter Tuesday at the end of the Michael Jackson memorial service.
Yes, pictures of a casket being lifted into a hearse and driven away will do that for you.
Yet the beat goes on. On Wednesday, there was Jackson’s skin doctor on ABC, announcing that he was not, “to the best of my knowledge,” the biological father of Jackson’s two oldest children. (Isn’t that the sort of question a person’s dermatologist should be able to answer without hedging?) The mayor of Los Angeles wondered if fans wouldn’t like to chip in to help the city pay for the cost of crowd control. And the coroner’s office is still working on the autopsy. (“They Saved Michael Jackson’s Brain!” announced E! Online.)
Meanwhile, in Washington the House Foreign Affairs Committee is weighing a 1,500-word resolution in Jackson’s honor.
Why, you may ask, is this the job of the Foreign Affairs Committee? Exactly the same question the committee members were undoubtedly asking, although on Wednesday they were too busy holding a hearing on nuclear cooperation with the United Arab Emirates to have much comment.
Perhaps because the resolution calls Jackson a “global” humanitarian. Perhaps because the House has not yet created a Committee on Controversial Musical Icons.
Anyhow, it’s there. The resolution was introduced by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas. It praises the entertainer’s charitable activities, perhaps in more detail than is absolutely necessary. (“Whereas in December 1991, Michael’s office MJJ Productions donated more than 200 turkey dinners to needy families in Los Angeles. ...”)
Jackson Lee gave a long and emotional speech at the memorial, in which she claimed to be appearing on behalf of the entire House of Representatives. All of whom, she seemed to suggest, owed their careers to the singer. (“He called us into public service. ...”)
People tend to get carried away when someone famous dies, so it’s best not to be hypercritical about the eulogies. Still, it was a little peculiar hearing Brooke Shields’s weepy testimony about her deep friendship with Jackson given the fact that she told reporters that the last time she saw him was at Elizabeth Taylor’s eighth wedding in 1991. And while Representative Jackson Lee correctly pointed out that Jackson was acquitted of all charges in that child molestation trial, nobody really wants their memorial service dotted with comments like “People are innocent until proven otherwise!”
The media, for its part, plans to continue talking about Michael Jackson for quite a while — this is the first time since the election that we feel we have everyone’s attention. The practice of churning out stories about a deceased celebrity for as long as possible is an old tradition. It used to be known as the “John Garfield Still Dead” syndrome, after the extensive postfuneral coverage of a movie star who had a fatal heart attack in 1952 in the bed of a woman other than his wife.
When I worked as a wire service reporter, there was a legendary tale about funeral overkill involving Daniel Patrick O’Connell, the political boss of Albany who died in 1977. Since O’Connell had run the town since 1919, this was a huge local story. There were many headlines about the death, the wake, the burial. Then ... what next? A beleaguered editor at U.P.I. finally solved the problem by filing an update that said: “Today, God said hello as thousands said goodbye to Daniel Patrick O’Connell.” It became a cautionary story about how not to freshen a lead.
The government, at least, can let Michael Jackson go.
Jackson Lee’s Resolution No. 600 “honoring an American legend and musical icon” is not going to make it through the House without a fight, given the fact that Representative Peter King, a Long Island Republican, discovered over the Fourth of July weekend that he could get several hundred thousand hits on YouTube with a home video in which he called Jackson a “pervert” and unfavorably compared the singer to fallen firefighters.
If I were running the world, I’d find a way to misplace the paperwork or change the subject. “We’re running out of dead people to name post offices after,” suggested the committee’s vice chairman, Gary Ackerman of Queens, thoughtfully.
America is a sea of woe these days, and we want to believe our elected representatives are spending every waking minute trying to help. Deep in our hearts, we know that many of them wouldn’t know what to do with a problem if they had it captured in a glass jar with no air holes. But we prefer not to be reminded of their uselessness by hearing that they spent their time arguing about whether the King of Pop deserves a posthumous ceremonial commendation.
If you can’t do anything serious, guys, it’s really better not to do anything at all. Spend your free time in prayer and contemplation.

