All the Beloved Michael Jackson Impersonators

gentle, kind, and pointlessly ruined by mean nazis

Hey, look, it’s the zeitgeist.

No one knows what to do. About this:

Court records show the man who pushed Whitcomb currently faces charges ranging from harassment and menacing to assault and illegal possession of a knife. He has also been accused of groping and assaulting women on the north side of the neighborhood and is on the state’s sex offender registry for forcible touching and sexual abuse convictions in 2017 and 2021.

He hurts people a lot, and he’s a registered sex offender, and he sometimes carries a knife, and he walks up to strangers on the street and just hurts them for no reason, and he especially likes to hurt women quite a lot, especially in ways that seem pretty consistently sexual. It’s….complicated. Hard to know what to do!

Note that the story takes care to avoid identifying the person the story is about, because the reporter is concerned that identifying the serial aggressor will make it possible for someone to hurt him: “Gothamist has chosen to withhold the man’s name because of his mental illness and because he is at risk of additional attacks by people who want to take matters into their own hands.” And hurting people is wrong. To prevent attacks, see, you don’t tell people the name of a person who keeps…attacking.

The story warns that the constant aggression of [unnamed person] is a warning about “the systemic failures that allow people to fall through the cracks,” because what a man hurting people over and over again shows us is that the man who’s being forced to hurt all those people by society’s deep cruelty isn’t getting enough services. Greenpoint, an increasingly expensive neighborhood in Brooklyn, is represented by “some of the city's most progressive lawmakers,” but they’re still struggling with these hard questions. America in 2023, ladies and gentlemen.

But finally, as a test of the reporter’s good faith, we get a broader description that contextualizes the problem. There are a lot of people in New York City who are being forced to hurt other people because they aren’t being given enough services, and here comes a famous example: “Earlier this year, Daniel Penny fatally choked Jordan Neely, a beloved Michael Jackson impersonator who Penny said was ‘going crazy’ and acting aggressively toward fellow subway riders.”

That’s it — that’s the whole description. Who was Jordan Neely? He was a man who impersonated Michael Jackson, and he was loved a whole lot, but then for some unaccountable reason Daniel Penny claimed the beloved man was going crazy, so he just suddenly killed the poor man. It’s strange that this Penny person would say something like that, right?

Now, in a city of eight million people, Jordan Neely was on a list, kept by the city government, of the fifty homeless people whose behavior is most persistently troubling. His case was regularly monitored by the “Coordinated Behavioral Health Task Force,” which “consists of workers from across city government, including the departments of Health, Homeless Services and Hospitals, along with representatives of the nonprofits that the city contracts with to try to connect homeless people to shelter and services, a process known as outreach.” At the time when the mean Daniel Penny suddenly killed him for no reason, Neely had an active arrest warrant. And other passengers in the subway car said that — well, let’s turn to the headline in the New York Times: “Witnesses in Subway Chokehold Case Describe Fears of Death and Violence.” From that story, describing grand jury testimony:

One passenger believed he was going to die as Jordan Neely approached him. Another heard Mr. Neely say, “I want to go to prison,” and she shielded herself with her son’s stroller as Mr. Neely made “half-lunge movements” at others. A third heard him say, “Someone is going to die today.”

….Some of the quotes included in the filing speak to the tense atmosphere on the car that day. One witness, a daily passenger, told the jurors, “I have encountered many things, but nothing that put fear into me like that.”

So, you see, Daniel Penny fatally choked a beloved entertainer. Very mean!

The need to revise obvious reality, to edit the earth and its human interactions to match a set of tedious ideological priors, appears everywhere and all the time. If you’re on social media, you’ve seen a hundred videos in the last week or so of people — always on university campuses or in big cities, as far as I can tell — ripping down posters that show the identity of Israelis kidnapped by Hamas.

Confronted, the ripper-downers don’t generally claim that the kidnapped people depicted by the posters aren’t kidnapped people. They don’t tend to claim that no kidnappings occurred, or that Hamas holds no hostages. They just don’t want that particular reality depicted, because noticing it is being complicit in genocide or aiding in Israeli propaganda. It’s unacceptable reality. (But see also the explanation from Piers Corbyn that Hamas didn’t really kill anyone on October 7, because the Jews just made it all up. Stop being mean, mean Jews!)

Hamas, we are forced to conclude, is an organization of beloved entertainers.

We have a long list of manageable problems, but we talk ourselves into not seeing them. “No one knows what to do.” How do we fight inflation right after the federal government rush-dumped an extra $7 trillion of free money into the economy? How do we stop Hamas from using a system of tunnels and a giant cache of rockets to attack Israel? How do we stop a violent lunatic from constantly attacking women on the street?

Can’t say. Too hard! Very complicated. Could we…put…water? On the burning, um, building thing? I don’t know, is it even fair to say that it’s actually burning? Let’s agonize about this. But, I, uh. It still…seems…to have the…apparent…flames?

“Beloved local source of warmth drowned by aggressors in big red truck.”