Icky Dadding

Michael Jackson (the singer, not beer hunter or motivational speaker or any other MJ) is by all reports still dead. And he is threatening to take the dad-ideal with him — well, not him exactly, any more, now its mostly reporting hagiography and hangers-on crawling out to claim some part of his relationship with fatherhood.

Two icky extremes from his songs: 1) in the words of his Billie Jean ("The kid is not my son") and, perhaps neither is the girl as stories surface that he is legal guardian and not biologically related to his children; 2) in the words from Beat It ("They'll kick you, then they beat you/Then they'll tell you it's fair") there is his daddy Joe, who knocked his little boy around to "help" teach him to sing and now wants to ride the death train toward the success of his own music label or at least into some of the money he wasn't supposed to get when he was left from the will.