From The Times of London
16,000 mourners pack basketball arena for Michael Jackson tribute
The body of Michael Jackson — at rest in a 14-carat, gold-plated casket lined with blue velvet — was carried into the Staples Centre in Los Angeles for yesterday’s memorial service and star-studded musical extravaganza, which was viewed by at least a billion people around the globe.
For the United States it wasn’t so much a “Diana moment” as a made-for-TV special. Afraid that millions of fans would cause havoc, and barely able to afford the overtime for its police officers and emergency services, the city’s leaders made it virtually impossible for the general public to take part in the service.
As an expression of public grief, it could not have been further removed from the 1997 funeral and cortège of Diana, Princess of Wales, which drew crowds of up to three million people.
When it became clear that only 50,000 people turned up outside the service — a fraction of the million expected — some wondered if the city had gone too far in telling people to stay at home, and that the showing was too small for the biggest day of public mourning in US history since the death of Elvis Presley.
Even the motorcade of more than 30 cars as Jackson’s body was brought from a “private funeral” at Hollywood’s Forest Lawn Cemetery to the Staples Centre was kept secret until the last minute, so that fans could not line the streets in advance to pay their respects. Instead, the convoy of blacked-out Rolls-Royces, Range Rovers and Cadillacs made its way to the memorial service on closed, empty freeways.
The result was an Oscars-style event that — for those fans not lucky enough to be among the 20,000 guests to win tickets in a lottery or be invited by the Jackson family — could be viewed only on television.
The family’s guest list was a Who’s Who of African-American powerbrokers in music, sports, film and politics: Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, Jennifer Hudson, Kobe Bryant, the Rev Al Sharpton, Spike Lee and Wesley Snipes. Most of the guests arrived in limousines and then strolled up a black carpet outside the venue, where fans were taking it in turns to sign two giant posters of Jackson. Notable absentees were Mr Jackson’s ex-wives, Debbie Rowe and Lisa Marie Presley.
Only one guest, Jackson’s daughter, Paris Michael Katherine, 11, sobbed uncontrollably, in perhaps the service’s most poignant moment. “I just wanted to say that, ever since I was born, Daddy has been the best father you could ever imagine. And I just wanted to say I love him so much,” she said.
In a rousing speech that brought applause, Mr Sharpton said: “He brought down the colour curtain. It was Michael Jackson who brought blacks and whites and Asians and Latinos together. It was Michael Jackson who created a comfort level so that people who felt they were separate became interconnected with his music.”
He said that the careers of Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods and President Obama would have been impossible without the singer. “Michael did that, he made us love each other. I want his kids to know: there was nothing strange about your Daddy. What was strange was what he had to deal with. He dealt with it anyway. Some people came here to say goodbye to Michael. I came to say thank you.”
Mr Obama, who was in Moscow for the second day of talks with President Medvedev, took time out to pay tribute to Jackson. He said: “I think like Elvis, like Sinatra, like the Beatles, he became a core part of our culture. His extraordinary talent and his music was matched with a big dose of tragedy and difficulty [in] his private life and I don’t think we can ignore that.”
He said that it was important to “affirm what was the best of him and that was captured by his music”.
Juno Pierre-Louis, 42, a car salesman from New York, who received a ticket for the memorial through the lottery, said: “Off the Wall came out when I was growing up near the Bronx, and the gang movement was big then. But as soon as everyone saw Michael’s moves, people stopped killing each other and starting having dancing competitions instead. So Michael Jackson means a lot to me. [African Americans] tend to walk away from anything that’s embraced by the white community — but today I’ve seen more black folk with the MJ colours on than the white folk.”
Of the 1.6 million people who entered the lottery for tickets to the memorial service, only 8,750 were told via e-mail that they had been chosen. Most received two passes for the service in the form of golden wristbands.
Without a golden wristband, it was impossible to get beyond the massive barriers that formed a huge security perimeter around the Staples Centre. In fact, the perimeter covered such a wide area that it was impossible for uninvited well-wishers to even glimpse the venue from afar.
William Bratton, the Los Angeles police chief, said: “If you’re down here, there won’t be much to see. You won’t get within several blocks of the area.”
With the seating capacity of the venue limited to about 16,000, several thousand guests had to watch the service on a giant video screen outside, along with thousands of journalists, photographers and television camera operators. Overhead, about 20 news helicopters and other light aircraft circled. It is thought that the service cost Los Angeles about $4 million (£2.46 million) — money it can ill-afford in the middle of a state-wide budget crisis.
The Staples Centre, home of the LA Lakers basketball team, was where Jackson had been rehearsing two weeks ago for his much-anticipated comeback tour in London. As soon as the set of the memorial service was dismantled yesterday, the venue was taken over by a circus.

