Father's House Blog

Many will have been shocked and upset by the news of Michael Jackson’s sudden death on Thursday June 25^th2009. Jackson’s music was loved by millions. His album Thriller is still the best selling record of all time. Many of his songs are regarded as pop classics. My personal favourite is Earth Song. The music video has been a favourite in my family for many years. But then MJ did turn the music video into an art form.

When I heard about MJ’s death I put a comment on Twitter that has generated some interesting discussion (you canfollow me on @markstibbe). I wrote this brief statement: ‘Exceptional music and dance talent but also iconic of the tragic sickness at the core of our fatherless culture’.

One of my major and consistent themes right now is that much of the world is in the grip of a pandemic of fatherlessness. This deep father wound at the heart of contemporary culture (or cultures) is behind the pathology of most of our social ills, from criminal behaviour to sexual confusion. There is no doubt that MJ was widely regarded by the Press as a person vulnerable to both. The famous case involving 13 year old Jordan Chandler in 1993-4 centred on precisely these issues – sexual confusionand criminal behaviour. MJ’s image took a massive blow in these years, and again in 2003 when he was accused of child molestation.

Much of the media only addressed the outward clues rather than the inner cause. Journalism tends to focus only on the external aspects of life and in that respect nearly always degenerates into superficial and sensationalist rhetoric. While no one should in any way dilute wrong doing (especially for the victims) one question has to be asked, ‘Why?’Why did MJ present as such a deeply wounded soul?

One compelling answer to that question has to do with MJ’s early childhood and particularly his relationship with his father, Joseph Walter ‘Joe’ Jackson. Michael, the 7^th of nine children, claimed later on in his life that he was emotionally, verbally and physically abused by his father. On one occasion, one of his siblings recalled that MJ was held upside down by one leg and pummelled incessantly. His father would often verbally abuse him with name calling, and trip him up so he fell into walls.

In 1993 Oprah Winfrey interviewed MJ. He opened up to her how he had felt deeply lonely throughout his childhood and how he had been terrified of his father, sometimes vomiting when he came into the house. In another interview he would recall how his father would sit in a chair with a belt in his hand during family music rehearsals, threatening to beat his children if they didn’t perform to his expectations.

Perhaps the most disturbing incident involved a night when MJ’s father wanted to discipline his children for leaving their bedroom windows open when they went to sleep. He allegedly entered MJ’s bedroom through the window wearing a mask and screaming. For years afterwards MJ suffered nightmares about being kidnapped from his bedroom.

There is no doubt that MJ had anambivalent attitude towards this abuse. On the one hand he was to say that his father’s disciplinarian nature instilled some valuable lessons in him. It made him a hard working and disciplined person. It also gave him a drive to succeedand to do well. But the toxic consequences of all of this are far more sinister than any perceived and rather dubious benefits. The truth is MJ was the victim of extreme father wounds. He was a victim of that alarming trend of poor fathering that US President Barak Obama has pinpointed in the African American culture, and which we’ve highlighted here in a previous blog. He was a victim of an abuse that his own father tried to pass off and even justify in 2003, when he made this extraordinary statement: "I whipped him with a switch and a belt. I never beat him. You beat someone with a stick."

When MJ died, his mother Katherine was present but his father Joe was not. In many ways that one sad fact sums upmuch of MJ’s life. Asked in the Oprah Winfrey interview whether he was mad with his dad, MJ replied: ‘Sometimes I do get angry. I don’t know him the way I’d like to know him. My mother’s wonderful. To me she’s perfection. I just wish I could understand my father’.

Michael Jackson was indeed an exceptional music and dance talent’ but he will also always be for me ‘iconic of the tragic sickness at the core of our fatherless culture’. He was undoubtedly poorly fathered, and this left its mark on the way he has fathered his own children.

Perhaps the most telling remark heever made was in a speech at the Oxford Union in 2003. ‘If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everything that happens in between can be dealt with’.

Michael Jackson and his father Joe

See the Guardian obituary at

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jun/26/michael-jackson-obituary

And the BBC article, ‘Can MichaelJacksons Demons be Explained?’ at

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8121599.stm