Paul Thomas: The French propensity for farce reaches fever pitch

What would we do without the French? Who cares that against Italy the All Blacks played with all the composure and cohesion of 15 different species of wildlife fleeing a forest fire when we have the Bastareaud affair to distract us?

In less than a fortnight the drama surrounding a few stitches in the face of a 110kg professional athlete playing one of the world's most violent sports has gone from pathos to bathos, from national disgrace to French farce.

There are echoes of the Rainbow Warrior bombing here. Both were ludicrous over-reactions to embarrassments that could have been endured at little cost.

Both were ineptly executed and in both cases fall-guys were left to carry the can and the French underestimated the doggedness of the New Zealand police.

The difference is that the French Government was prepared to apologise for the lies told by a hungover, battered, and obviously highly strung 20-year-old, but not for an act of state terrorism that left a man dead.

And amidst the cast of thousands musing on Michael Jackson's death, it took a bona fide French intellectual to nail its true meaning and significance. Philosopher and pin-up boy ("God is dead but my hair is perfect") Bernard-Henri Levy warmed up by comparing Jacko to Beau Brummell, Charles Baudelaire, and Jean-Paul Sartre. He then pulled out the big one, likening the King of Pop to the King of the Jews, aka J. Christ.

"This way of torturing, modifying, profaning, and ultimately erasing his own face," wrote Levy, "should be read as the last stage of a long and terrible Calvary."

(For the godless among you, Calvary - Golgotha in the Hebrew - is where Christ was crucified.) Intentionally or otherwise, Levy's 750-odd clamouring words and short, sharp flexing of his intellectual muscles invite the conclusion that Jacko was as mad as a cut snake. I don't know about you, but I'd suspected that for some time.

To be fair the French aren't the only ones striving to ascribe deep meaning to Jackson's death or erect a milestone in our socio-cultural journey. Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein declared that the vast amount of attention lavished on it shows that the culture war of the past 50 years is over, and popular culture has won.

In fact, the real culture war is between faith-based social conservatism and secular social liberalism. While it might be all over bar the shouting in some countries - such as New Zealand - the main battleground is and always has been the US. Anyone who thinks that war is over obviously didn't notice that a prominent abortion doctor was assassinated in a church in Wichita a month ago.

Perversely Finkelstein reads too much into the media coverage of Jackson's death while downplaying his influence on popular music, dismissing him as an "essentially innocuous showman" whose main achievement was to sell a lot of records.

I'm not a Michael Jackson fan. I much prefer Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, to name but two. But then I'm middle-aged. I don't imagine many people under the age of 20 regularly listen to Blonde on Blonde (1966) or Born to Run (1975).

The fact that there's a generation of middle-aged people who listen to what was, in its time, pop/rock music doesn't alter the fact that, at any given time, pop is what the kids are listening to and their parents can't stand.

Anyone who doubts Jackson's influence on the music that the youth of today listen and relate to should go and watch Stage Challenge.

Whatever the merits or otherwise of his music, Jackson changed pop in three ways: by connecting with a mass white audience as no other black pop star before him had done; by elevating the importance of dance and performance; and thirdly by transforming the music video from a marketing tool to an integral component of the artist's output and persona.

Whether he changed pop music for the better or worse is beside the point. Ultimately, there is no better or worse - there's just what the young fans are listening to, dancing to, buying, imitating, and being inspired by.

The real significance of Jackson's death, which appears more sordid and pathetic by the day, is that the showbusiness dream factory continues to turn out seriously flawed products. He is just another in the long line of those unhinged by the illusion of stardom.

As Springsteen said in 1997: "Once you're inside that dream room, things about you that are important and relevant in the real world ... will just strangle and die. And so will you."