Lost Icons, and Unfading Icons

The AP ran an article this morning on the events that added up to a "bad day" for Generation Xers, the generation to which I apparently belong by virtue of my birth year. It was a bad day because we Xers lost two cultural icons (or three, if you want to count Ed McMahon, whose passing quickly became passe in the wake of the news about Farrah and Michael).

I guess I have my parents to thank for my failure to feel like the world of my youth has begun to crumble before my very eyes, because while they are cultural icons for many of my peers, they amounted to curiosities to me, since my growing up didn't include much exposure to them. Sure, I saw Captain Eo at least a dozen times at Disneyland, and I remember the commercials for Charlie's Angels and the avian-inspired hair made popular by the show's blonde vixen, but the people behind these images remained rather mysterious to me as I never became immersed in their culture.

My appreciation for Michael Jackson's artistry has come only recently, and even then it was a sidebar to the weird news that broke about him, his changing face, and his Neverland scandals. He, love him or hate him, really was the "King of Pop", and he altered the face of pop culture as surely as he rearranged his own features.

I was shocked to read that he died, and saddened in some way that is hard to explain. Farrah's death is similarly sobering. I think it is because I recognize that underneath the hairspray, lights and image, here were two real people who had struggled -- with life publicly in Jackson's case and with death publicly in Fawcett's -- and lost the ultimate battle.

Daniel and I sat on the couch last night watching my belly bounce up and down as a little person stretched his limbs in his rather tight confines. I rubbed the surface of my tummy and remarked to him, "You, baby Ian, will be born into a world without Michael Jackson... a world in which he is only a memory." Daniel added, "and a well-preserved plasticine corpse."

In the end, well-preserved or not, a corpse is all we leave here... outside of our legacies, our offspring and the seeds of the eternal we have planted in other lives, and I derive strength from that thought.

You see, my icons did not die yesterday. They still hang on the walls of our home and church, illumined by candles, linking this fallen world to the imperishable. Culture will pass, and its icons will fade. The light of Christ and the beauty of a life well-lived will not. I hope to be defined by that fact. I may be a part of Gen. X by birth, but I hope to number in the generations of the faithful by adoption. I hope, as well, that these recently departed souls find in death some of the peace that may have evaded them in life.

Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, And Your dominion endures throughout all generations.