I’m looking at the man in the mirror, and I’m wishing he would change his ways by punching himself in the face.

I’ve been able to escape speeding tickets, high school detentions and even late fees from Family Video. But I can’t escape this Michael Jackson case.

Every TV network mentions the case practically every 10 minutes (dude, I saw Jackson on Al-Jazeera). Last Friday, the managing editor at the Plain Dealer thought the picture of Michael Jackson wearing pajamas was important enough to be the main photo on the front page. The editor must have thought there weren’t any bomb blasts in Iraq that killed 47 people that week.

What’s sad is most people care more about whether Michael Jackson touched a kid’s peepee than any other news in general.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m the biggest fan of Michael Jackson’s music, along with the 5 billion who claim to be fans. I know every dance step to the song “Beat It,” and I look like an ass doing the moonwalk just like everyone else.

But the thing is, Michael Jackson was a talented artist. Until the King of Pop puts out songs that are worthy of his musical nickname, I refuse to follow this trial. It’s been almost 15 years since his album Dangerous came out. Forgive me for using the name of one his other albums to make a terrible pun, but everything else he’s put out since then is … bad.

He deserves to go to court not just for “kid peepee touching” but also for his last two comeback albums sucking. He first tried to come back in the mid-’90s with the album Blood on the Dance Floor. It featured the song “You are Not Alone,” whose video featured himself naked with his then wife, Lisa Marie Presley. The album was so nauseating, it took me 20 minutes on the Internet just to find the name of it. In other words, not even Google wanted to associate itself with it!

Then, there was the 2001 album Invincible, when Michael Jackson tried coming back for the second time. The album featured the song, “You Rock My World,” and the only thing the album rocked was the 99-cent bin at record stores across the country. Not even doing a music video with Chris Tucker for the song or a remix with Jay-Z could get Michael out of that failure.

Now my friends might call me a hypocrite because I was obsessed with the Kobe Bryant case and the O.J. Simpson trial. But those guys were actually talented during the time their cases happened. Kobe was coming off another NBA championship when he thought a semi-overweight hotel clerk was more appealing than his gorgeous-gift-from-God wife. O.J. deserved his coverage because he was accused of murdering his wife shortly after the movie The Naked Gun 33 1/3 came out. I’m well aware my defense for following the O.J. trial is bogus, but I was trying really hard to mention a Naked Gun movie in this column. Leslie Nielsen is my hero.

Aman Ali is a junior information design major, president of the Muslim Students Association and a columnist for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact him at [email protected].