Rigorous Intuition

Rigorous Intuition
is worth a visit. There are many dark insights here and just on the front page it's hard to choose one from each. But I was particularly struck by this one. Of couse, anyone who quotes Leonard Cohen is worth a second look any day. But this goes a lot deeper, asking questions many of us probably really do not want answers to.

Jackson 5.0

So I work in that same beauty salon, I'm chained to the old masquerade
The lipstick, the shadow, the silicone: I follow my father's trade - Leonard Cohen

Michael Jackson may be another example of a celebrity distraction which, upon examination, reveals more about our society's mortal condition than a tabloid could imagine. Almost certainly more than it would dare to describe.

Last week's real Jackson story ran in the New York Daily News, under the snappy banner "Creepy dad was root of all clan's woe, singer sez." The singer was brother Jermaine, and the claims based on the projected outline for his abandoned "tell-all" family story.

Reading that Joseph was a nightmare of a father and sexually abusive towards his daughters is not exactly a "stop the presses" moment. What's new is this:

Jermaine even suggested his father may have set up Michael to be somehow victimized by older men.

He tells how his father would have Michael join in at late-night hotel room meetings with "important business people," and wondered whether "something happened" to Michael at those sessions.

He said he sensed something was wrong because Michael would be sick for days after. "What was Joseph doing?" Jermaine wrote.

This lifts the Jackson family horror show to a whole new order of dysfunction, one that sees parents network with power and trade their children for privilege. This should be a motif familiar to anyone acquainted with the literature of mind control and ritual abuse survivors: the father and first controller, passing his child-victim up the social ladder of abuse in return for status, protection and reward. All that's missing is the element of occult terror. Or maybe not: "LaToya also described being awakened in the night by Joseph wearing a 'monster mask.'"

Not that any of this actually surprises me, much less shocks me. But it is rather odd that it takes wierdness of Jacksonian magnitude to get people to even consider how much twisting it takes to become so obviously twisted.