Because I listen to the BBC I know that Robert McNamara died. There was a big sensation about him a few years back when he published in his memoirs that the Vietnam War was a terrible blunder (or something similar). Nothing blunder about it in fact - unless you mean like the bull blundering about in the china shop. But in this case the bull's intentions were criminal to start with. Besides he never mentioned that his years at the World Bank were also a terrible blunder.

Anyway I happened to be in Vietnam when the memoirs came out, so I asked various Vietnamese friends what they thought of the "confession". Not one of them gave a fuck what McNamara thought about anything.

Now to the vastly more important death of Michael Jackson (no irony intended). I'm going to the gym every evening during the week and there isn't much to do while you're on the treadmill, except watch a variety of TV channels. I need to get an iPod or something, but in the meantime, I'm re-learning popular culture as I get a choice each evening of football (non-soccer), Discovery channel (docufictions), V-channel (non-stop pop) and 2 commercial free-to-air channels (9 and 7). Three of those 5 have covered pretty much Michael Jackson for the last 2 weeks. I've started timing my visits to the gym so I can watch Who Wants to be a Millionaire* instead of endless Michael Jackson.

Anyway, tonight both 7 and 9 devoted the first`15 minutes of their news programs to this memorial show or whatever you call it. I left after the first 15 minutes, so for all I know they didn't cover any other news at all. If you didn't get enough of it by then, 9 was going to rebroadcast the entire thing starting at 7 pm. The racial overtones of just everything surrounding Jackson are mind-blowing. On the pop channel, in between Jackson clips they've been running two series of top 25s of all time - the first is the top songs of all time (something by Jackson at #2 - so maybe not the Greatest of All Time or GOAT?**); the second is the sexiest males of all time in which MJ does not feature (though he was certainly scrawny enough) and, guess what, there weren't any men of colour in the list at all.

OK Jacko, the product, was a good singer-dancer but not sexy. Then we look at the thing in the stadium (or whatever it was) with the shiny coffin and thousands of people bawling their eyes out because some pop star they'd never met died. Then there's all these people of colour up on the stage (with a small sprinkling of white chilluns and Brooke Shields who, unlike all the others, had to have a label at the bottom of the screen saying she was a 'friend and confidante' - I suppose they did that in case anybody thought she'd done terrible nekkid things with a black man - oh! and the label also said "actress" in case you mistakenly thought the tears were real) and I know I'm going to get hate mail for this (if anybody reads it), but it just looked a whole lot like black people doing what black people have always done best which is entertaining white people. If I'd been Jackson, I'd have taken a whole load of drugs and died early too because I'd have worked out pretty early that all I was good for was being a black man who sang and danced and took drugs. And there's Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and those basketballers and Don King and all the other entertainers celebrating or maybe mourning because American culture is stuck in a rut it has been in for centuries. I found the whole thing perfectly ghastly.

*(just to prove how 'big' soccer is in this country) a guy won $20,000 tonight for knowing that Chelsea won the FA Cup this year.
** actually Madonna is the GOAT.