Via yourkitchensink:
Sorry, yesterday’s New Least Favorite Person is being mightily outstripped by today’s New Least Favorite Person (this may need to become a series). So here she is, your new new least favorite person: Hermene Hartman.
His young son, Michael, was the most talented of the Jackson crew, and he showed great promise. He had older brothers who taught him, and he had a natural talent. They were probably hard on cute, little Michael, but so it goes with younger children. Joe saw talent and developed it. As a child, Michael missed some things, like the playground and children’s games because Poppa Joe made them practice, rehearse and record. Joe had a plan. That doesn’t make him a bad guy. It makes him a disciplined father.
Sure, Michael was denied a couple of little league experiences. I hardly think that an entire adulthood of obsession with childhood can be connected to that.
Black fathers, for the most part, catch flak. The white media, on the outside looking in, only sees abandonment and neglect, among other things, but here’s a father who was in the household, who raised his children, who whipped them as he saw necessary and he’s portrayed as a criminal. He was a good father. He provided. He nurtured. He developed. He disciplined. The end result is that his plan worked. They left Gary; he gave them all musical careers; he made them all stars.
Yeah, guys. Little Michael had the talent and someone had to beat that talent out of him. Back in the ‘60’s, that’s just how talent came out of the blacks. It’s just the way things were. You whites don’t understand. Your DNA allows talent to blossom naturally. But it’s just written into black genes that all talent cells shall be activated via brutal beatings.
Jackson knew the value of discipline, practice, determination and focus — the basic steps to success. He had boys, and boys sometimes require discipline. Sometimes they even need spanking or whippings. It is the old school way of black fathers of Joe’s generation and customary in black families. Every black family has a Joe, and the kids grew up to be somebody. Joe was about the business of making his children into something. He was coming out of Gary. He was coming out of the ghetto. He was providing his children with a better life.
Hermene is soooooooo right, you guys. Man, I wish that rather than my father be 600 miles away from me, he had instead lived in the same house and beaten me on a regular basis. I wish I were black, so that my black family would have had a Joe. I wish I had been left with no choice about the course of my life. I wish that instead of being a moderately well-adjusted adult struggling to make it, I were instead an astronomically wealthy recluse, with no real friends, no person I could trust to talk about my sexuality with, no real idea of who I am outside of my body of work. I wish I, too, were attempting to cultivate an identity based on circus animals, plastic surgery, and celebrity. I wish I were surrounded by doctors who were more concerned with being connected to my fame than they were with practicing medicine responsibly. But nooooooooooo. My dad had to be all white, far away, and non-abusive and now I’m just a big nobody who’s constantly not on TMZ. I could have been Lika, as Lindsay Lohan is Lilo. I could have had a stupid celebrinickname and been dead inside.
Yes, Hermene Hartman. Let us praise this.
