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America is dying. You could smell it at the Michael Jackson trial.
Snapshot from the end of the case: It is early on a Tuesday morning on the last week of the proceedings. The verdict is days, perhaps hours, away. The courthouse compound is in an advanced zoolike state. The pro-Jackson crazies have descended en masse for the verdict, and they are fighting, in some cases with fists, to get places in front of the cameras. At the courthouse gates, a fat creep from Tennessee named BJ — journalists have dubbed him "Superfan" — is pushing two Polish girls aside so that his weirdo buddies can dance, out of tune, to "Black or White," for the amusement of a row of mute European photographers. One of the shooters takes a place on the Tennessean's ladder, which he stands on every morning to cheer for Michael. "Watch the fucking ladder!" BJ shouts.
Thirty yards away, inside the compound at the courthouse front door, the journalists are assembling. Correspondents, pens in hand, are calling out to their producers in the tents. The word is out: "Jesse's going to speak!" Jesse Jackson is here, and he's going to make a statement.
Why is Jesse Jackson here? Why is he giving a statement? Who knows? It's the Michael Jackson trial — why ask why?
Jesse comes out. He looks just like Jesse Jackson: $10 million blue suit, perfect Windsor knot, grave expression, the spotless wing collars of your dreams. And he starts talking. He's into his "Keep hope alive" act within thirty seconds. This is a hundred-year-old George Carlin, performing in a Peoria VFW hall, doing his "Seven Dirty Words" routine — but he can remember only five of the dirty words. Well, five will do, the audience has already paid....
"If the choice is between hope and fear," Jesse says, "Michael chooses hope.... We must not be paralyzed by fear."
A reporter next to me scribbles in his notebook: "MJ — chooses hope."
It's a deathbed scene. Even in his best days, Jesse the cultural figure was a pastiche of old ideas. The presentation was a pale copy of Martin Luther King Jr. The politics were a fifty-year-old New Deal. But at least the candidate was a young man full of fire and ambition. Now only Jesse's suits are new, and his shtick is a hideous self-plagiarizing parody of himself from better days. All he is is a celebrity; no longer a leader, he's just playing a part here, obeying the logic of this thing, whatever this thing is.
A Fox reporter named Aphrodite Jones squeezes to the front to ask a question. Another loud, middle-aged TV creature with too much makeup and an extra layer of flesh, bearing the name of a pro wrestler.
"Reverend Jackson!" she shouts. "Why haven't the other public figures come out here to support Michael at this time? People like Elizabeth Taylor — they don't seem to be here. Why aren't they here? Why?"
Exactly what I was thinking. Where the fuck is Elizabeth Taylor? Slacker! At Aphrodite's second "why," Jesse looks up. For the first time in his life, he's speechless.
"Um, I don't know," he says. "I don't know their schedules.... I, uh..."
A few minutes later, some nameless handler rescues Jesse and pulls him back inside the courthouse. He will be back tomorrow, he says. As if he's going anywhere. A half-hour later, he's drifting in front of the TV tents, begging for airtime — right in front of the pro-Michael freaks (the majority by far), the crusading Christians, the PETA activists with their prancing veggie girls in lettuce bikinis, who are all here for exactly the same reason. Anything to get on television.
Somewhere inside the courtroom, a jury is deliberating, trying to bring this whole business to a climax. But who cares what they'll say? What can a verdict possibly tell us that this case hasn't said a hundred ways already?
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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."
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And then there was the very key figure in the case, the accuser's mother, who had to plead the Fifth Amendment on the first day of her testimony to avoid cross-examination on a welfare-fraud allegation — a witness so completely full of shit that Sneddon's own assistants cringed openly throughout most of her five days of testimony.
Mom waved her hands wildly, made crass jokes about German people (mocking Jackson's German associates in a Hogan's Heroes accent), violently jabbed fingers in the direction of the defendant and reporters, and even pulled an "I know you are, but what am I?" grade-school shtick with Jackson attorney Tom Mesereau, answering questions on cross-examination in a mock impersonation of Mesereau's own icy Harvard diction. One of the prosecution assistants, Ronald Zonen, even resorted to objecting to his own witness' testimony as nonresponsive, just to get her to shut the fuck up during the cross.
Sneddon did manage to elicit testimony from the alleged victim's brother that Jackson had plied his sibling with liquor and stuck his hands down his "underwears." But that was about all his case accomplished, and that accomplishment was confined to the first two weeks.
