The Apotheosis of Michael Jackson

Note: The following was written a few weeks ago but due to vacations hasn't been posted until now.

The King is Dead !

So read the banner headline of the Drudge Report on June 26. How fitting this comes so soon after the summer solstice.

Long Live the King!

The phrase was first employed when Charles VII inherited the crown from Charles VI in 1422 and embodies the principle of le mort saisit le vif-death takes the living-which signifies the instant transfer of sovereignty upon the death of a reigning monarch.

Ebony and Ivory, living together in perfect harmony. This would be more than the piano keyboard as metaphor for racial harmony, but the code for the tessellated chessboard of the magickal universe. Jachin and Boaz, Tonto (fool) and the Lone Ranger (dipshit).

Michael was Whacko Jacko in life, but in death becomes the celebrated icon who burst through racial barriers and made it possible for black entertainers to become bona fide superstars. But then again he is white, no? Ebony and Ivory indeed. Strange to see him celebrated as a black icon when he strove in life to remove all traces of his African heritage.

And the Mormons used to tell the Indians that if they sold their land to the church and became Mormons, they would become white....er, pure.

In July 1831 after the arrival of Joseph Smith, Jr., and others in Jackson County, Missouri, plans were made to preach to the Native Americans. Smith received a directive on intermarriage with the Indians....

He was an androgynous creature, not quite male or female, not quite adult or child. Not quite black or white. Like some mythical beast representing the reconciliation of opposites: Long Live the King! The King is Dead. The circle of life goes on. The sun dies and is reborn.

He was the King of Pop, which spelled backwards still makes him the King of Pop. And he took himself for a king. Even named his sons Prince Michael I and Prince Michael II. And his daughter is Paris. Which isn’t Versailles but close enough. Did someone say Sun King? Here’s looking at the man in the hall of mirrors.

The sun has just begun its dying process: The King is Dead! Long Live the King!

Oh and lest you forget, there’s a great alchemical secret to get in on: Nature can be perfected....

"There is also, of course, the old adage that celebrities die in threes, with the deaths of Gianni Versace, Princess Diana and Mother Teresa in 1997 frequently held up as an example of this."

We cite (Carradine, Farrah Fawcett aka Darby Crash) and Michael Jackson. All icons of the Dead Seventies.

And in South Carolina, another king, Governor Sanford, as in Sanford and Sun, disappeared, leaving the state in a tizzy, but his return didn’t really smooth things over. Seems he was visiting his Argentine mistress: Maria (mother of Jesus) Belen (Bethlehem) Chapur. Chapur is a Persian surname. And in Persia the media has perfect leverage to wag the dog. Which backwards spells God. As if waving in front of your face. Heroic youth on the front-lines. With the death of an old regime a new one can be born. Martyred beautiful young woman, liberty leading the people, dead on the barricades, her last breath captured on a cell phone.

The King is Dead! Long Live the King!

It’s Easter and Christmas all rolled up into one. It’s the solstice.

"In the end, sometimes our reactions were divorced from reason and rationale, and had nothing to do with how we felt about him. They were reactions born of the raw emotion that comes when a seam in the fabric of our culture unravels, when someone as undeniably monumental as Michael Jackson dies."

How now, brown cow?

[added July 15]

So get ready for the resurrection and the visions. Just like Jesus we've had a (now located) missing body, miraculous sightings and both Kings have appeared in a lowly Cheeto....

Hunchbacks Cannibalized after CIA Assassinates Two Liberian Presidents

The Ugandan government recently issued a warning: Ritual murder is on the rise.

Within the last week, if we have successfully untangled several stories that may in fact be the same confused tale:

* In Bwaise, a suburb of Kampala, capital of Uganda, a witchdoctor was arrested (and has since died after being attacked by a mob) along with at least 9 others in connection with the ritual murder of 3 persons after severed legs were found in a latrine. Before dying, the witchdoctor, Musa Bogere, led police to a decapitated rotting corpse in a swamp where multiple dog carcasses were later discovered.

* In Sierra Leon, 14 people were arrested in connection with a corpse that "was missing its heart, tongue, breasts and sexual organs."

A special task force has been set up in Uganda to battle the troubling trend. Children, albinos, pregnant women, and hunchbacks are the favored victims, generally found with missing body parts that have been consumed in West African juju-marabou rituals.

Even more horrifying than last week's news: 3 people in Bibiani were arrested last August for eating a hunchback's "hump". Apparently, multiple victims were found, carved alive and bled to death.

In nearby Liberia, presidency comes with related risk. In 1980, President William Tolbert was either beheaded, disemboweled by future President Samuel Doe, or shot by the CIA, depending on which story you choose to believe. President Samuel Doe, in turn, was stripped naked and had his ears cut off before being murdered, all videotaped by captors sipping Budweisers -- captors supposedly let loose on Doe by, you guessed it, the CIA.

Now the world-weary authors and readers of LoS are probably not shocked by CIA incriminations nor bolted upright by tales of ritual murder (although the eating of hunchback humps while the victims lay bleeding to death is, you have to admit, particularly shocking), there is an element to all this that just doesn't seem to jive with our jaded attempts at understanding such depths of human horror.

Namely, cannibalism--like Holy Communion--is intended to convey some powers of the victim upon the consumer. Indeed, the idea behind the eaten victims detailed in this posting seems to be that the eater will be endowed some particular successes. In Tanzania, for example, "more than 40 [albinos] have been killed since 2007, sometimes right in front of their families, by gangs of men who hack off legs, heads or genitals and run away with them. In the last two years, rumors have spread in East [sic???] Africa that potions made with albino blood, shoes made of albino skin, tendrils of albino hair woven into fishing nets and amulets with albino body parts will make people rich."

Yet juju-marabou seems to single out albinos, hunchbacks, and the mentally disabled as proper ritualistic murder victims because they are believed to be evil.

How then, we wonder, does the consumption of evil bless the cannibals?

But before we get too smug in our attempts to outwit cannibals via logical debates on blogs, we should do well to remember that murder is leading cause of death of pregnant women in the U.S.A.