Meeting Michael Jackson in the mid-1980s was one of the creepier experiences of my life.
There was something about his overall behavior that weirded me out. He seemed, even then, to be a person who was trying with all of his being to step outside of reality and leave it behind.
Emmanuel Lewis, the child star of the hit TV series “Webster,” was with Jackson that evening.
I remember thinking as I left the Garden that Jackson had treated Lewis almost as a pet.
In many ways we descended as a society into a fantasyland, trying to leave the limits and consequences and obligations of the real world behind. Politicians stopped talking about the poor. We built up staggering amounts of debt and called it an economic boom. We shipped jobs overseas by the millions without ever thinking seriously about how to replace them. We let New Orleans drown.
clipped from: www.nytimes.com