I watched most of the Michael Jackson memorial service, and was largely repelled by it. It wasn’t because it was an award ceremony posing as a funeral, which is what the Daily News charged today. That is the way poor Black funerals go: long on musical performance and over the top praise of the deceased—though there you may also get an old fashioned fire and brimstone sermon. Here all you got for a finale was “We Are the Children” and “Smiles”, both of which are full of the simple minded sincerity that is to be found on a Jerry Lewis Telethon, which indeed used “Smiles” as its tear wrenching finale for many, many years. Nor was it the overhead of the hearse bearing the casket to Staples Center while off screen news people went over the latest concerning the will and the autopsy and who was responsible for giving Jackson all those drugs. Not exactly solemnity; more like Entertainment Tonight. It was a mixing of genres that enhanced neither the funeral nor the vultures of the press. But that is nothing new.

When my wife called to check in yesterday afternoon, she wondered why I would waste my time watching the memorial service, something even lower, to her mind, than the Congressional hearings to which I also devote time. She was not really satisfied with my answer, which was that I thought coming to grips with popular culture in general. I think she wonders why I would be interested in figuring out popular culture, what is the great mystery about it.

Well, for me. it is a mystery in that it seems to me that popular culture embodies the same intellectual and cultural qualities that were present both in popular culture and in ordinary life in the social class in which I grew up. (My wife, of course, would wonder why I cared to do the archaeology of figuring out what my youth was like, and for the most part I agree: let the dead bury the dead.) I could never quite figure out the ways in which I was different from my peers and my family. We all spoke English; we all engaged in reasoning; we all mixed the statement of opinions in with arguments. Popular culture as represented by Hollywood and TV seemed to catch these people and me in a common way of communicating; it actually transmitted knowledge and differing senses of things in comprehensible ways. I knew I used fancy vocabulary and was criticized for it; I knew I was precocious in both a good and a bad way; I knew I asked questions for which parents and peers and teachers did not have answers, and that led them to be annoyed with me. But that did not cover the underlying qualitative difference between their mental activities and mine, though maybe those indicators are enough of a qualitative difference.

I used to quarrel with the Readers Digest because that was the only periodical my father brought into the house, and so what was wrong about my class/ethnic/popular culture was what was wrong with Readers Digest, which I now think amounted to the same thing that was wrong with the Michael Jackson memorial service, which is the following: neither resolve cognitive dissonance. Facts contrary to the argument the magazine article or the ceremony wanted to pursue are disregarded or mentioned ironically. Brooke Shields gave a very emotionally persuasive eulogy. She acknowledged that the two of them, who were close friends and shared having been child stars, she providing him with a date when he needed one, were regarded in the press as "an odd couple", which was as close to acknowledging what a freak he was as anyone in the ceremonies with the exception of Al Sharpton who said that it was the press that accused Michael of being strange when what was strange was the way in which Jackson had been treated by the press. This brought overwhelming applause from a crowd that was insisting Jackson was the greatest entertainer of all time (greater than the Beatles? or Frank Sinatra? or Charlie Chaplin?), an insistence based, I think, on wanting to make this claim for a black entertainer who represented the aspirations of all black people and who had shattered barriers (actually, that being an anachronistic interpretation, it being Sammy Davis, Jr. and Sidney Poitier and Nat King Cole who smashed barriers a decade before Jackson appeared on the scene as a five year old in the late Sixties).

So much of the memorial service was over the top in this way: claiming too much and therefore making less valid any appeal that might be made to Jackson's actual talent. And there was no reference to his dark side. Now I know one does not stress the worst about people at funerals, though I think one ought to give a decently accurate account of the person. But the tone of this memorial was that to cast Jackson's story as having any complexity was to demean it. You might characterize Jackson as a tragic figure, hounded by demons that finally overcame him. You might characterize him as a great artist who is therefore forgiven for his human foibles, as one might do with Roman Polanski or Woody Allen. But that was not the way here. Jackson was simply a shining light at the forefront of a battle in which he in fact took no part and was simply hounded by those opposed to him (for reasons never spelled out).

To draw back: what happening at the memorial service is that reason was used simply for advocacy and that no one would call attention to the elephant in the room except to deride it. This is what I think Plato was recognizing when he analyzed ordinary opinion as stuck in repetition and particular examples rather than in the principles which operate independently of the particular examples. Reason is not reason (only sophism) when is oriented only to proving a point that is already believed in. The same is true of popular culture and of my old neighborhood. An uncle who worked in the post office said Black people didn't work very hard and when I pointed out that neither did he, he said that he worked harder than they did, which might have been true enough, but it was a point he would not have to make to someone other than his overly skeptical nephew. It was a known truth. There was no need of proof or transcendental reasoning that might arrive at a different conclusion.

Now, my friend and colleague Roland Wulbert thinks that reasoning always grows out of the situation, is always in the service of the person making an argument, and so, as he has brilliantly noted, people can always (almost always) come up with something to say as a rejoinder, even if that is changing the subject and denying that the subject has been changed, which succeeds in having extended the argument in a different direction. But the invention of transcendental and evidence based argument, out to settle truths rather than opinions, also serves a number of purposes, including the idea that there is something beyond the idea of opinion, that middle class life (with which reasoning becomes identified) is capable of being different in spirit and not just in content from working class or peasant or even aristocratic thinking. Transcendental logic provides a way to cut through Readers Digest articles which tell you, as I remember one article doing, all the terrible things about Uganda and why it was ripe for a Communist takeover, and then said that there was a good deal of hope that things would turn out differently. One was not bound to draw a logical conclusion, only a comforting one. I hated the Jackson smugness, just as I hated the smugness of the people around me in the Bronx.