Smooth Criminal

His Royal Weirdness, Michael Jackson, is touring again. My reaction to the news was, of course, whoop-de-frikkin-do. It's not often that Michael Jackson makes the news anymore. Unless, of course, he's paying off some kid's family so they don't talk about the buggering. Used to not be that way, though. Michael Jackson used to be news. He'd sell out concerts, sell millions of albums, perform or do backing vocals on a third of every record played on the radio, have major movie producers doing his videos ... That was a while back. Then I got to thinking. When did it all come crashing down for Michael Jackson? As I recall, it was in the early 1990s. When he was young, he was a popular Black singer. And rich. He was even able to out-bid Paul McCartney for the Beatles music catalog. Around the early 1990s, though, things went wrong. First, he seems to have turned White. And was accused of child molestation. And got hooked on drugs (mostly painkillers). And lost most of his money. Since then, he's been almost pitiful. But something was nagging at me. Then it hit me. There's a parallel with Barack Obama. Follow me on this. Obama was raised by his White mother (his Kenyan father having left) until he was 10, then by his White grandparents until he graduated high school. He went to Harvard, graduated, then moved to Chicago in the early 1990s. That's when he became Black. Around the time Michael Jackson turned White, Barack Obama turned Black. It seems the world only has room for one Black superstar at a time. I'm not saying it's right. I'm just saying. Will Jacko's tour succeed? Probably not. Unless Obama turns White again.