In the next six weeks, virtually every piece of his case imploded in open court, and the chief drama of the trial quickly turned into a race to see if the DA could manage to put all of his witnesses on the stand without getting any of them removed from the courthouse in manacles.
Sneddon's hard-on for Jackson was a faith-based vengeance grab every bit as blind and desperate as George Bush's "case" against Saddam Hussein. If Ahmad Chalabi had ever been to Neverland, Sneddon would have put him on the stand too.
By the end of the prosecution's case, Sneddon was behaving like a lunatic, shouting at his witnesses in ungrammatical English, publicly insulting his own team members (at one point, Sneddon told Judge Rodney Melville that his deputy, Gerald Franklin, is "here to carry my briefcase, Your Honor"), and unilaterally declaring victory every time one of his disastrous examinations ended abruptly in uncomfortable silence.
Sneddon's grammar departed him whenever he got angry, which by the second month was almost all the time. "You know no role what he played in the family!" he barked at Connie Keenan, the editor of the tiny Mid Valley News, which had run an article about the accuser's battle with cancer. He went on to berate this witness for not knowing that the accuser needed a special humidifier, and then, when he was finished, slammed his file folder shut, roaring at the jury, "I'll quit while I'm ahead!"
Any beginner prosecutor closes his case with a bang. Sneddon began his wrap-up with a day and a half of excruciating testimony about Michael Jackson's telephone records. Apparently, Jackson's aides made thirty-eight phone calls in the course of one day, the same day the family "escaped" (in a Rolls-Royce, incidentally) from Neverland. Obviously they were up to something. When the prosecution rested, two jurors were asleep in the jury box.
Sneddon was the perfect protagonist for this trial. For two months, he was President of the United States of Get Those Fuckers. He was a vengeful, half-literate moron, bent on wasting every last public dollar he could get his hands on, and everyone hated him — but he was in charge, and no one could stop him. A situation we're all quite used to these days, after all. His only saving grace, if you could call it that, was that everyone else in the courtroom deserved him.
Late in the trial. We are deep into the defense's case by now. Fatigue has set in all around; the journalists in the press listening room (a heavily guarded separate trailer where the hacks can watch the trial on closed-circuit TV) have taken to chirping and bitching like prison inmates from sunup to sundown. Most of the media personnel stopped listening to the testimony weeks ago and spend their days reading books or doing crossword puzzles. A British TV journalist next to me is drawing, in ballpoint, a picture of a human hand plunging a knife into a dog's head.
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The only remaining intrigue in the trial involves the ongoing list of celebrities called to testify on Jackson's behalf. It's a running joke: It seems like Jackson's accusers, at one time or another, tried to steal the silverware of every famous person in Southern California. If Tom Mesereau were to get up tomorrow and call Queen Elizabeth II to the stand, no one in this room would even look up from his crossword.
"We call Larry King, Your Honor," says Mesereau.
Sure, why not Larry King? Why not Merv Griffin and Dick Cavett, too? Why not call Ellen DeGeneres, dress her in rubber, have her sit on the face of Wayne Brady? In a relationship this long, you have to be creative to keep things interesting.
King's testimony would ultimately be inadmissible, but the celebrity train rolled on straight through to the end of the case. Jackson's slick white-haired lawyer, Mesereau, put on a defense that at the end felt like a dinner for the jury at Spago. You know: Look, there's Chris Tucker, let's go over and I'll introduce you. Sneddon's woeful performance had set up the defense as the good guys, but when the bell rang, Mesereau answered with a string of witnesses who testified that Jackson had spent hundreds, if not thousands, of nights in bed with strange children. Far ahead on points, Jackson's first counterstrike was to boldly announce himself as a compulsive maniac, addicted to children — a musical Saturday-morning-cartoons version of something out of Seven.
This might have been a disastrous move were it not for the utter incompetence of the prosecution. By the third month of the trial, the prosecution's strategy seemed to be to excitedly introduce the words "boy," "suck," "penis" and "jack off" into their cross-examinations as often as possible (Sneddon managed to elicit the trifecta phrase "sucking on the penis of a young boy!") — and they pissed away Jackson's own damaging admissions by continually introducing crazy new theories of molestation, real wacko witch-hunt stuff, that turned what might have been a serious trial into a low comedy of grasping provincial bureaucrats.
