This Keith Olbermann interview with doctor and author Deepak Chopra, one of Michael Jackson’s closest friends and confidants, is required viewing for anyone wanting to get past the knee-jerk “a pedophile is dead” stupidity flooding the net, the air waves, etc., in the wake of the entertainer’s untimely demise Thursday.  The interview comes on the heels of a Huffington Post op-ed Chopra penned early Friday morning, worth more than any cheap dime-store speculation from misanthropes and uneducated buffoons.

Thankfully the interview briefly gets into the issue of Jackson’s lupus condition, which obviously speaks to the plastic surgery that eventually became an obsession with health that so many are quick to forget or ignore, choosing instead the line that he was attempting to transform himself into a child or some other such nonsense.  There is a Wolf Blitzer interview with Chopra that was even longer, which kick-started his many media appearances this weekend.  If you can find that, give it a look, too.

From the Huffington Post piece, it’s worth it to highlight these graphs, I feel:

The closest we ever became, perhaps, was when Michael needed a book to sell primarily as a concert souvenir. It would contain pictures for his fans but there would also be a text consisting of short fables. I sat with him for hours while he dreamily wove Aesop-like tales about animals, mixed with words about music and his love of all things musical. This project became Dancing the Dream after I pulled the text together for him, acting strictly as a friend. It was this time together that convinced me of the modus vivendi Michael had devised for himself: to counter the tidal wave of stress that accompanies mega-stardom, he built a private retreat in a fantasy world where pink clouds veiled inner anguish and Peter Pan was a hero, not a pathology.

This compromise with reality gradually became unsustainable. He went to strange lengths to preserve it. Unbounded privilege became another toxic force in his undoing. What began as idiosyncrasy, shyness, and vulnerability was ravaged by obsessions over health, paranoia over security, and an isolation that grew more and more unhealthy. When Michael passed me the music for that last song, the one sitting by my bedside waiting for the right words, the procedure for getting the CD to me rivaled a CIA covert operation in its secrecy.

They recall, for me, a portion of Andrew Sullivan’s shrewd point in an Atlantic post Thursday:

I grieve for him; but I also grieve for the culture that created and destroyed him. That culture is ours’ and it is a lethal and brutal one: with fame and celebrity as its core values, with money as its sole motive, it chewed this child up and spat him out.

And yet, I hope Chopra’s final thoughts are made manifest in the wake of this tragedy:

…I couldn’t help but write this brief remembrance in sadness. But when the shock subsides and a thousand public voices recount Michael’s brilliant, joyous, embattled, enigmatic, bizarre trajectory, I hope the word “joyous” is the one that will rise from the ashes and shine as he once did.

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