The discussions of Michael Jackson are coming from all sides now. I’m not going to exhaust much more of my time thinking about this, mostly because so many people have already spoken so eloquently about the subject, but I still have a few things to say before I try and put this event in my past.

I find much of the well-written reactions have the common trend of levelness. Our media enjoys the deconstruction of celebrity, which is why Jackson’s tortured personal life is such fodder. So let’s get that out of the way now: I don’t know if he was a pedophile, whether in thought or action; I tend to think that the damage he suffered as a child left him with a yearning to find the childhood he never had which, in turn, led to his desire to befriend young boys. But I make no illusions about his actions. They were troubling and it is not an unreasonable assumption to believe his love for those boys was not platonic but romantic. But I don’t. Roger Ebert put it best:

I have no idea whether Michael abused the children he “adopted.” It is possible those relationships were without sex; he seemed frozen at a time before puberty. Whether he touched them criminally or not, it is easy to see what he sought: To create, with and for these Lost Boys, a Neverland where they could imagine together the childhood he never had.

These words do not revel in the broken life of a man. Too often the need to have heroes and villains makes us think the worst or the best. We vilify or we justify, but we don’t analyze. We don’t try to understand, we avoid nuance.

I hope that Michael Jackson’s music survives his death without the stigma his life has brought to it in recent years. And I hope that his personal life is not turned into a darker more twisted tale as time goes on. But I don’t want either side of the story to disappear.

I tend to take these small things and expand them with dire warnings; I’ve written in the past of the dangers of guilty pleasures, and now I write of the dangers of fundamentalism, albeit in the guise of celebrity obsession. We must be able to take the good with the bad, and not reject the former because of the latter nor ignore the latter out of respect for the former. Because once we do either, we begin our fall into a world of extreme fundamentalism, whether its to purity or a lack of same.

Human beings are not easily understood, so we categorize, we typify, we stereotype. None of this applies to the wonders and horrors our kind can produce. And none of it should.