Jacko-Wacker

I avoid the O.J. trial like the plague. Mind you, by some weird twist of fate, I managed to miss the initial incident of the O.J. trial completely too, so I got off to a good start.
I had been on tour with a comedy troupe - The Juanabees - and the morning of the infamous slow-speed white-bronco chase, The Juanabees left Montreal for a four day drive to Minneapolis which has since become infamous in it's own right in certain circles. (Perhaps I'll illuminate that some day.) On our way down the Death-Star Trench known as the de Carie expressway, our radio lost it's signal just as the first glimmer of news about something involving O.J. Simpson was aired. It was taken over by static. We turned off the radio and as happened so often when we were on tour, we dissappeared into a two-week news-less vacuum. (Three years earlier it took me ten days to find out that the Soviet Union had politically disintegrated. A fact all the more remarkable by right of us being on tour with a group of Russians!)
The similarity in the Blake trial has left me cold... and it seems that many people are reacting similarly.

But then there's Michael Jackson...

I can't stop watching. I'm reading everything I can get my hands on about it.

My sister must have played two copies of 'Thriller' into the ground when we were kids. Maybe even three. My University room mate listened to some of the most egregious music I can think of - including a (ahem) healthy dose of M.J. (Hall and Oates and anything by Prince - not just his scattered brilliant stuff - we're also on his aural menu.) The man really had no sense of the obligations university students have to listen to cutting edge music. (Admitting that what I listened to in my first years of university was within a few years mocked by the phrase "Alternative to what?") But I digress...

I loathed Michael Jackson. And the incessant subjection to him that I endured only made it worse.

I managed to avoid Michael Jackson for years - excepting a brief window where I played in a band that did a kick-ass country and western version of 'Beat It' - we argued that it was about a gun-fight. And while I had my back turned, Michael just got weirder and weirder. I'm sure you've noticed. I barely even raised my head for the first round of alleged pedophillia.

But then the Bashir interview/documentary came out. I don't know if it was by accident, or by design, but it got recorded in my household. My then fiancee, if she recorded it, practically forgot about it - but once I started watching, I never stopped.
I guess it's part schadenfreude. But I think part of it is revenge. I feel like this is my retribution towards M.J. for every time I had to listen to P.Y.T. or Black/White. It's me getting to indulge my Self-Righteousness Junkie tendencies and be right about Jacko all along.
It's akin to me wishing that I could have been a fly on the wall when all the head-banger dick-heads from high-school found out that Rob Halford was gay. What a laugh that would have been! What were they thinking? "London Leather Boys?" It was always there. Tee hee.

I guess it sounds like I've already made up my mind. Well, I guess I have. I do have an extremely strong suspicion. It looks bad. (No pun intended.) Even if he is innocent, he needs to have someone sit him down and explain to him that it doesn't matter what he believes is sweet and good; that it doesn't matter how much money he has and how many 'yes-men' he has in his court, majority of us on this planet... hell, you don't even have to go that far... the majority of us on this continent - even just the U.S. - DO NOT THINK IT'S SWEET. And the second he had even ONE suggestion that something innappropriate was happening, the only right thing to do was to from that moment on ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS make certain that any children in his presence were ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS accompanied by an adult who was neither Jackson nor under his employ.

He has said "people don't understand." No, Michael. The score is YOU don't understand. Even if you are innocent, it looks bad. Even if every staunch Jackson fan-come-supporter could be counted in favour of molesting children he'd still be out numbered - probably millions to one. It's absurd to suggest that the majority is wrong - especially in the light of what now is daily becoming more and more overwhelming evidence.

This has been a long pre-amble for where I was heading...

I think I'll call this a post, and make my original thought a separate one.

Ta.