It means even less to me.

It's a case of certain media outlets making a mint off the most frivolous, silly people in the country. Enough already! We already have TMZ. And that's plenty!!!

Like it or not:

1)He was one of the world's most famous people

2)His music made millions of people happy and some other people rich

3)He was never proven guilty of any crime

4)Pop artists and some politicians have taken the role fulfilled by "heroes" in the past, meaning they will get big funeral and memorial services. Even more so in this day and age.

5)Paradoxically, having more information about what's happening around the world has not prevented or avoided tragedies.

6)People all around the world don't care about what happens on the other side of the world, even if they could do something about it. The US didn't care about Rwanda when it was happening.

7)This is the way things are.

DEAL WITH IT.

And no, it didn't mean much to me either. But I can understand that there was absolutely no chance in hell for Jackson's memorial not to be the biggest news story for quite some time.

@V.B. from MN

Forget superiority complexes, it's logic (and ignorance) like yours that is the reason the American left is--and probably forever will be--utterly meaningless in the global scale of things. Whenever people like you say things like "a Chinese Muslim group (that few, I'd wager, have even heard of prior to a few months ago)" you make it clear why no one in the world cares one whit about this "left" that you're so quick to identify yourself as a member of. Progressives and leftists around the world yawn when American "leftists" start bloviating and throwing around their theories and opinions because they know these are the irrelevant squeaks of an uninformed, pampered pseudo-left best consigned to spinning off deconstructionist accounts of Family Guy or fighting over which of its ridiculously affluent middle class citizens is most symbolically victimized.

There are about 15 million Uyghurs out there who, I'm pretty sure, have heard of themselves, as have most of the 1.4 billion other citizens of China, as well as a good chunk of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims. Not to mention plenty of Americans, Europeans and others who have had their heads out of the sand for any length of time.

I'm sorry if you feel defensive about having your own ridiculous ignorance called out by Greenwald, but please treat that emotion for what it is--shock at having your American shell bruised--and leave the analysis for the grownups.

@Jon Dubya

I agree that the guilt trip here is too generic to be at all effective; Engelhardt has never been a savvy communicator. But surely we could agree that the crucial point is that while in other parts of the world these forms of grief (the symbolic and the actual, the distant and the immediate, the techno-mediated pornographic and the personally intimate, the easy and the difficult, the irresponsible and the responsible) co-exist, in the US one is the distraction that helps us repress the other. Not a good state of affairs for fellow citizens and surely not one that bodes well for any MJ-loving Afghans who have the bad luck to end up on the wrong side of American complacency.

So, by that rationale since you pork your wife I should pork her too?

It has nothing to do with Michael Jackson or whether we should or should not grieve for him...morons! Read the article!

I remember seeing those words spray painted in 20 foot letters on the side of a mountain in Greece, of all places. That was before 9/11. At the time, I hardly understood what it meant but it stayed with me.

It is astonishing that the majority of Americans still argue that Muslims are violent. In all likelihood we have probably killed more Afghans now than the Taliban ever did during their reign. Yet, we call them violent?

Afghan blood bought and paid for by the CIA helped defeat the US's archenemy by proxy. Now Afghan blood pays for the sins of a oil rich sheikh, for the sins of the Arab world (Afghans are not Arabs). Always, it is the poorest people who get screwed...here, there, and everywhere.

if you want to write a piece about the innocent lives lost at the hands of our military than write it. no need to compare it to Michael Jackson's death, or was that inserted into the title to get people to read it? If this was written a month ago would you have compared it to Jon & Kate?

Tracking the destruction of weddings would be regarded by some people as almost trivial. So immune to universal human values have so many people become that to hear of such things moves them very little. It's not just the loss of life involved, but the attack upon such an important event in the lives of the community and the individuals involved.

Do you people understand the concept of "acquittal"? Evidently not, so here's a primer: When a person is tried for a crime and found innocent, that means they were "acquitted." In Jackson's case, I believe he was the victim of a collection of grifter parents and a manifestly corrupt prosecutor who should himself be in prison for abuse of his office.

Thomas M. Engelhardt has labelled himself as a attention seeking nutter

Oh, boohoo forgive us for calling a pedophile a pedophile.

"Do you people understand the concept of 'acquittal'?"

Actually the delightful irony is that you clearly do not understand it.

"Evidently not, so here's a primer: When a person is tried for a crime and found innocent, that means they were 'acquitted.'"

No you clown, in the Anglo-American legal system it does not mean they are "innocent" merely 'not guilty'.

that someone so adamant in decrying the naivete of a sizable diverse cross section of the global public that is mourning the death of Mr. Jackson would so blatantly call upon his name to attract folks to this post...go figure. Media pimpdom looms large...even here on Salon at times.

p.s. Although controversy loomed large in MJ's life in many respects, one cannot say that he was not a humanitarian and would not or did not call the world's attention to the atrocities devastating our world and to tacitly imply that to mourn Jackson is to take away from those who are suffering and dying in other parts of the world is a grave insult not only to him but to the ordinary people who were motivated to serve and contribute to healing the world because of him...however shallow a motivation that might appear to be to you Mr. Engelhardt.