Are we not talking here about the oddity of a mass mourning by millions for an entertainer, and an entertainer the mourners never came within 1,000 feet of, or a 1,000 miles of, at that?

That makes the adulation one-way and virtual, however cathartic. It is simply not the same thing as admiring someone you know personally or applauding a statesman who has forestalled a war or given dignity to the disenfranchised.

The former is spectacle and optional. The latter is community and vital.

Despite the several assertions to the contrary above, entertainers do not make people happy. Their purpose is to distract, to take people out of themselves and away from their worries for a few hours. They galvanize crowds with fantasy, light, sound, and rhythm. That's oblivion, not happiness.

The appeal of entertainers is thus not to the mind or to the heart. It's to the emotions. People will pay big bucks to have their neglected emotional natures pumped up for a few hours. But does that change their lives?

C'mon. Has, say, Salvador Dali or Billy Holiday changed your level of happiness? The research says not.

MJ, like other entertainers, distracted people from their woes and, in the case of Americans, the fact that their tax dollars were financing the deaths of thousands of poor non-Americans abroad — including the bombing of wedding parties, of all things.

Yet most Americans also rightly suspected that those dead were pretty much like them. And they were dying for official reasons that were too vague to be understandable.

Those Americans concluded that they had no choice in the matter. The IRS would not let them withhold their financial support.

So distracting themselves from their complicity and powerlessness was the next best thing. Now they're lamenting the passing of a first-rate distracter, someone who has few if any heroic qualities.

And out of the woodwork unfailingly come the hidebound traditionalists and Limbaughites:

That's just the way the world works, so accept reality. (larrfirr)

This is the way things are. DEAL WITH IT. (Mario A. Ortega)

Same sorts of things that hidebound traditionalists once said about slavery and, more recently, women working as anything other than nurses or teachers.

Well, OK, I am dealing with it. I'm pointing out that the MJ hype is a media scam and a con to legitimize and addict us to the state of being distracted.

Yes. That's all I have to say. Your virtue is exhausting.

At some level this rant stuck onto its diminishing title strikes me as on par with my mother’s moralizing at the dinner table: “Clean your plate. People are starving in China.”

I very much agree with his sentiment, although Michael Jackson versus Afghanistan coverage is perhaps not the strongest analogy.

I came to very much the same conclusion as a teenager reading a front-page story about two Britons being killed in a resurgence of IRA bombings. In the same edition, buried behind the editorial pages was a newswire story of nearly six dozen killed in Soweto Township by South African soldiers. I think I correctly concluded at the time that we value some lives a great deal more than others.

Of course, there have been no shortage of examples of seriously skewed media attention from Jessica McClure to Natalee Holloway. One might argue the media are just giving the public what it wants or that we have become jaded with stories from far-flung places where death and killing is commonplace.

But on the other hand we really don't know because we don't get those stories from mainstream news outlets, not even mass killings or genocide unless some Hollywood celebrity decides to make penance for the $25 million they made on their last film by virtue of merely being a "commodity" and uses their influence to call media attention to Dafur or what have you.

It's a sick world, alright.

Michael Jackson.

I really don't see any grief or mourning. I see an avaricious family almost gleefully squeezing what's left from their cash cow, and a bunch of has-beens pushing their way into the public's attention one more time. The fans? That's not grief. They look to be having a grand old time mugging for the cameras. Let's face it, Jackson was a bad '80's act that surrvived because his nose fell off at regular intervals. His death, like his life was a freak show. That was the appeal and interest. This isn't grief.

The civilians killed in Afghanistan? We paint everyone as some sort of video game villain now. The people of Iraq and Afghanistan are looked upon as "them." They've been dehumanized by our media and politicians, and that has resonated with many Americans. We have an all volunteer army now, so war doesn't touch the lives of most American. It's something remote that we see on tv like a movie. I just think most americans don't have any real feelings about it.

The Afghani civilians killed by American bombs sent by American soldiers are being sent in our names supposedly in order to protect our security. We democratically elected the leaders who sent them and we have failed to stop them from pursuing wars that end up killing lots of innocent civilians.

We are, therefore, to some extent responsible for their deaths. The blood of tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani (not to mention Vietnamese and many other) civilians is on our hands.

But none of us had anything to do with Michael Jackson's death.

It is more difficult to mourn the dead when we are the ones who are killing them. It is not surprising, then, that so many of the comments on this article have mentioned "guilt".

If you don't like being "guilt tripped" about the "collateral damage" caused by American foreign policies, perhaps the best thing to do about it is bury yourself in celebrity and entertainment news. Its purpose is, after all, to enable us to forget these unpleasant truths.

it's about American disregard for non-American lives.

Michael Jackson is just a convenient point of reference: his death - the death of one man - is still ricocheting emptily round the airwaves while the deaths of many, many innocent Afghans at the hands of American troops goes unmourned and largely unreported in the American media.

Under Obama, American policy now - i.e. put the people first and not the bad guys - is surely right. But it is far too late. Afghans who have lost friends and relatives at weddings and funerals to American bombs are not just going to forgive and forget. Would you?

This will haunt America for many years to come, yet many Americans will still not understand why.