As promised here's Chrisite Blatchford's comments on Michael's blackness - he seemed to want to escape rather then celebrate it and have it accepted:
That crowds were lining up around the star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the boyhood home in Indiana and the rented estate in Los Angeles for “Michael,” as everyone is now calling him, was entirely predictable. The public mourning promises to be protracted and ridiculous, with people who had never met him or even seen him in concert all but bursting into flames with grief.
Oddly, for a change the usual grotesque circus will actually suit the deceased: While he was a wonderful talent, Mr. Jackson was a seriously troubled guy.
He began life as a beautiful black man who seemed to grow whiter every year, and while he always attributed this to disease, his plastic surgery choices seemed nonetheless to reflect a preference for Caucasian features. He was, if never convicted as a pedophile (one set of allegations involving a 13-year-old boy were settled out of court for $23-million, while he was acquitted of later molestation charges), certainly a curious boy-lover, admitting that he slept with youngsters at his Neverland Ranch and kissed them goodnight but insisting there was nothing sexual about it, only sweetness. That omnipresent face mask, the barely audible soft voice, the completely bizarre dangling of his youngest child over a balcony: The man was a train wreck.
That crowds were lining up around the star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the boyhood home in Indiana and the rented estate in Los Angeles for “Michael,” as everyone is now calling him, was entirely predictable. The public mourning promises to be protracted and ridiculous, with people who had never met him or even seen him in concert all but bursting into flames with grief.
Oddly, for a change the usual grotesque circus will actually suit the deceased: While he was a wonderful talent, Mr. Jackson was a seriously troubled guy.
He began life as a beautiful black man who seemed to grow whiter every year, and while he always attributed this to disease, his plastic surgery choices seemed nonetheless to reflect a preference for Caucasian features. He was, if never convicted as a pedophile (one set of allegations involving a 13-year-old boy were settled out of court for $23-million, while he was acquitted of later molestation charges), certainly a curious boy-lover, admitting that he slept with youngsters at his Neverland Ranch and kissed them goodnight but insisting there was nothing sexual about it, only sweetness. That omnipresent face mask, the barely audible soft voice, the completely bizarre dangling of his youngest child over a balcony: The man was a train wreck.