Famed Predator Dies

Allen Klein, Former Beatles And Rolling Stones Manager, Dead
Music manager Allen Klein, a no-holds-barred businessman who bulldozed his way into and out of deals with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, died Saturday, a publicist for his company said. He was 77.
Klein, who was one of the most powerful figures in the music business in the 1960s but ended up feuding with some of his biggest clients, died at his New York City home of Alzheimer's disease, said Bob Merlis, publicist for ABKCO Music & Records. An accountant known for his brashness, temper and tenacity in tracking down royalties and getting better record deals, Klein garnered clients including Sam Cooke, Bobby Darin and Herman's Hermits.
But he became most famous _ and later infamous _ for signing on the Rolling Stones and then the Beatles. Both arrangements eventually spurred lawsuits, with some Beatles fans blaming Klein for contributing to the tensions that broke up the group.
Klein was convicted of tax fraud in 1979 and served two months in prison for failing to report income from sales of promotional records by the Beatles and other groups; the records were supposed to be given away. The Rolling Stones grew so infuriated with Klein _ whose company still owns an enormous chunk of their 1960s songs _ that Mick Jagger once chased him down the hall of a posh hotel.
Klein was reputed to be the basis for the slick manager "Ron Decline," played by Jon Belushi, in the parodic 1978 film "The Rutles," and the inspiration for John Lennon's bitter 1974 song "Steel and Glass."
Regardless, Klein remained "very proud of the position he was in and what he was able to do with the different artists he was able to work with," Merlis said.
Klein began building his reputation by auditing record companies' books and finding unpaid royalties for Darin and other artists. After meeting Cooke in 1962, he helped the soul singer secure a then-unusual level of control over his music and finances.
Story continues below "I never wanted to be a manager," he told The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., in 2002. "It was going over the books that I loved. And I was good at it."
That helped him win over the Rolling Stones, who hired him in the mid-1960s. He helped the group negotiate a new contract with its label, but the relationship soured after Klein bought the rights to the band's 1960s songs and recordings from a former manager.
He was fired in 1970, but the animosity continued for decades, culminating in dueling lawsuits over rights and royalties and a 1984 trial. Jagger testified in a federal court in New York that Klein "wanted a hold on us, on our futures" _ and that a 1974 discussion about money ended with a shouting Jagger chasing Klein down a corridor at London's Savoy Hotel. The lawsuit was settled soon after, with Klein keeping the song rights but agreeing to pay royalties promptly.
In the meantime, Klein had set his sights on managing the Beatles and saw his chance when their longtime manager, Brian Epstein, died in 1967.
Initially rebuffed, Klein eventually won John Lennon's favor. "He not only knew my work, and the lyrics that I had written, but he also understood them, and from way back. That was it," Lennon told an interviewer in 1970.
The group hired Klein in 1969 over the objections of Paul McCartney, who preferred his father-in-law, Lee Eastman.
At the time, a New York Times profile referred to Klein as "the toughest wheeler-dealer in the pop jungle." Klein himself once sent out a chest-beating holiday card with a profane takeoff on the 23rd Psalm: "Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, because I'm the biggest bastard in the valley."
But his relationship with the Beatles was bitter and short-lived. The group broke up the next year, and McCartney sued his bandmates in an effort to break free from Klein, an action once unthinkable among the harmonious foursome. McCartney went on to revile Klein in a 1997 biography, "Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now."
The other Beatles lost faith in Klein and sued him in the mid-1970s. Lennon sent him off in song in "Steel and Glass," which describes how "your mouthpiece squawks as he spreads your lies."
Klein was born in Newark on Dec. 18, 1931, and spent several years in an orphanage after his mother's death during his infancy. He was later raised by a grandmother and an aunt.
Klein graduated from Upsala College and served in the U.S. Army before joining a Manhattan accounting firm, according to his company.
He started his own firm, which later became ABKCO, in the late 1950s. Besides managing music, he co-produced 1971's "The Concert for Bangladesh," a forerunner of modern charity concerts, and films including 1978's "The Greek Tycoon," starring Anthony Quinn and Jacqueline Bisset.
He is survived by a longtime companion, Iris Keitel; his estranged wife, Betty; three children, four grandchildren and a sister.
Associated Press Writer Hillel Italie contributed to this report.

