One of the fundamental aspects of our time is the fact that we are so often either disappointed or shocked by the behavior of people in high-profile positions. Michael Jackson has been such a person for a long time.

First it was explained, perhaps most insightfully, that he was a victim of show business in that he had been turned into a narcissistic eccentric by the isolation that had included being locked as a kid in dressing rooms full of mirrors when his handlers didn’t want him to wander off between shows at the Apollo Theatre.

Now he has crossed another of the lines that have made him seem such an odd one. When Jackson dangled his baby from a balcony Tuesday, he seemed to have gone the distance. His love of monster films, such as his very own “Thriller,” had moved out of the video world and brought gasps from those so intrigued by his every gesture.

However shocking the baby dangling might have been, I’m sure that those parents with whom Jackson settled out of court to squash child molestation charges would say – if they aren’t too busy enjoying their new lives made possible by the millions – that had their boys merely been frightened by Jackson, they would be psychologically better off.

So what does this add up to with a man who recently enlisted Al Sharpton, had a press conference at the Apollo and presented himself as the embodiment of black musicians who had been exploited by the white men in charge of the record business?

Perhaps it is less about Jackson than about the entertainment business. Our kids are not only dangled out of windows mentally and emotionally, but dropped into cesspools. In that muck, anarchy, vulgarity, the crudest materialism, misogyny and brutal ruthlessness are celebrated as virtues because the pop industry has been irresponsibly hustling ever greater rage as a youth drug for decades.

But our young are telling us something else right now. They are providing the most money for the kind of entertainment that reaches back to the old days of myth and legend. There is something very instructive about the success of the “Harry Potter” series and what will surely be the success of the ongoing “Lord of the Ring” series. Both have some blood and guts, but they also are aligned with the fairy tale, which celebrates heroic, not monstrous, behavior.

In both series, there is also an essential cooperation between adults and the young, not the tired alienation that drives our least imaginative popular art in which only the young understand one another and the old have nothing to teach them.

As Michael Jackson turns into a more literal monster before our very eyes, he does not bolster his image the way a bad guy does in the phony world of wrestling, but he does show us that fairy tales in which the worst of the weird become ever worse are too close to the truth to make us comfortable.

– Stanley Crouch is a columnist for the New York Daily News. His e-mail address is scrouchedit@nydailynews.com.