The danse macabre of Michael Jackson's death-One reporter told us the news from LA was 'truly a JFK moment' by Mark Steel

Mark Steel

Within minutes of the first reports, it was clear the world was going mad. The reporter on Radio 5 Live told us the news from Los Angeles "was truly a JFK moment". Because the sense of shock and grief were identical, in one case millions feeling a new era of civil rights and peace had been cruelly snuffed out; in the other, the realisation we would never again see a man go "Yow" while spinning in a circle.

From the tone, you expected the next reporter to say: "I think it's much more momentous than that, and feels like the Norman victory at the Battle of Hastings, or even the collapse of Roman civilisation into warring feudal tribes."

Then came the messages: "Judith from Luton has texted to say nothing matters any more so she's going to convert her Facebook page into a suicide cult. Well, Judith, I think we all feel that way and wish you the very best of luck with that project."

Then the newspapers started, with 63 pages devoted to pictures of painkillers and articles about the impact of "ABC" on linguistic theory, and agony aunts advising how to console an orphaned monkey. It seemed every bit of every paper had to be dedicated to him, so the chess puzzle would go "Today, in honour of Michael, the pawns are allowed to move one square backwards as long as they make it look like they're going forwards. And both players can be on the same side, as the black pieces are allowed to pretend they're white."

And the crossword would be full of clues like "Tennis queen who loses her King is not my lover. 6,4."

At one point on Friday evening, while in a bar in Runcorn, I noticed a huge TV screen was displaying tributes, and for a whole minute it told us: "Amanda Holden says 'I'm thinking of his family on this sad day'." Well that must have been a comfort to them. But presumably this kept going all day, so eventually it was displaying messages such as "Mick McCarthy, the manager of Wolverhampton Wanderers, says, 'I'm absolutely gutted. I haven't felt this bad since I was relegated with Sunderland in the 2002-3 season. Rest in peace, Michael'."

And it's still going on. The front page of yesterday's Daily Mirror showed a picture of Michael, declaring that it was taken on the morning he died, and asking in huge letters "So what went wrong?" It certainly is a mystery, how anyone that dies in the evening can have been alive in the morning. Presumably, inside it carried on, "Our investigations have revealed that he may have been living RIGHT UP TO THE MOMENT HE DIED. But still the authorities have provided no explanation."

One music journalist on Radio 5 Live told us "he was the most influential pop musician ever," and on Radio Four we were told he was "more influential than any other soul artist, including James Brown". And this is where the madness springs from, because they seem to confuse record sales and celebrity status with influence. For example, James Brown's "influence" cannot be measured just in retail units, but from the impact of him yelling to people categorised as officially inferior, "Say it out loud, I'm black and I'm proud." Whereas Jackson's attitude towards his colour was slightly less forthright. Still, he could at least have made an effort and sang, "Say it's apparent, I'm almost transparent."

Michael Jackson aimed solely to make people dance, which is a fine aspiration, and he was himself a fantastic dancer. But while he provided a catchy soundtrack to the early 1980s, truly influential dance music has created more than a hypnotic beat, it has made its audience want to dance to express itself, finding pride in its colour, sexuality or youthfulness that is restricted in other areas of society and transform the world beyond the dancefloor.

Jackson, though, was tragically hollow, which may be why his main influence was on combining music with new technology, firstly by transforming videos into mini-feature films, then by becoming the subject of the world's first globally mass-texted useless jokes.

So, as the media assured us the universe was in mourning, most of the planet's JFK moment will mean always remembering where you were when you read a contrived question that could arrive at the punchline "Don't blame it on the boogie".

First published in The Independent on 1st July 2009

Review of Michael Parenti's THE CULTURE STRUGGLE by Alex Miller

Michael Parenti speaking in San Francisco in December 2006, at a meeting commemorate the fifth anniversary of the sentencing of United States political prisoners the Cuban Five.

The Culture Struggle
By Michael Parenti
Seven Stories Press
143 pages
Paperback £7.99

REVIEW BY ALEX MILLER

Michael Parenti’s latest book is a study of culture’s place as “a key battleground in the sociopolitical struggles of this world”. As Parenti himself points out, the book is not a social-science monograph constructing a rigorous theory of culture, but rather “a set of discursive commentaries linked by underlying themes, filled with illustrative examples”. The book consists of 14 separate, brief but interrelated essays dealing with topics such as mass-market culture, cultural conceptions of mental illness, marriage, rape, slavery, racism, and “new age” culture.

Parenti writes with limpid clarity and razor-sharp precision, stripping away the myths surrounding cultural practices and explaining their relationship to the various sorts of power struggle raging within and between societies. He has a gift for providing succinct and elegant statements of complex cultural-political facts, facts that other writers can spill oceans of ink attempting to elucidate. For example, Parenti summarises the relation between politico-economic imperialism and cultural imperialism in four ringing sentences: “Imperialism is the process of empire. It occurs when the dominant interests of one nation bring to bear their military and economic power upon another nation or region in order to expropriate its land, labor, capital, natural resources, and markets. During the course of conquest, the colonizers trample underfoot much of the indigenous people’s social fabric. The people lose not only their land but their way of life, their mores, historic lore, healing arts, music, gods, shamans, and eventually even their language”.

There is a similarly taut discussion of the issue of homosexual marriage. To the bigots who oppose it, Parenti fires a broadside: “Here are some of the things that straight-sex marriage has wrought through the ages: polygamy, child-brides, loveless arrangements, trafficked women, battered wives, raped wives, sexual slavery, child abuse and abandonment, racist miscegenation laws, and astronomical divorce rates. If gays are unqualified for marriage, what can we say about straights?” Picking up on a phrase coined by arch-bigot George. W. Bush, he concludes: “the homophobic Jesus worshippers who want to defend this ‘most fundamental institution of civilization’ might begin by taking an honest look at the ugly condition of so many heterosexual unions in this country and throughout the world”.

The jewel of the book, and a peerless specimen of conceptual clarity, is Parenti’s discussion of culture imperialism and cultural relativism. Cultural relativists claim that it is illegitimate to essay any criticisms of practices in cultures other than our own, while cultural imperialists take their own culture as the ultimate and only authority of what is and is not of value. Both are equally unpalatable: cultural relativism leaves us unable to criticise despicable practices such as female genital mutilation, while cultural imperialism serves to convince the poor and weak of the legitimacy of their domination by the rich and strong. Often, they are presented by their protagonists as exhaustive alternatives: according to relativists, any criticism of another culture makes for imperialism, while imperialists argue that resistance to the domination of one culture by another can only result in relativism.

Parenti demonstrates that this is a false dilemma. One can criticise another culture, not simply because it is different from one’s own, but on the basis of facts and values that transcend particular human cultures: “A starving child is a starving child whatever the cultural rationale proffered. A tortured prisoner is a tortured prisoner in whatever country, so with a jailed journalist, a raped woman, an enslaved worker, a youngster forced into prostitution, and a murdered innocent. And a chemically toxified environment undermines our global ecology regardless of the particular cultural attitudes about such things”. One can sail past the Scylla of cultural imperialism whilst avoiding the Charybdis of cultural relativism.

This short volume packs a mightier punch than its slender proportions might lead you to believe. Students of culture, power and society will find it stimulating and enlightening