Los Olivos Journal NY Times

Neverland, Old Neighbors and New Visitors

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
LOS OLIVOS, Calif. — Every now and then, a black Bentley would pull up in front of Young’s Gallery here and out would spill a knot of children and a man with a very large umbrella and mask. Michael Jackson needed to pick up his framed art.
“He was a person, not a celebrity,” said the gallery owner, Ralph Young, who still had nearly a dozen prints — mostly Norman Rockwell depictions of animals and children — that Mr. Jackson had ordered but failed to pick up since he moved from his Neverland ranch four years ago.
Yes, it has been a while since Mr. Jackson, who moved from the ranch five miles up a country road after his 2005 acquittal on child molesting charges, popped into the boutiques and markets here, usually without a stir.
Mr. Young is out about $500, but he said that it was “water under the bridge” and that he had no plans to go after Mr. Jackson’s estate. He has not even put up a sign identifying the prints in his store, which he said Mr. Jackson had carefully selected with stickers in a catalog in the shop.
But now some in this wine country village, the setting of some scenes from the hit movie “Sideways,” are wondering if their gentle attitude toward Mr. Jackson will be tested as the ranch and the spillover of fans gathering there make this something of a Graceland-like stop on the Michael Jackson after-death tour.
The owner of the ranch is a real estate firm called Colony Capital L.L.C., which bought it as a joint venture with Mr. Jackson last year as his finances collapsed. The company has not announced plans for it, but it did open its gates to reporters and photographers on Thursday.
The 13,000-square-foot French country main house is barren, and Mr. Jackson had not updated the interior much since he bought in the late 1980s: dark, solid-oak floors from an 18th century chateau meet patches of exposed brick. The kitchen cabinets are chipped and worn; the bedroom holds nothing but echoes; the cedar-lined closets, including a hidden compartment inside the main walk-in, are ready for another regiment’s worth of clothes.
What remains of the amusement rides and outdoor Jumbotron where Mr. Jackson once played video games with friends are the worn concrete patches where they once stood. A bowl of water was left behind in the tiger pen.
With the major networks coming for broadcasts, the house staff spruced up the grounds, notably restoring 40 of the statues of playing children that once adorned the ranch, which is 2,700 hilly acres, with at least five fountains, a couple of lakes and two railroads.
The air-conditioning cranked only in the “Elizabeth Taylor” house, the four-apartment guest house where Ms. Taylor stayed on visits and where staff members now bunk on air mattresses.
All in all, Neverland, reflecting Mr. Jackson’s late career, seemed forlorn.
“All of this was for the big kid that he really was,” said a long-time caretaker who spoke anonymously on orders from the company that owns the property. “He wanted everybody happy and comfortable. He had perfume sprayed in the giraffe barn because he didn’t like the smell and didn’t think his guests would.”
Outside the gates, it did not seem to matter to the 100 or 200 fans who gathered from the around the world that a family spokesman had said Mr. Jackson’s funeral would not take place here.
An encampment of news media and fans sprang up days ago and, though somewhat thinned as word of no funeral spread, it still sported large satellite trucks, many faithful clutching flowers, writing remembrances on a white board — “Canada loves you! — and playing and dancing to his music.
Some had flown in for the funeral. “It is more than seeing a body,” said Elias Romero, 30, who came from Albuquerque. “It is seeing a life.”
In town, such sentiment gets a mixed reception, with people appreciative of the little bump in business in recent days — a number of stores played Mr. Jackson’s hits — but worried that the attention would tarnish the rustic image.

