For me. I just don't get it. Elvis didn't swing this kind of media saturation and neither did John Lennon. Both were higher up the music food chain than Michael Jackson. This was a very troubled man. Pills spilled out of his tummy at the autopsy. (Not that Elvis couldn't swallow a pharmacy in his day.) He built a pretend village and used real people as set dressing. He had sleep overs with little boys and employed a porn director as personal videographer. Yeah, he could sing and dance and was a huge hit back in the early Reagan years. R.I.P.
Let's leave air time for a good police chase, or hill fire or invasion by Nazi dinosaurs.
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It comes off as more than a little tasteless to me. His own brothers were using his wake as a forum to advertise their recording studio. They have cameras poked in his daughters face while shes trying to give a eulogy. This is a F'n funeral not the emmy's! Sad the lengths hollywood's underbelly will go to to profit off of someone else's misery. I would never make it in that business. I'm not nearly diplomatic enough to keep from telling them where to stick their cameras, and promptly demonstrating on the nearest volunteer.
As I recall, I started looking for a Jackson -free news channel about 45 minutes after he died - finally settling on the BBC. They [at first] offered a tasteful, no frills announcement then went on to talk about new transit problems in London. Later, after they gathered their wits about them found enough file tape for a full blown orgy of weeping and endless retrospect.
I'm sorry for all this, really -but I've got real stuff to tend to. He didn't change my life personally in any way and we never went out for toast.
Maybe now that this is behind us, we can all resume trying to outwit Big Brother.
It seems all this celebrity-as-deity stuff really kicked into high gear with Princess Di. ((1997-98?)
Again, nice lady, did some stuff on the problems of landmines, but not worth the orgy of coverage.
What aren't we supposed to be paying attention to?
While I'm sympathetic to the sentiments expressed I did get to sit on a stool for six hours watching various news anchors try to think off something, anything to say about Jackson. We're talking OT, meal penalties and no break, say what you will about pop culture it pays well.
I don't think we'd do the same for Nazi dinosaurs, they don't dance and our reporters would probably ask them how Jackson's death affected them.
Who knows?
Perhaps it's about Obama's sleepover with Putin - where he proceeded to grovel, then promised to give up a big chunk of our defense system. As their part of the exchange Russians have agreed to eat more American fast food.
Obama's deal with the Russians reminds me of something Mort Sahl once said about the SALT talks:
"We agree not to bomb Moscow and so do the Russians."
My husband said something to the effect of, "Korea couldn't have asked for anything better than for MJ to die." Now they can get away with anything and the American people wouldn't notice!
SW: I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt the Memorial was a little tasteless. The little boy singing MJs song that he sang as a little boy kind of fried my brains. Why would we want to do that to another child? Didn't MJ getting beaten and forced to work every moment of his life?
That being said...
The little girl talking highly of him made me very sad. And for the first time I wondered just a little if he really was a child molester or not.
Takineko,
Speaking of North Korea, our government and South Korea had their computer systems crashed over the weekend by a sophisticated cyber attack.
Clearly not interesting enough to override file footage of "Billy Jean."
Kate: That isn't what happened. Let us not yield to hyperbole. The only thing they really agreed on was to reduce our nuclear stockpiles and allow cargo planes to fly over Russian space. The missile defense thing is a bad idea anyway. I seem to remember something called the Cuban missile crisis in our own back yard caused over something similar. Russia's big beef with the US of late is that we violated our agreements attained under your golden boy Regan and under Clinton not to expand NATO. They feel every bit as threatened by that as you would be if every communist or leftist power in South America joined the Warsaw pact.
The cyber attack was only a DDOS. Annoying yes but not a threat. Not nearly so much as the daily probes we get from China. They do a very good job of stealing our technology. Makes me wonder why we even bother putting secure information on the internet. They really should disconnect all military and research facilities and put them on a dedicated intranet.
As for all the Jackson coverage, The news is run like any other entertainment medium. They exist for ratings alone. That's why one really should diversify and look online to sources that are a bit more neutral. Can't rely on Fox news for everything.
Congratulations, Squirrely,
You have the longest political comment ever posted on “Write Enough.”
And while this thread has trended more political than most, let us all remember that “Write Enough” is primarily dedicated to things like Three-Wolf Moon tee-shirts and songs from “Attack of the Gargantuas.”
In that spirit, let us move forward.
I will start a petition for 3 warewolf moon in dedication to thriller.
Now you're talking.
Remember: more werewolves on the sleeve would be nice.
Yay! I win! I win! I think...;>_>
While my Navy Corpsman kid is training for deployment in 108 degree weather, with the Marines in the Mojave Dessert, and we have over 150,000 military personnel in harms way, in 2 wars; there were more than 10 articles in the paper yesterday about a weird pop icon's death and only 2 about our war effort. Does anyone really wonder why newspapers are in trouble? Or, for that matter, our society?
Squirrely,
A few thoughts before your victory lap.-:)
Missile defense is a splendid idea. Technology is not frozen in 1962 Lucite. Missile-on-missile interceptions have been successfully tested at Edwards AFB and over the Pacific. Diplomacy is nice, but diplomacy and missile defense are nicer.
Russia has been acting very 1970s lately, only with the red scrubbed off. If they’re nervous, I imagine Georgia is even more nervous. (Also, I’m uncertain the analogy stands between expanding NATO in Europe’s backyard and allowing People’s Banana Republics an ocean away to join a disbanded club of conquered states like the Warsaw Pact.) Given the great squashing Eastern Europe endured under people like Putin, I’ll bet those nations are glad NATO’s hiring. I am. As to breaking our word, given Russian experience in telling whoppers, I’d think they’d respect us.
Mostly agree with you on the cyber attack, though I have no idea what DDOS is. (Plus the Treasury Dept. did think the NK attack pretty serious.) But you are correct re. China. Their technology is top notch and their spies very active. Perhaps we should place all our secrets on CNN? Given their ratings, who would notice?
Which brings us to Michael Jackson: I don’t think the complaint is a lack of alternate news sources. (Though you can rely on Fox News to counterbalance the homogenized views of ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and MSNBC – excepting Jake Tapper and a few others.) It’s the tsunami of Michael Jackson irrelevance. Important issues like cap-and-trade, health care, and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are brushed aside for more breathless coverage of a troubled entertainer whose best years lay behind him. But I think we agree here.
Sincerely yours in Calzones.
DDOS is Distributed Denial Of Service. It's where you get an army of computers to ping a single server several times a second overloading its ability to handle the requests. It thereby becomes unavailable to legitimate packets. There are ways around a DDOS. It's an old trick.
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