Doing Alright With The Boys

You know who I feel sorry for? Gary Glitter. This must be very galling for him. “He was the same as me,” I can hear him thinking, “but they love him and they hate me.” Well, as the old saying goes, some animals are more equal than others. Gary, you didn‘t have $25,000,000 as a sweetener for accusers to drop the charges, did you? And you didn‘t have Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monnet, Chevalier de Lamarck in you corner, either. Learn from the master, Gary. That dead, French aristo is like two Johnny Cochranes on your team.
What the Chevalier de Lamarck taught us is that Darwin was wrong. Now, that’s a lesson every true Creationism-believing American wants to hear, so Jacko got the public on his side right away. He appealed to good, old fashioned common-sense, the kind that tells us iron ships sink and aeroplanes drop out of the sky.
Lamarckian evolution proposes not survival of the fittest, but improvement by design. Weaklings who become blacksmiths and build up bulging biceps at work will pass on their brawny arms to their sons. Short-necked giraffes have to stretch to reach the best leaves and they pass on the stretching to their off-spring who will have longer necks. Stands to reason doesn’t it?
So that is why a man who is born black and then undergoes years of painful plastic surgery to become white, will sire white children. And he did! Lamarck triumphant!
The only newspaper to discuss this topic in any detail, that I recall, was The Daily Star, which ran a memorable headline on the day Jackson’s first son was born:
“Jacko’s Kiddo Ain’t Blacko!”
What they lacked in English grammar, they made up for in basic biology. Even The Star knew something was strange there and anyone who has ever heard Public Enemy’s classic Fear of a Black Planet album would know why. But believers in the Chevalier’s theory had no qualms. Why shouldn’t his children inherit his new whiteness? Surely you’re not trying to say he hired surrogates to bear another man’s children and pretended he was the father just so as they’d be accepted as legally his, even though they weren’t? That’s the sickest thing I’ve ever heard! Only an evil paedophile would do that! This is Michael Jackson we’re talking about here!
Of course. No-one would ever suggest such a thing, because it would also imply that Jackson had bought his children. Certainly that he had paid for them... and I half remember the Americans had some sort of contretemps a while back about the rights and wrongs of buying human beings. Now I think of it, the question of being black or white was involved too. I wonder if they ever resolved that one.
You never thought of having your own captive clutch of kids, did you Gary, but I know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking: “If I took an overdose of drugs, just like him, would they love me again then?”
Hold that thought, Gary, hold that thought.