Michael Jackson is dead, and I’m sorry about that.

I’m sorry when anyone dies.

But if I turn on the television and see him gyrating across the screen one more time, I’m going to take my granddaddy’s double-barrel shotgun and blow the thing to smithereens.

Admittedly, I’m not a Michael Jackson fan.

I don’t like the noise that he makes and what he calls dancing is just plain vulgar.

I’m from the Elvis generation, and I well remember that, when he was going to be on the Ed Sullivan Show, the cameras were only allowed to show him from the waist up so the television audience couldn’t see him wiggle his hips.

That was all right with us. The top part was the pretty part of Elvis.

And, too, he could sing like nobody’s business – rock ’n’ roll songs, patriotic songs, love songs, Christmas songs, gospel songs. I could understand every word he said.

But Michael Jackson? I can’t understand a thing that he’s hollering about. It’s just racket to my ears. That’s not to say that he didn’t have talent because when he was with the Jackson Five, that little fellow could sing. He had a voice with incredible range.

And at one time, he was a nice looking young man. Then he went and pinched his nose almost off his face and tried to turn himself white and started walking around with an umbrella over his head. I thought that was odd.

Then he put up a merry-go-round in his backyard and invited little children over to play with him and stay and spend the night … and that was odd.

Michael Jackson was an odd ball, and I find it hard to view him as an icon. There was just way too much controversy surrounding him. He married Lisa Marie Presley for show and dangled his baby – or somebody’s baby – over a balcony. He was at odds with his family and high-tailed in out of the country to some distant hideaway. He was accused of child molestation but a jury found him not guilty, but juries do strange things. One jury let “the Juice” a-loose.

Then Jackson married a woman and paid her to have his(?) babies, but all that anyone knows for sure is that they are her children. No one knows, as Miss Mattie would have said, who sired them.

So, I’m not sure why, now weeks, after his death, Michael Jackson is the subject of every entertainment news show on television and every radio talk show and on the cover of every entertainment magazine. And, that people, who two months ago, were ready to send him to the looney bin are now bowing down to worship him.

For sure, he had a drug problem – prescription or otherwise – and probably was – he himself – the “great enabler” but some doctor’s going to get his reputation tarnished in an effort to put a little polish on the Michael Jackson legacy.

There’s no doubt that some members of Jackson’s family are grieving, but some are gravy-ing. His dad is jockeying for dollars in the six figures and his sister is trying to cash in on his passing. And, there will be royalties on everything from Michael Jackson umbrellas and white, kid gloves to cigarette lighters and coffee mugs. His records will sell like hotcakes and, for the next thousand years, all of the legalities over the Jackson children and the Jackson estate will consume the airwaves.

But maybe, from time to time, the entertainment news will take a short break from the Jackson ordeal to mention some “insignificant things” like the murder of a couple in Pensacola that was known for adopting children with developmental disabilities and other special needs. “Tonight, in other news ….”