The objectification of a childhood.
I don't know him now, and I didn't know him then. Or did I? Looking back on it now, I have an image in my mind of his innocence spilling out all over the stage, spilling out through the TV screen into our living rooms, all over America. Before he had a sense of an identity. There he was, just 5, and black, and given this grandiose stage on which to expand, with screaming fans all around. "What is this fantasy world into which I have landed?" "Is this all about me?" "How good it feels to be loved by ALL-THESE-PEOPLE!"

An egg which has no shell does not mature into a bird. A chrysalis cut open a bit prematurely, a slip of the knife: it will be a freak of nature if it survives. Childhood is Metamorphosis.

I am not excusing or forgiving -- I assume he is "innocent", per the jury. I don't know what he has or hasn't done. Wasn't he dismantled in public, though, when he was 5? BEFORE THERE WAS A HIM. What are the lessons a 5 year old is learning? A sense of self. Identity. Limits.

A 5 year old mind whose limits were extended out into our living rooms. Off stage, beaten by his father. On stage, was he larger than 5? How could he contract, into a shape he couldn't define? How could he squeeze back into the special box of being a black man in America (which Arthur Ashe once said was the hardest thing he ever faced in his life, not dying of AIDS)?

I haven't followed the case. I haven't followed his career. So to me, it is easy to remember him as the smallest member of a singing band. I do believe in adult responsibility and in free will, but it is impossible to judge what kind of worse man or what kind of better man he might have been, if he made different choices. The media circus has been all about playing up a sense of outrage, and ironically blind to the topic of child abuse at the hands of pop culture. His Peter Pan references seem to be his attempt to mythologize the only life he has lived.

Shapes in this Salvador Dali world get twisted and warped by the background. We on the outside don't know what it is to be on the inside of that bizarre world. Moreover, we don't care at all about the inside. He is still only an object, mocked as a freak. "Hey look! That butterfly never sewed its severed legs back together, never mended its wings!"

How society laughs at and mocks its broken people.