Michael Jackson and 'Little Monkey'

So Joe Jackson thinks that Little Monkey is his grandson. Even though nobody else in the world seems to think so. What intrigues me so much about Joe Jackson’s claim of ancestry for Omer Bhatti (a/k/a Omar Bhatti for no reason I can understand) is just how plausible it is in the case of the Jackson family that one member might not know for sure and have to speculate about the existence of other family members. The Jackson family is a family like no other, and Joe Jackson, about whom I’ll have plenty to say, a man with his own illegitimate child, is a father like no other. With 25 confirmed grandchildren, I would be surprised if he could even remember all of their names.

I think it’s highly unlikely that Omer Bhatti is Michael Jackson’s child, but he’s still an interesting person: one of those kids who had such a close relationship with Michael Jackson. One of those relationships that, from the child’s perspective, seemed to be a case of ‘hero worship’. Macauley Culkin has described his friendship with Michael Jackson as a down-to-earth, bubble-popping one, where he viewed Jackson as an equal as opposed to an idol. However, if this is really true, it’s a very rare case among Jackson’s child-friendships. It’s interesting to speculate on the understanding of ‘friendship’ of a person whose closest relationships, with few exceptions, featured either a hero worship moving from him to his target, someone a generation older (Diana Ross, Elizabeth Taylor) or to him from someone a generation younger (countless kids). In my personal experience, relationships that have a characteristic of hero worship within them may be very valuable, very meaningful relationships, but they’re not exactly ‘friendships’. If this is the case, Michael Jackson had very few friends indeed.