As previously mentioned on a recent Bill Simmons podcast, Chuck Klosterman is spending the semester in Germany, teaching a class on American popular culture, a venture that I'm sure will result in a great book in a year or two.
Anyway, he writes his Esquire column about his students' impressions of American life. In giving them an essay question on "Who do you consider the most interesting twentieth-century American?", Chuck discovered this:
Michael Jackson had more essays written about him than anyone else, which didn't shock me. What did surprise me was how sympathetically he is viewed: The general consensus seems to be that Jackson is an eccentric, philanthropic genius whose nation has turned against him, possibly due to racist motives. However, they do assume he's a child molester. Europeans are open-minded in unorthodox ways.Americans, strangely enough, feel the same way about R. Kelly. Posted by Stephen Silver at July 2, 2008 08:54 PM