Watching Michael Jackson's arrest live on television last Thursday made me feel unexpectedly nauseous -well, extra nauseous, given that the arrest of a pop star was deemed significant enough to interrupt the scenes of carnage in Istanbul.

The nausea continued well into the next day, when I read the tabloids' not ungleeful reporting of the event which can be loosely paraphrased as "gotcha, paedo". Which would all be just about bearable (in a cruel, inhumane, lovably tabloid kind of way) were it not for the fact that Jackson is clearly and unmistakably not a well man.

Feeling delight at his arrest feels like laughing at the mad polar bears in the zoo -the ones that rock on all fours, insane with misery and the longing to be elsewhere -or with having a good chortle at anyone physically deformed or seriously mentally confused. We're in Elephant Man or indeed Thompson and Venables territory, where compassion does a runner and jostling, baying, howling crowds queue up to point and jeer, themselves rendered insane by that odd and powerful mixture of sanctimony and blood lust.

(Of course, all those hatchet-faced women, their features contorted with hatred, who bang on police vans outside courts and howl for "justice" on housing estates containing alleged paeds are absolutely sweet to their own children, who all grow up to be really emotionally well-adjusted and happy, not to mention unbruised.

Which is just as well, given that there is more than one way to abuse a child.) Jackson is really sick - not necessarily name-and-shame paedo sick -but ill, suffering, tormented. Which, of course, doesn't make him stupid, or above the law, or give him carte blanche to molest children and doesn't mean that he ought to escape punishment if he is guilty (even though his whole life seems to me like a spiralling series of punishments). But having watched him over the years, there's a good case to be made for him suffering from arrested development at best and having a mental age, at least emotionally, of about 13.

Jackson is a walking mess of misery and confusion, a would-be messiah who, it may well turn out, has more in common with dark forces than good. An abused child himself, he is as disturbed as he is disturbing. Worst and most obviously of all, he wasn't born that way.

Jackson is an extreme example of what fame does, particularly when it is inflicted on very young children (he was five when the Jackson Five formed). He stopped being a person and became a spectacle years ago and people who pretended, or still pretend, to be horrified by this are being disingenuous.

We used to love him for being "childlike": we thought he was cute and wholesome and loved animals, before we decided he was creepy and weird and unwholesome for exactly the same reasons. We liked the initial erosion of his African-American features -the first couple of nose jobs, the relaxed hair, the cafe-au-lait complexion -because they made him prettier and, frankly, less black (look around you: straight hair and nose jobs sell more records, especially if you are not Caucasian to start with).

Then, of course, when his face started collapsing, we were all suddenly horrified -as though there were nothing horrific or disturbing enough in the idea of a grown man so hating his own face that he was willing to have it bleached and smashed and chipped away at in the first place.

From finding him admirably, granny-pleasingly "childlike" -"Peter Pan", we used to say approvingly, as though this were the most natural thing for an adult man to aspire to in the world -we then turned Jackson into a child's plaything, there to be picked up and examined, prodded, probed, his melting facial features reproduced in huge blow-ups for our amusement.

What a freak, we chorus on cue. What a weirdo. And guess what? That's exactly what he became -and how.

Jackson, on a pitifully transparent mission to be loved, always knew how to please a crowd.

In the midst of the forthcoming hysteria, we will conveniently forget that this isn't entirely about Michael Jackson and his ranch and his llamas and his peculiar notions of fun, but about a child, or possibly children, making very serious allegations.

There is, so far, no real concern about the cancer-afflicted 12-year-old (just to make the whole thing extra grotesque) at the centre of last Thursday's arrest: like Jordy Chandler before him, he stands every chance of becoming yet another bit-part player in the unfolding tragedy that is the Michael Jackson Show.

Really, the whole thing is a Grimm fairy tale, complete with castle, sleeping prince, uses of enchantment -and a baying mob pulling the prince out of his castle at the end for a metaphorical dismemberment. It is supremely uncomfortable to watch and it's going to get worse.

Stories such as Jackson's never have happy endings -not for the protagonist and not for the onlookers, who are (or ought to be) left feeling as sickened with themselves as they are with the person they sought to bring down.

What makes this particular story so hard to take is that you can't help feeling that at some level there are two children involved in these molestation accusations: the child in question and his childlike, maladjusted alleged abuser.

There will be no winners -unless you take into account Jackson's demented desire to be seen as a Christ figure. On that front at least, we may yet grant him his wish: the crucifixion begins any day now.