The Nation in the Mirror

The Michael Jackson trial commenced during a relative lull in the George W. Bush era of American history. A long and contentious election had just ended; an overseas war, relieved of the burden of being a campaign issue, had receded to the inside pages, where the bombings and shootings appeared each day alongside quiet reassurances that "progress is being made."

Politically, this was Alice Cooper time: School's out for summer. Time to enjoy that media-peace dividend, time to get retarded. Let's grab our crosses and descend on the bedside of an expiring coma patient; let's drag a weeping Jose Canseco and his bulging biceps before Congress, tell him we're doing it "for the children." And then in Santa Maria, California, on February 28th, let's raise the curtain on a nice, long, slow look at ourselves at rest — a world where every third person has his own porn Web site, where even twelve-year-old children talk like bookers for the Jerry Springer Show, where the chief engine of the economy is civil litigation.

Ostensibly a story about bringing a child molester to justice, the Michael Jackson trial would instead be a kind of homecoming parade of insipid American types — grifters, suckers and no-talent schemers, mired in either outright unemployment or the bogus non-careers of the information age, looking to cash in any way they can.

In the manner of any American caught within spitting range of television cameras, they were all hopelessly self-righteous. But the only thing they could think to be self-righteous about was a fourth-rate version of our oldest mob-think standby: the idea that people like that have to get what's coming to them.

The people like that in this case would be Michael Jackson — a shell-shocked billionaire weirdo. He would spend months paraded before the cameras like an animal, so that Middle America could gape at his bedsheets and his porn collection. That was the setup, and it promised to be a good time all around. More than 2,000 reporters were sent to record the affair for history, and once they arrived, there was no turning that switch off again.

The trial opened with the state's case, which for two long months played out like a coin-operated Times Square peep show. The Jackson trial was in this respect a perfect American-media phenomenon. The government's case was marked throughout with the same naked, dumbly envious voyeurism of a median Nielsen viewer. It was almost as if it had been written for TV.

The MC of the proceedings was District Attorney Tom Sneddon, whose metaphorical role in this American reality show was to represent the mean gray heart of the Nixonian Silent Majority — the bitter mediocrity itching to stick it to anyone who'd ever taken a vacation to Paris.

The whole trial was infected with Sneddon's cipherlike non-personality, his ferret face, his freckled hands. Even his name was a Dickensian masterpiece perfectly appropriate to the tone of the proceedings. It sounded like a verb; maybe he had been Sneddoned in his youth. It sounded like snot, needle, snout and dong. It sounded like the hole in the wall of a highway restroom.

His case was bullshit. California vs. Jackson turned out to be basically a tale of a family of low-rent grifters trying to lay a criminal-molestation charge on a rich celebrity as a prelude to a civil suit: British TV documentary reveals pop star sleeps in bed with children; pop star's handlers scramble to do damage control; coddling of potentially troublesome family passed off first as kidnapping, and then, what the hell, as molestation.

The first month or so of the trial featured perhaps the most compromised collection of prosecution witnesses ever assembled in an American criminal case — almost to a man a group of convicted liars, paid gossip hawkers or worse. The early witnesses against Jackson included a bodyguard who missed court because he was in custody facing charges stemming from a series of armed robberies, including holding up a Jack in the Box at gunpoint; a former Neverland maid who'd stolen a sketch Jackson had made of Elvis Presley and sold it to the tabloids for thirty grand; another former employee who'd lost a wrongful-termination suit against Jackson and had to pay part of a $1.4 million settlement as a result; a housekeeper whose son claims he was molested sold stories about Jackson to Hard Copy; and a Neverland chef whose off-duty hobbies included a porn site called Virtual Sin that featured "hours of live sex."