Richard Littledale's
Views on the News: July 2009

Death of a star?

Have you looked up at the night sky recently? Of course you'll have to wait longer to see it at this time of the year. Many of the stars that we see twinkling in the night sky above us are in fact already dead. Their light has long since been extinguished - its just that the light takes so long to reach us that we are left with the impression that they are still shining. All we are in fact left with is an echo of a former glory which continues to sparkle on and give the mistaken impression of life.

In all the thousands of tributes to Michael Jackson since his death in June, I wonder if anybody has considered that we were witnessing the sparkling of just such a star? Few of those in the know would disagree that his most brilliant and innovative work was many years behind him, and that we were left with only the memory of his real sparkle long before he died. In fact, it may well have been eclipsed by those other dark shadows lingering around his life: his discomfort with his own body, and his strange attitudes to his own and other people's children to name but two. This was a once talented but perpetually troubled man.

Of course there are many who deeply resent the blanket media coverage which Jackson's death has already attracted. Certainly it seems disproportionate that the deaths of protesters in Iran should be so quickly forgotten when a washed-up pop star breathes his last in a luxury hotel suite. Such comparisons, though, are always invidious. None of us can or should measure the value of one life against another as if we were God. Not only this, but our inability to cope with the grand scale of loss and death in the world means that we will always engage with the big statistics through the single story - whether that story belongs to a protester or a pop star.

When 11-year old Michael Jackson recorded his first ever song with the Jackson 5, it included the following line:

Fairy tales, fairy tales I don't enjoy. Fairy tales and wishful dreams are broken toys.

How sadly poignant those lines look now. This is not the time to pontificate on vice and virtue in the pop world. This is the time to pray for those in the arts and to ask that God keep them from falling. As a human race it suits us to have idols, with a small 'i' if not a capital one. However, when idols are placed too high on their pedestal, it is not only the idol but the crowds all around who suffer when it crashes to earth.