Skeptical adventures in the land of conspiracy

MJ? Who is this MJ? My name is... Guy Incognito.

Michael Jackson died a little while ago. Not being a fan myself, I took the news with equanimity, but this is apparently not a sentiment shared by many. The cable news networks assure me that despite overwhelming public outcry, Jackson is still dead. There’s probably no good reason for this state of affairs, and it seems a cruel trick on the part of Nature.

Naturally, some people are taking the news pretty hard – there are the usual suggestions that his death was faked, as with any celebrity who dies relatively young, though the Gloved One was no Elvis or 2Pac or Marilyn Monroe (although it could be argued that if you take those three, mash them together in a trash compactor, and force the resulting flesh-cube to take the lead role in Satan’s production of Peter Pan, you’d pretty much have Michael Jackson in a nutshell). A wonderful article in the Daily Telegraph sums up some of the early theories, and a series of hysterical Yahoo Answers threads provides a good gauge of paranoid opinion:

Yes, I believe he did fake his death. As a person who works in the medical field many things just do not add up here. His doctor working on him at his home for as long as he did before calling 911. The body “cold” when EMS team got there. Bodies do not get cold that quickly. If he was DOA when EMS got to him– why then not pronounce him dead as soon as he reached the hospital? They worked on him for hours ? When the body gets cold the blood begins to pool in areas — any doctor would know it is a lost cause. None of this adds up. And why now is the doctor missing???? I smell a fake — not that I blame him. As the master of disquise and reinventing, yes he COULD pull it off.

The challenge, of course, would be disguising himself as somebody with a functioning nose.

The faked-death theories eventually ebbed, as they must, but another subset of Michael Jackson conspiracy theories remained – that he was killed by the Iranian government so that his death would gain traction in the media and draw Western public attention away from the rigged election, by the US government to divert media coverage away from the climate bill, or some kind of amazingly nutty Russian CIA mind control EMP weapon thing.

There are a couple of reasons behind conspiracy theories popping up at a time like this – death is a confusing and arbitrary thing, and people have a hard time dealing with it being able to strike without warning. It’s only natural to look for some kind of order in things, which is why there’s a particular conspiracy crowd who see every event of even minor note – a plane being struck by lightning, a celebrity dying, an NGO holding a conference in some particular place, a spacecraft being launched – as a puzzle piece in the machinations of some sinister cabal. There’s also a compelling desire to score points off a tragedy like this; it affords a unique opportunity for pushing one’s own political agenda via scapegoating. Finally, the faked-death theories are spurred in part by wishful thinking on the part of Jackson’s more scarily obsessed fans, who no doubt are picturing him shacked up in a Brooklyn tenement with Andy Kaufman and the Count of St. Germain.

On the other hand, it’s Michael Friggin’ Jackson, so the conspiracy theories don’t seem to have taken much of a hold. After the drugs, the surgery, and the public displays of utter insanity, is it a surprise to anyone with a functioning brain that he’s finally joined the great castrato chorus in the sky?

Tags: CIA, death, mental illness, Politics

This entry was posted by Disinfo Agent on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 11:07 pm and is filed under pop culture. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.