I'm with PoppaGator on this one. And with Frank. And with Kendall.

Michael Jackson was much more to be pitied than admired. He was exploited from early on, and what that essentially boiled down to was child abuse. He was little, he was cute, and he did have a bundle of energy and talent, which, frankly, I don't think was ever fully realized. He was crammed into a mold performing with the Jackson Five, and not really allowed to develop his own talent in his own way. When it came right down to it, the Jackson Five would have been just one more of many such groups had it not been for the cute, energetic kid. They needed him! And they used him.

Did he really want to be there? What choice did he have?

I'm not given, God knows, to seeking out television stories about Michael Jackson, but I do recall seeing a feature on him on some news program. It might have been "60 Minutes" while I was waiting to hear Andy Rooney grump about something, but I don't recall for sure. Anyway, someone (Leslie Stahl?) interviewed him (I didn't learn anything that I cared to retain), and then followed him when he went to an art gallery to buy a bunch of new stuff for his "Neverland Ranch" ("Neverland" strikes me as significant in itself:   the land where children never grow up). It was eye-popping. He wandered through the gallery with someone following him and taking notes. As he walked through, he'd point at something (without really looking at it) and say, "I'll take that one. And I'll take that one and that one. And that one over there. . . ."

And, of course, he had the money to do it with!

It was like someone going to a bookstore and buying thirty feet of books, not carrying anything about content, just to fill their shelves at home. All for show.

But I got to thinking about this when the child abuse allegations started. I heard some newscaster or commentator venture the opinion that, inappropriate as Jackson's behavior was, laying around in a bed with young kids, he probably wasn't actually sexually abusing them (he was charged, but acquitted). He just wanted to surround himself with children. Other children.

Because he never had a childhood himself. It was stolen from him at an early age.

I was reminded of the Orson Welles' 1941 epic movie, "Citizen Kane." One of the key scenes in the movie shows Charles Kane's future being planned. He is to be sent away from his beloved mother to protect him from his abusive father, to live with a banker friend of the family who will see to his education. Private schools, preparation for material success in the world, power and greatness. While this discussion is going on, you see the boy, Charles Kane, out in the yard, playing happily in the snow with his sled. At the end of the scene, the grown-ups come out, interrupt his play, take his sled away from him, and drag him off to fulfill the destiny they have planned for him.

Just as he dies (at the beginning of the movie—the story is told in flashbacks) Kane drops a snow globe (one of those glass balls with a winter scene inside) and says the cryptic word:   "Rosebud." That question underlies the entire movie. What, or who, is "Rosebud?" And what is its significance? Many people who have seen the movie missed it, apparently because they blinked at the wrong time or just didn't notice. But after all of the millions of dollars worth of art treasures are cleaned out of Kane's mansion, "Xanadu," and while the workmen are burning all the old junk that Kane also acquired, and wondering why he had gone to such great effort to accumulate all this useless junk (SPOILER ALERT), the camera moves in on a burning sled, as the flames blister and obliterate the name on the sled; the sled the boy Kane had been playing with in the yard when the grown-ups came and took him away:   Rosebud.

Kane may have been removed from his abusive father. But he had also been robbed of his childhood, to be groomed to become the Great Man he became. All of that material acquisition was an attempt to buy back his childhood.

I think Michael Jackson's problems might very well have stemmed from something quite similar.

Random thoughts while waiting for the tea water to boil.

Don Firth