But pricey Malibu treatment centers where you can pamper your inner child in peace are for small-timers like Britney Spears and Eddie Van Halen. Instead of blaming his obsession with tween dreamboats on an unquenchable thirst for Jesus juice, Jackson is pursuing a more ambitious form of rehab. His current strategy, it seems, is to steamroller past the idea that he is slightly less marketable than a barbecued skunk at a PETA luncheon by creating projects so huge in scale they magically confer universal adoration upon him.
Is there enough neon in the world to make people forget the time Jackson showed off his one-handed baby-juggling skills on the fourth-floor balcony of a Berlin hotel? Or that one of his alleged molestation victims made reference to the singular "baby oil stink" of his genitals? Or that his brother Jermaine was trying to shop a book proposal last year in which he stated, "Yes, he's eccentric. Yes, he has a thing for young children"? Or that Jackson himself thinks it's completely normal for a 48-year-old boy to share his bed with an endless succession of tween-dreamboat hotties?
Well, who knows? The technique seems to work pretty well for pudgy North Korean despot Kim Jong Il, and he can barely even moonwalk. Still, the odds are against Jackson: Even if he suddenly lost interest in serial tot-cuddling and developed a conspicuous appetite for 35-year-old MILFs, he would still be a self-made noseless albino whose last chart-topping single came more than a decade ago. No doubt he could give Rick Springfield or a Bee Gees tribute band a run for their money at the Suncoast, but his own megaresort?
Even if Jackagio is a flop, however, Las Vegas still wins. For the last half of the 20th century, Las Vegas reigned as the mecca of overcapitalized bad taste. Now, the gap between it and its legion of lookalikes has narrowed considerably. Casinos have become so common in America that even the most brightly lit ones rarely surpass the semi-invisible presence of fast-food outlets, and here in Las Vegas, the most ambitious developers have abandoned tacky glitz excess in favor of the subtle ultraluxe garishness that characterizes any golf-course community where the townhouses start in the low seven figures. Even the exploding volcanoes have a muted elegance these days.
But while gigantic styrofoam sphinxes now lure suckers into Midwestern sin palaces, will Joliet, Illinois, or Tunica, Mississippi, ever build a megaresort that celebrates a man whose least disturbing adult relationship was with a diaper-clad, adolescent chimp? (When Bubbles got old, Jackson dumped him, too.) Only in Las Vegas is such a project even conceivable, and if it ever comes to fruition, it will immediately reestablish the city as the undisputed world champ of surreal excess. Let the groundbreaking commence.