“Right now it’s no really big deal with people going to see where he lived, but it is not outrageous,” said Frank Palmer, a musician who grew up around here and recalled playing on the ranch land before it was Neverland.

“But this was a sleepy little town not too long ago,” Mr. Palmer added, “and a lot of people want to keep it that way. They still remember Elizabeth Taylor.”

That would be a reference to the star’s wedding in 1991 to Larry Fortensky, which locals do not remember so fondly, with all the clattering helicopters, droves of limousines and cameras everywhere.

The police have already sought to restrict parking on the narrow, two-lane highway leading to the ranch, but they seem to be tolerating the fact that most people are ignoring the new no-parking signs. One vendor selling Jackson T-shirts from a minivan even moved a sign partly blocking the view of his wares.

Michael Bainer, a retired county employee who spent much of his youth in the hills around here, grimaced at all the attention, though understood if the ranch were opened in some way to fans.

“I’m not sure I even like all the wineries around here,” Mr. Bainer said. But when it comes to Neverland, “they should open so people could see what it was all about.”

From The Sunday London Times
RIP Michael Jackson: your passing has shown the power of Twitter
India Knight

There was Michael Jackson, milling around somewhere at the back of my consciousness in a box labelled “top tunes, disturbed person, poor old thing”, and I’d gone out to supper last Thursday and came back at about 11pm, made a cup of tea and logged on to Twitter, as you do, whereupon I found hundreds of people were posting about Jackson being taken to hospital, being in a coma, possibly being dead.
I turned on the television but that didn’t give me any new information at all. Ten minutes later someone posted on Twitter that the Los Angeles Times was confirming that Jackson had died. Meanwhile, the news networks were still speculating; it took them a good 20 minutes to catch up and call in the talking heads — people who had met Jackson twice 15 years ago and who spouted the most hilariously inane platitudes such as, “Of course, he was a tall man. Over six foot.”
Back on Twitter — I very nearly wrote “back in the real world”, because that is what Twitter now feels like — people were doing what twitterers do best: engaging with each other and passing on news, thoughts and information.
Los Angeles residents were reporting that the sky had blackened with helicopters, describing the crowd outside the hospital, discussing the television commentary, making playlists of Jackson’s work, expressing sorrow, saying how stunned they were and making jokes. Hundreds and hundreds of jokes. The death couldn’t be blamed on the sunshine or moonlight, which left only the boogie (everyone); “Let’s all turn our Twitter pictures white. It’s what he’d have wanted” (@wardytron); “Reports of MJ's death are incorrect. He was found in the children’s ward having a stroke” (@ivan007). And so on.
The jokes, as off-colour (see what I did there?) as you might expect, came within minutes of the announcement of Jackson’s death, swiftly followed by everyone wondering whether Elton John would once again nobly volunteer to record another reworking of Candle in the Wind.
Concurrently, there was an outpouring of sadness and bewilderment. As I am constantly saying, Twitter is an extraordinary thing which we should all feel privileged to be able to access: a snapshot of the global consciousness at any given moment, whether you’re interested in Jackson or Iran or bee-keeping, with information, opinion and emotion thrown in.
On Thursday night and Friday morning the site was a swirling cauldron of grief, humour, sentimentality, cynicism and every emotion in between, in real time — although not always from real people: somebody pretending to be David Miliband, the foreign secretary, found his zeitgeisty “RIP Michael” entry solemnly quoted in Friday’s newspapers. David Schneider, the comedian, compared the site to “a Hadron collider of grief and sick gags thrown together”.
