Appreciation

One of the most telling details that has emerged from what people are calling the Michael Jackson Death Trial is how many people depended on Jackson as a source of income and to what extent he was an idol as well as a cash cow.

The accused Dr Conrad Murray's witnessed behavior during the moments when he found that Jackson had expired betrayed the near-frantic reactions of a man who was trying to resuscitate a corpse, not because he cared about the vital human being who had given up the ghost quite unexpectedly under his care, but because of what he was figuring that he had to gain by keeping Michael's heart beating and what he stood to lose if he did not. The image of Murray whipping a dead horse sprang to mind as accounts from EMS crews and emergency room doctors were certain that Jackson was clinically dead while Murray was insisting that they keep trying to resuscitate him.

Viewers of the concert movie This Is It (an ironically crass title) were spared, through careful editing, the recorded moments when Jackson betrayed how actually fragile his health was while he put himself through rehearsals for a concert tour he himself announced would be his last.

Another inadvertent revelation of Murray's trial is that his obvious incompetence and unscrupulousness were the conditions of his employment as Michael Jackson's personal physician. A more competent and scrupulous doctor simply wouldn't have prescribed all the drugs that Jackson insisted on having, no matter how much Jackson offered to pay him.

I watched an incredible interview the other day with one of Jackson's business advisers who, while claiming to have been a close friend of his, spoke with unconcealed and unrestrained pride about the dead man's ongoing Net Worth. Despite the expiration of the mortal Michael Jackson, the Estate of Michael Jackson lives on, and even grows, continuing to enrich all the people named in his will but also the many employed in the management of his legacy.

In his final days, Jackson wasn't much different from Elvis - a drug-addicted wreck. At least Jackson wasn't found dead on the toilet. When the Arthur Penn film Bonnie and Clyde became an unexpected hit in 1967, cartoon appeared in a popular magazine that depicted two prison inmates, one of whom says to the other "Bonnie and Clyde! Bonnie and Clyde! All I hear is Bonnie and Clyde. The saying is true, you're never appreciated until after you're dead!" In Jackson's case, he has appreciated in more than one sense.