Smooth Criminal Mindreaders

Let me first state, I am not a huge Michael Jackson fan. I was a deprived child in the 80s, and my parents told us we couldn't afford cable. As evidence, for years, I thought Torture was a Michael Jackson video. I was watching it on a 13 inch screen, what the hell did I know?

But I'm not really here to write about how lame I was. No. I wanted to write about a peculiar article here that was posted on the occasion of Michael Jackson's death. JimGalt wrote a post titled, Death of a Child Molester. I'm not linking it here, so that link goes to a post where he ponders self-deletion.

If you choose to read his post, please enjoy this fine tune as an accompaniment:

But if you stay, let me just say, that the title really says it all. If you need more, I'm pretty sure this is him on Yahoo Answers. And I commented because I used to feel similarly, until I read this article from GQ. And he wrote back, and we had a very disturbing conversation with several other voices, all of whom had decided that Michael Jackson was a pedophile, based on the fact that a court had acquitted him of all the charges he'd faced. Now, I don't for one moment believe that our system is perfect. OJ Simpson even wrote an ill-advised book to rub our faces in how poorly it can work. But I was surprised by how bothered I was by the way they had decided that Michael Jackson had to be guilty, based on the words of children, and the fact that he was a goofy bastard.

Now, don't get me wrong. Child abuse and molestation really happens, and by no means am I encouraging parents to ignore their kids when they tell them that they've been touched inappropriately. That's not what this is about. I'm more concerned about the way we have accepted the notion that people who have been accused of something must be guilty of it, when there is no evidence. Perhaps I saw this relationship most clearly yesterday, because earlier I'd been at the march the San Jose Peace and Justice Center organized. We rallied in front of Jeppesen's headquarters to protest against their participation in the extraordinary rendition program, organized by the CIA. It astounds me that this country I love has become so fearful and paranoid that it will ignore the very reasons it was formed, Fedexing people to be tortured. When our founding fathers rebelled against England, it was in protest of the monolithic brutalizing force of that state. They rejected taxation without representation. They rejected the notion of presumed guilt. And they rejected the idea of law implemented capriciously, to punish the poor, the misunderstood or the powerless.

We inherited a country with those values, though we've often failed to uphold them. And now we are a country where the President can simply shove people in a hole, because of a case of mistaken identity. Now, we are a county where demagogues rouse us to violence because they grow impatient with the law and its workings. And finally, now we are a country where once a man has died, we remember what his accusers have said, instead of what was proven in a court of law.

I'm sure this always happened. Rumors proliferate because they are so much more colorful and satisfyingly spiced than truth. But we have means of finding what is true and what isn't these days, ways our ancestors lacked. Yet still, the messages that find their way into my inbox are unbelievably silly. I can disprove them in a heartbeat, the way I disproved the claim in the comments somewhere around here, that Timothy McVeigh only had one book, written by Al Gore.

And that's why I wanted to say something about JimGalt's post, even though it seems to have disappeared. It's a symptom of this paranoia we're infected with, that teaches us to fear each other and erodes our communities. His post is like a boil, erupting on the skin, where all the fear can bubble up. Where people slap each other on the back for indicting men who don't seem to have any genuine crimes to their name, besides maybe a freaky appearance and a penchant for dressing weirdly.

I was so fascinated trying to find out how he was so certain about this, when the police weren't, and then he closed the comments. And when I sent him that GQ article, he said I was stalking him. So that's why I posted this. If you can't even stand to read about what might exonerate this person you've decided is a monster, then I only feel it's right to demonstrate why that's so frightening to someone who values freedom and the rule of law. Yes, men can be monsters. And so can children. The Salem Witch Trials ran on the words of children. In LA in the 1980s, a DA went on a crusade against child molesters, getting statements from children who took the stand as witnesses.

And now, years later, we know those children were intimidated into lying. And that means that all those people went to jail, based on hysteria. That means the children who testified against them grew up with the horrible knowledge that you could be sent to jail on a lie. One man wouldn't even bathe his own baby girl because he was so fearful about what someone might say about it.

I can't imagine what it could be like for someone who has truly experienced the horror of being molested. I don't know what those memories would feel like, or what brings the bile up in the back of your throat. But I do know that innocent people are accused of crimes. Our system is slow and reliant on process because often, the truth is not obvious. But that slowness is a feature, not a bug. When it runs off those ponderous tracks, we get more horrible realities than those we thought we were correcting. And please, don't take my word for it:

"It screwed me up; the guilt of thinking I put my mom in prison for the worst offense possible," Donald Grafton says in an interview. He claims he was forced to falsely testify that his own mother had sex with him as a child. His mother, Margie, endured hellish treatment from other inmates. "Mom got black widow bites and they pushed her hands into machinery and busted them up because she was a child molester. It was directly on me because I lied and put her there."

When it runs off the tracks and we convict people based on patterns of behavior rather than evidence of a crime, we put innocent people in prison. That's what happened to the people in Kern County. That's what is happening to the people it Guantanamo Bay. And that's how JimGalt believes justice should work. For him, it's enough to just have the patterns of activity. Two people accused Jackson of molesting them, 10 years apart. Repetition equals guilt.

But he doesn't seem to consider it significant that the first molestation case was in all the papers, because of course Michael Jackson is a celebrity. That can't possibly have anything to do with people who came to accuse Jackson later.

And several times, he thought it was significant that La Toya had accused her brother of being a pedophile. And it doesn't matter that she recanted... that's when she's crazy apparently.

And what few in the comments seemed willing to acknowledge, was the pain of the children who are involved in this whole thing. What does it do to you, when one of your parents drugs you, and then puts you in a courtroom? What must it be like for Jackson's real children, who are getting to be old enough to google him, and who will inevitably find these things?

I can't know, and I won't guess. I only find it sad, that this is what followed Jackson to his grave, when the man left us with so much more.

Alien Ant Farm - Smooth Criminal
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