World of Wonder co-founder Fenton Bailey is truly a good writer with keen observational skills. (It’s what makes him a good filmmaker, as well.) But with his myriad responsibilities, he doesn’t get the chance to write much. Fortunately, we’re friends and I follow his Facebook posts. This one I had to ask if I could post to The WOW Report. Sad, astute and so true. Will we ever wake up?
“It truly is astonishing – and sickening – how the the truth about Michael Jackson has been out there for 25 years, willfully ignored until now.
Read the book Michael Jackson Was My Lover by Victor Gutierrez, based on Jordie Chandler’s own account of his relationship with Michael Jackson from the early 90’s. It is explicit, clear-eyed and mirrors so many of the details in this documentary. And yet no publisher would touch the book. So Victor self-published it. We optioned it and wrote a script. No takers.
I think the problem lies in the flaw that is the American Dream. It’s a delusion. A fantasy. We want to believe so badly that we blind ourselves to reality.
We may think now after a generation that the scales have fallen from our eyes and we see clearly now. Nope. Because for all the metoo’ing we have a sexual predator for a President. He’s also a traitor and a criminal – not a particularly smooth one. But he is a criminal. And Bad. Really bad. Yet on we go. In complete and utter denial.
Fact: Trump wouldn’t stand a chance in a society with even the slightest grasp of reality.
In years to come (if there are years to come after Trump has finished) we will look back and marvel how he cast a spell – just like Michael Jackson did! Wake up! Neither of them did anything to us. Look at them and their things… Trump Tower and Neverland. Really not so very different… shiny but slightly tacky stage sets. Dubai on a budget. But the illusion didn’t have to be all that good to work. Because while they knew the magic was phony, they also knew it would only take a few cheap props to take us in. Even before they said their abracadabras, we already believed. We are so in thrall to the delusion of the American Dream that we will deny reality, deny the evidence of our own eyes.
Recently, I interviewed David Copperfield who made the Statue of Liberty disappear in 1983. He did it to show how freedom is fragile and something not to be taken for granted. It was a great show with a great point. But the real point I think was lost in the hoopla… which is that the statue hadn’t actually disappeared. It hadn’t moved an inch. It had remained there all along. But we had moved (you can google how he did it).
IF we want to, we CAN tell the difference between the dream and reality. We just don’t want to. That willful ignorance is how dreams become real life nightmares.
So, while it’s great that after a quarter of a century we are woke to Michael Jackson, far worse things are happening all around us on a much ghastlier scale, right in front of our eyes. Yet here we are in same old state of denial. We may not have the luxury of 25 years to recognize it. –Fenton Bailey“
Leaving Neverland is a two-part documentary exploring the separate but parallel experiences of two young boys, James Safechuck, at age ten, and Wade Robson, at age seven, both of whom were befriended by Michael Jackson. Through gut-wrenching interviews with Safechuck, now 40, and Robson, now 36, as well as their mothers, wives and siblings, the film crafts a portrait of sustained abuse, exploring the complicated feelings that led both men to confront their experiences after both had a young son of his own. Directed by Dan Reed. You can see it on HBO.
Watch.
(Photos, screen grabs, HBO)
