Jacko’s Fans: A Chorus of Holy Fools?

The weirdest sideshow at Michael Jackson’s celebrity-trial circus is the dance of the fans. Who are these people who leave homes and jobs to wave aloft banalities (“You Are a Legend and Legends Are Indestructible,” read one poster) and dash after the star like hungry pigeons? Anyone who fancies himself a serious student of what Preston Sturges called this country’s “cockeyed caravan” should know the question has a precedent. It is basically the same question that classical scholars ask about the chorus in Greek tragedy.

About 50 Jackson fans gather daily outside the courthouse in Santa Maria, screaming and running about whenever Jackson comes or goes. Greek choruses also had between 12 and 50 members, who sang and danced and ran around the stage, and had a remarkably large number of lines. But what purpose did they serve?

Read the greatest of Greek tragedies, “Oedipus Rex,” and you’ll see that a chorus’ job was to fail to see what is about to happen and to make credulous, cliche-clogged speeches about it. No sooner has the blind seer Tiresias been thrown out of court for suggesting that the great King Oedipus might have had something to do with the murder of his predecessor than the chorus rushes volubly to Oedipus’ defense: “Shall I believe my great lord criminal / At a raging word that a blind old man let fall? ... These evil words are lies.”

Some classicists claim the chorus represented the audience. If it was dimwitted, that’s because audiences were, or so the playwrights thought. But that can’t be right. Not even a snobbish Athenian author would forget that his audiences grew up on Greek myths and didn’t need to be walked through their plot twists.

Jackson’s fans bring to mind another possibility: The chorus existed to play the thankless but dramatically satisfying role of holy fools.

“To be a fan is to see his goodness,” British beautician Jacqui Scott said of Jackson to journalist Michael J. Gross; she had flown halfway across the world to join the chorus of fans in Santa Maria. “He’s not Jesus Christ or anything,” another fan said. “But he is an angel.” Gross, in the London Telegraph, explains that Jackson’s fans “see themselves as intermediaries to a holy innocent, representing what they perceive to be his values -- generosity, humility and love -- in a world where goodness is persecuted.” According to Seth Stevenson, who is covering the trial for Slate, whenever Jackson waves to fans who have been admitted into the courtroom, they glow for a quarter of an hour, “like there’s a light from within.”

There is something in all of us that wants to believe in the good against the odds. This, in fact, is how many people define faith. The Russia Orthodox Church even recognizes a category of spiritual activity known as holy folly, or foolishness for Christ, in which ascetics either feign madness or go mad in order to achieve the simplicity of the true believer. Neither Jackson fans nor Greek choruses need to feign madness to seem simple, but both elevate the proceedings around them through the purity of their beliefs. They serve to remind viewers of what’s at stake, for it really is a tragedy to break a fool’s heart.