Reflecting on June 25, 2009 - The Death of Two Pop Icons

I opened my TweetDeck this morning. The words dominating the TwitScoop pane were "Farrah" and "Fawcett." I didn't have to click. I knew what happened.

Then, later in the day, I felt a moment of ontic shock when I looked over and the TwitScoop trends were "cardiac," "arrest," "Michael," "Jackson." "Oh no," I said. I clicked and read the flow of re-tweets from the TMZ story. "Maybe he will be okay," I thought. But it was not to be. The death of the self-proclaimed "King of Pop" was declared while I ate dinner with my family at a local deli with the other 50 or so people in the restaurant casually looking on and listening to CNN's coverage of the story.

I did not personally know either Farrah Fawcett or Michael Jackson. Few of us did. Not personally at least. But their impact on our culture helped to fundamentally shape those of us who experienced the 70's and the 80's. That is, the "who" they were made a deep enough impression on the world to craft the identity - even if in the smallest way - of those of us who lived when they were at the peak of their fame. So we "knew" them in this sense. Or, more profoundly, they became a part of us. As we knew who we were becoming under their influence, we knew something of them. And so we mourn and we watch the massive vigils being carried out before our eyes that will likely continue for the next few days. In these exercises, we sense the gravity of our collective loss.

[NB: I was going to write something that I never finished to end this post, but will go ahead and finish it after reading something online]

The tragedy of both Farrah and Michael is the way that both of their careers represent our tendency to destroy our pop icons. Farrah became a point of ridicule for the past decade - not taken seriously by the culture that once embraced her. Michael was also decimated by those who once embraced him. Now, each of these pop icons did plenty to attract the ire of our culture, but how much of their actions were driven by them and how much was the cost of lives lived in celebrity (which we created for them)? What's revealed in these lives is a tragic symbiosis of our ability to create celebrities or pop icons and then our reciprocal ability to destroy them. Our "icon" of Farrah was never who she was, and she suffered for that. Our "icon" of Michael was never who he was, and his whole life (especially in its later years) was a representation of suffering from our demolition of this icon. For this we also mourn; that is, we mourn for them and for ourselves.