The reigning emotion in the wake of the Conrad Murray guilty verdict on Monday was of hollow victory rather than catharsis. At the end of the ordeal, Michael Jackson was still dead and no amount of prison for his doomed doctor would bring him back. Surprisingly, the spectacle of Murray’s public humiliation didn’t seem to interest the normally voracious consumers of celebrity trash. The story had little traction in the tabloids, drove even less TMZ traffic and the live feed of the six-week trial was neither the subject of water cooler debate nor late night comics across the nation. Herman Cain’s sexual harrassment rumors nabbed more time on cable news than the courtroom account of how Conrad Murray injected the King of Pop with a fatal dose of hospital-grade sedative, and then lied about it to save himself. The Casey Anthony trial riveted Nancy Grace. Not Conrad Murray. Where was the outrage? Maybe we were just tired of it. Rather than peel back the curtain on a celebrity’s private life, the Conrad Murray trial showed us a sordid picture of Michael Jackson that we no longer wanted to see. With his death at age 50, we had finally deified the King of Pop. His sudden demise led to an outpouring of global emotion. Those of us who had casually mocked him for years or reviled him for suspected child abuse, suddenly let all that fall away. Instead we remembered the Michael Jackson we loved – his childlike innocence, his talent, and the outright joy his music brought to millions across the world.
