Washington ? How weird is Michael Jackson? Well, if you were a 45-year-old man who had just been arrested on charges of child molestation, and you knew that your mug shot would be published around the world, would you lather yourself in lipstick and mascara and conceal one eye — come-hither style — with a wavy lock of hair?

Of course not. So we’re agreed: Michael Jackson is decidedly peculiar and, to some degree, divorced from reality. He’s a talented dancer-singer-entertainer (if you have a taste for his particular style); and while his career in his native land is in the doldrums, he enjoys a fervent international following.

But he lives on a not-so-secluded estate where his passion for the lifestyle of a 5-year-old boy is indulged with resources unavailable to most children. His voice is ethereal, his clothes are comically theatrical, his face is a tribute to the plastic surgeon’s art. As fodder for discussion, in print and on television, Michael Jackson is irresistible.

Permit me to express my official position: I have no idea whether, as alleged, the King of Pop molested a minor. I have no inside information about Neverland Ranch, no particular affection or animus toward Michael Jackson, and I patiently await the disposition of the charges. But in the midst of all the repetitious saturation coverage — which, I assume, will only intensify — some troublesome thoughts have risen to the surface.

The first is that Jackson’s guilt appears to be a foregone conclusion. Since no one in a position to know anything is speaking publicly, speculation has largely replaced certainty in the media.

My favorite illustration of this was the repeated broadcast of videotapes of Michael Jackson’s “secret rooms,” a warren of oversized closets adjacent to his bedroom. They were filled with a multitude of toys, dolls and games, more than any child or adult could require. Their purpose, it was said, could only be seduction: It was noted, ominously, that the only path to this juvenile paradise was through Jackson’s bedroom, and in one corner of a room was a “shrine” to the actor Macaulay Culkin.

I agree that the notion of a man in middle age surrounding himself with childish playthings is odd. And Macaulay Culkin seems an unconventional choice for veneration. But the fact that Jackson has three young children of his own goes unmentioned, and since when is eccentricity against the law? The same cable-TV reporters who recoil from Jackson’s playthings are delighted by model-railroad buffs, or men who collect Barbie dolls.

Moreover, Jackson’s guilt seems exclusively his own. I am not so sure. If, as reported, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of children have been invited to “sleepovers” in Jackson’s Neverland bedroom over the years, where did they come from? Allegations of pedophilia have surrounded Michael Jackson since he paid one accuser $20 million a decade ago, presumably to avoid criminal charges. It is possible, of course, that such allegations are false, and that Jackson’s craving for juvenile companionship is chaste, as he says. But what parent in his right mind would use a child as bait to test the validity of Jackson’s claim?

Either the mothers and fathers involved are criminally negligent, or are tucking their children under Michael Jackson’s covers with visions of $20 million dancing in their head.

Which leaves us, in the end, pondering the cost of celebrity culture. If Michael Jackson were the unmarried accountant next door, and not the King of Pop, slumber-party invitations to the neighborhood children would be received with horror. That is the interesting contradiction here: Jackson’s fame gives his case its embarrassing notoriety, but it also allowed him for years on end to preside — unmolested, as it were — over rituals and practices no novelist would invent.

It also erected an impenetrable wall between subject and reality. It is difficult to look at a photograph of Jackson a quarter-century ago, compare it with the Santa Barbara police mug shot, and avoid the impression of a downward spiral into something like madness. Quite apart from the oddball costumes, the masks and gloves, the dangling of his infant from the balcony in Berlin, or the marriage of convenience to Elvis’ daughter, it is Jackson’s face that startles and repels, the skeletal cheeks and ghostly eyes, especially the surgically mutilated nose.

Fame has protected Jackson against rebuke — allowed him to indulge his painful obsessions, enabled him to fend off judgment and advice, indulged his increasingly destructive habits. Now, it sweeps away any semblance of privacy, and invites us all to buy a ticket for the circus.

Philip Terzian is the associate editor of the Providence Journal.