Here's Ron Zonen cross-examining Wade Robson, a young man the prosecution contended had been molested by Jackson — but who testified to the contrary.
ZONEN: You're telling us nothing happened, right?
ROBSON: That's right.
ZONEN: All right. What you're really telling us is that nothing happened while you were awake. Isn't that true?
ROBSON: I'm telling you nothing ever happened.
ZONEN: Mr. Robson, when you were asleep, you wouldn't have known what had happened, particularly at age seven, would you have?
ROBSON: I think something like that would wake me up.
One would think it would. In any case, there was never enough evidence at this trial of "something like that" to answer with any satisfaction the question of who Michael Jackson really is. Emboldened, the defense never bothered to offer an affirmative explanation of Jackson's strange behavior.
Instead, the case it put on was mostly grunt work, ho-hum explanations for various unpleasant pieces of anecdotal evidence — along the lines of "Your Honor, we can explain each of those five documented instances of head-licking" — followed by a sunny dismount into a pool of supportive celebrities, people like Jay Leno, Macaulay Culkin and Chris Tucker.
In between, the defense made sure to take plenty of shots at various people on Jackson's shit list: Sneddon, the police, his thieving employees, his scheming advisers, et cetera, all those enemies of peace and love and beautiful things.
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By the end of the trial, Jackson had begun to press his courtroom-victim persona into service in other areas of his life. Under pressure now to sell his ownership of the Beatles catalog to cover his mounting debts, Jackson began to cast his financial difficulties as being a result of organized persecution. In the last week, we were told, through Jesse Jackson, that the idea that Jackson should have to give up his grip on "Strawberry Fields" in order to pay for his elephants and his amusement rides and his collection of porcelain sarcophagi is a "gross injustice."
People ask about Michael Jackson's post-trial career. He may have a future as a permanent victim. Why not? All fading celebrities play the Christ/martyr card sooner or later, once they have nothing left to sell. Which is where, regardless of the verdict, Michael is now.
Who is Michael Jackson? The idea that he is a unique individual, utterly unlike anyone else in the world in either appearance or behavior, has been repeated so often that it is now no longer seriously questioned. But the Michael Jackson who emerged from this trial appeared not as a singular genius but as just another ordinary full-of-shit Hollywood person, distinguished only by the scale of his pretentiousness.
Because this case could never really be about the evidence — there wasn't enough of it — it ended up mostly being a period piece about a certain kind of brazen, image-obsessed sociopath common to this part of the world. Jackson was a perfect representative.
The scam was the same all across the board in the Jackson trial. Everyone had a deep, dark secret, a criminal racket or a sordid perversion, which is what their real raison d'etre was, what they really did for a living. The loyal business associate was a gay pornographer. The accuser's mother, the grieving parent of a cancer victim, was a scam artist who allegedly used her son's chemotherapy money to pay for her own plastic surgery. Your continental chef ran a live-sex Web site, and your maid was negotiating with the tabloids about the value of the things hanging on your walls. Even your travel agent was wearing a wire.
In private they were all crooks, no better than any random group of suckers found in a communal holding cell at the L.A. county jail on any given day. But in public they all pretended to be legit and apparently spent most of their waking hours trying to be seen at benefit concerts and charity functions. They talked about diets, their new pilots, some relationship to Jesus they all allegedly shared. It was all the same rap. They were old women lying about their age.
Or their face. Here's Jesse Jackson, in a radio broadcast, interviewing Michael about his weight-loss tips during the trial:
JESSE: You've maintained the weight, man, that's what people is [sic] most jealous of and so excited about....
MICHAEL: My health is perfect, actually. I'm a great believer in holistic natural foods and eating and herbs and things, you know, God's medicine, instead of Western chemicals....
If you can grasp the absurdity of Michael Jackson, a man with a face made entirely of wax and plastic parts, proclaiming absolute faith in "God's medicine" and the natural processes, then you've grasped the essence of the Jackson trial.
An American these days may be a welfare cheat, he may fuck little boys and he may just want to steal Iraq's oil. But as long as he gives it up for Jesus, stays out of jail and keeps the weight off, he's still viable, still a story. What he is underneath doesn't matter. And nobody is particularly interested in finding out. We're happy to stare — but we can do without the smell.
[From Issue 977/978 — June 30, 2005]