I read and clicked and tweeted until about 2am, pausing occasionally to roll my eyes at the feeble television coverage which featured a string of uninteresting, unoriginal and unfunny people, at which point I thought I’d better go to bed.
I couldn’t sleep. Strange: the shock of hearing about Jackson’s death had passed, I felt sated with information, I’d watched a sad little clip on YouTube. But no sleep. I felt weirdly discombobulated and couldn’t really work out why since I’m not a Jackson obsessive, or even much of a fan. Farrah Fawcett had died earlier on the same day — sad, too, obviously but again hardly devastating for me at a personal level compared with the extremely disturbing footage of Neda Agha Soltan in Tehran the previous week (well, I say “footage”: it was a snuff movie, really).
Then, because you can always rely on Twitter for someone, somewhere, to hit the nail on the head, up popped a little update. “The day the Eighties officially died” said @MusicThing. That was it, of course: the strange and unexpected sadness I was experiencing — as, judging by Twitter, were many of my friends — wasn’t so much to do with The Day the Music Died as with The Death of Our Youth.
Jackson’s passing means we are now officially old. Of course he was a musical genius and an extraordinary person at all sorts of levels, and so on and so forth. But for many of us he also functioned as a sort of figurehead — the pop star you grew up with and always assumed you would grow old with, you with increasing amounts of Botox, he with increasing amounts of looniness.
It isn’t simply that his death brought on a strong dose of intimations of mortality, but rather that — combined with the death of Fawcett, the last old-school pin-up — it marked the passing of an entire era.
For fortysomething kidults, wearing 1980s fashion for the second time around, popping out babies in our middle age, believing we’re still cool, believing we’re really not at all old and more than belong at Glastonbury 2009, something died along with Jackson last Thursday, live on Twitter.
Every generation has a rock star death that shakes them up and marks a new chapter: Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis, John Lennon. It doesn’t matter whether you liked them or owned their records or were even especially aware of them. The soundtrack to the fun, carefree part of your life has suddenly ended; the stylus skitters across the vinyl (remember vinyl?), and it’s as though some stentorian voice boomed down and said, “Now do you get it?” Time to put away childish things.
That, egomaniacally enough, is why so many people who grew up in the 1980s feel an unexpected sadness at Jackson’s death. He was the king of pop, yes, and no, we probably won’t see his like again. But the most remarkable thing about his death, for me, was being able to communicate instantly with friends, acquaintances and complete strangers all over the world — to share in an event as it developed, to think and engage and be provoked.
I’m not mourning my youth. We may have had the Smiths and got there first with the batwing sleeves, but nothing is as mind-blowing as the ability to confer collectively and globally when something happens.
+ Speaking of Glastonbury and popular beat combos: having fond memories of northern soul weekenders in places such as Wigan, I’d always been of the naive opinion that music gatherings, including festivals, were for everyone, by which I mean for young people who didn’t necessarily live in fabulous houses and have violin and Mandarin lessons from the age of four.
Instead, it is so prohibitively expensive that you know all the young people there are called Jack, Tarquin and Daisy and are enjoying a bit of musical slumming before Tuscany and Ibiza later this summer. My son’s ticket cost £180; kitting him out with camping equipment, wellies and so on cost another £100; the ticket to the party bus to Somerset cost £50; and that’s before a single penny of spending money. He is having the most fabulous time imaginable (and yes, I do envy him bitterly, pace Michael Jackson and my extreme old age), but really — what’s with the pre-recession costs? Still, 170,000 people can afford it, which is cheering in these gloomy times.

india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk