Of all the thousands of people who attended the memorial service at Staples Center, I was perhaps the least likely. Yet there I was, sandwiched between two young friends and a middle-aged stranger, each of whom spent the entire event in various stages of grief. I, on the other hand, frequently found myself rolling my eyes, careful to keep my face averted from those I loved who had come because they loved him.

Him. When I think of Michael Jackson, a montage of images rolls across my eyes, a most appropriate form of memory for our mediated age. I see him young, singing Rocking Robin, I see him in adolescence, crooning to a rat. Then the images grow increasingly bizarre, his nose smaller, his outfits shinier, his face whiter, his makeup heavier, until he becomes a kind of Norma Desmond with a dollop of Lon Cheney.

What I do not think of is a hero, a man who made me believe in myself, someone who brought the world together, a civil rights leader. And yet these were unmistakably the ways in which Jackson was eulogized, both by the very famous faces on stage and by my twenty-something friends, each of whom had a connection to this stranger that I can only describe as visceral. For example, after Brooke Shields addressed his children by name, "Prince, Paris, [pause pause[, Blanket," I turned in merriment to my companion-- only to find tears pouring out of her eyes. It was too late for me to stop my snarky comment, which came out something like "ok you have to admit the Blanket thing is kind of weird." "No," she said, "I understand it, because a blanket is something you cover yourself with that is comforting."

Ah. Got it. Michael Jackson was not weird. My friend said so. Brooke said so. Al Sharpton said so ("Wasn't nothin' strange about your daddy"). Magic Johnson said so ("he ate KFC!"). A representative from congress even showed up to say so: "In America, you are innocent until you are proven guilty!" As my eyebrows shot back onto my skull, the crowd roared its applause and leapt to a standing ovation.

I stood too but only so that I could continue to watch this fascinating spectacle, one for a man I think was very, very strange. Or was it me? I had to start to wonder. Why did all these people love this person while I felt nothing? Had I ever cared about a celebrity like this? I thought back to John Lennon, how stunned I had been by his murder, how sad I had felt that someone who also had a message of peace had been cut down in his prime. I would probably have gone to a memorial, if it had been in Los Angeles that is. If it wasn't too hard to get to. If it wasn't too big of a hassle. No, even for Lennon, I did not feel an urge to join some crowd and emote.

So while I am apparently not the type of person to become wrapped up in the life of someone I don't know (which perhaps explains my apathy to Christianity), I am aware of reasons that Jackson mattered. To my young friends, he was a symbol of love. To African-Americans, he symbolized the further erosion of racial barriers, the possibility of massive success and acceptance available to them in the United States in spite of our ugly prejudices. And I suppose to the world he represented the fantastic possibilities inherent in freedom, even the possibility of erasing your racial characteristics and building a theme park as your private residence. I guess you could say Michael Jackson was America.

Since the event I have not found any new intense connection to this stranger, no more than I have to anyone I don't know. (I did feel a pang for him when Chris Martin sang a forlorn acoustic "Billy Jean" at the recent Coldplay concert. See, I am not entirely without heart!) Yet I remain interested in him because I am a scholar and I know when someone makes this big of an impact on the world (knocking the Iran rebellion off the cnn.com headlines for days on end, continuing to be in the news every day), there's something terribly important about him-- whether I think so or not.