Michael Jackson to heal Sunni/Shia schism

Call him a contrarian, call him an iconoclast, call him a child rapist, but one thing is certain -- Michael Jackson marches to the beat of his own underaged, chimpanzee drummer.

While the eccentricities which were once enduring have morphed into revolting, Jackson, who in his more benign years successfully remixed Augusto Pinochet's closet into the very look of international pop stardom, refuses to embrace normalcy.

Is there a method to his madness? Charitable as I am, I tend to think that there is.

Case in point: Over the last few years some of Michael's superstar cohorts have adopted children of various racial and ethnic backgrounds, creating a kind of United Nations' family aesthetic befitting the increasingly interconnected human race of the 21st century.

That's all fine and dandy in a kumbaya kind of way, but what about the black man who wants to painfully bleach the pigmentation out of his skin and then have white-as-driven-snow biological children with a woman he hasn't technically "had sex" with?

Who would that man have, besides Michael Jackson, to stand with him and shout to a judging world that normal is only a wash cycle on a household appliance?

OK, Michael Jackson is completely insane. And you know what completely insane people eventually do . . ? They find religion.

I've always pegged Jackson for a future Scientologist because, dogmatically, Scientology overlooks some of the otherwise sinful baggage Jackson brings with him.

But you can never predict the life path of the former king of pop and, according to his brother Jermaine, Michael Jackson will convert to the considerably less tolerant religion of Islam.

As the Christians, Jews and Buddhists of the world breath a sigh of relief, I also wonder: Will Jackson don the burka and the veil?