The question is not, Who is Michael Jackson? The question is, Who are we?

The surprising thing about the 20-month extravaganza that ended last week with the pop star’s acquittal is how little it tells us about Michael Jackson. The discomforting thing is how much our fascination with this spectacle tells us about ourselves — our mindset, our media, our priorities. Mr. Jackson is now free to pick up the pieces, but we’re left grappling with questions as old as America: Who are these Americans, and what is it that most interests them?

Let’s start by laying to rest the notion that this mega-story, into which the media invested millions of dollars and viewers poured billions of hours, was an issue of deep importance. It wasn’t. If the issue is pedophilia and predatory sexuality in the twenty-first century, the important legal cases will focus on the Catholic church, not on a California celebrity whose quirky lifestyle provides little useful judicial precedent.

If the issue is Mr. Jackson’s identity, that’s hardly been clarified. Despite months of scrutiny, he remains an enigmatic curiosity who admits to living in a fantasy world of his own making.

If the issue is the role of celebrity in an age of instant communication, there’s little here to study. The fairest and best legal system treats everyone as equal before the law, overlooking celebrity rather than paying attention to it — a point enforced by Judge Rodney Melville when he banned cameras from the courtroom.

And if the issue is the media itself, remember the adage that a citizenry gets the media it deserves. Editors can count on five things to make grabber headlines: violence, sex, wealth, fame, and power. The O. J. Simpson story contained all five. The Michael Jackson story lacks only violence to be in that category. Blaming the editors, however, is too glib. They’re essentially responding to our tastes, desires, and interests. Unless we change, why should the media change?

We’re left, then, with some sobering questions. When the editors called, why did we answer? Is it that we imagined the story to be important? That’s a stretch. It’s hard to argue that pop music, or Hollywood, or the United States, or the world would be substantially changed by this trial.

So was it that we knew the story to be insubstantial, but nevertheless expended one of our most valuable assets — our attention — to follow its twists and turns? That, too, seems a poor explanation: Given the much-discussed pressure of time and shortness of attention spans, it seems odd that we should knowingly squander such a resource.

Then was it that we were ignorant of the issues truly deserving attention in the world today — terrorism, nuclear proliferation, AIDS, environmental degradation, global economic disparities, and of course the war in Iraq? There may be some who, in the words of the old Simon and Garfunkel song, “get all the news [they] need from the weather report” — or from the supermarket tabloids. But a twenty-first-century American would have to live in a fantasy world paralleling Michael Jackson’s to be unaware that these issues, if unaddressed, could have dire consequences.

But maybe that very direness holds the clue to our fascination. Is it that, at bottom, this story lets us escape from the hairier issues? Is it somehow comforting to turn on the news and find nothing more dangerous than Michael Jackson? The United States, after all, created the most powerful global fantasy-maker in the world when it invented Hollywood. And Americans have called upon it during moments of national crisis to provide a kind of Neverland alternative to the grim reality of the news. So are we peculiarly prone to these flights of fantasy — just when we should be focusing on the serious issues at hand? Is this desire to seek refuge in escapism a key facet of the U.S. mind?

And does that, finally, explain the importance of Michael Jackson — more as a symbol than a personality? If his trial has a lesson, it is to remind us that we’re all at risk of building Neverlands of the mind and escaping into them when the ambiguities become overbearing. It reminds us of the need to find within ourselves the moral resources to address confusion, master complexity, and come through it into clarity. It reminds us that we earn our way to simplicity, not through avoidance but through engagement. Of such is real morality built.

©2005 Institute for Global Ethics