Silly Little Country

I'm Confused Too

On Tuesday I drove up to Ottawa to visit my mother; that afternoon in her building I was chatting with one of the tenants, in her eighties, who commented, "The memorial was quite nice; it was tasteful and moving", or the like. I was momentarily puzzled, and then realized that she meant the Michael Jackson memorial. So yes, part of my confusion was my ageism; I simply assumed someone twenty years older than I am would be as indifferent to the event as I am!
But my confusion actually runs deeper than indifference; David Rothkopf has a nice post on a number of confusing world events all going on at once and the memorial is one of them.

• The Michael Jackson memorial service will cost the City of Los Angeles $4 million. That's their official estimate. I would bet you my copy of the "Thriller" album that the costs are considerably higher and they can't bear to admit it. Why? Well, because California is broke, right? So here we have a government that is strapped for cash forking out for the public funeral of a multi-millionaire...an event that is likely to sell hundreds of thousands of records the profits of which go straight to Jackson's family.
  
• On top of this, isn't this the same local government that spent hundreds of thousands trying to prosecute today's hero for child molestation? Whose case was made more difficult because today's hero paid millions to buy the silence of children with whom he had some sort of interaction...one that was worth millions to keep covered up?
  
• Also baffling: in a bizarre twist on a bizarre case, in order to defray the costs of memorial, the NAACP is, according to MSNBC, trying to raise funds from their members and supporters. Am I getting this right? The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is pulling out the stops to raise money for an individual who actually spent a small fortune testing the boundaries of medical science in order to actually cease being a person of color?
  

I suspect Rothkopf, like me, has missed something.
The post is worth reading for other puzzling events of the day.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 8:10 PM