One of the more popular of my husband’s c&w songs (there’s nothing like songwriter’s night for diversity) is his plaintive request to know if Diana and Elvis are dating in heaven. But his cynicism aside, the whole Diana thing was similar & may demonstrate its universality – well, I hope it isn’t just English-speaking cultures that are so silly. We can contemplate Poe’s belief that nothing is more poignant than the death of a beautiful young woman – perhaps it is a sign of our times that the mourning is of a 50-year-old – what – bixsexual? Even the most favorable interpretations of him were that he was a boy at 50. And who will be sued seems the next topic. Welcome to the 21st century – in which we’ve retained all the disproportionality of the 20th.

*I cancelled my cable and have been basically reading the papers on line, NPR, blogs, so that this has all passed me by. I did notice two young boys, well young teens, blasting Michael Jackson outside of my library. They were sitting, in a kind of curious way, on a curb, and would look up from time to time to see if anyone was paying attention. They looked like they wanted attention.

As I said at Althouse, this reminds me of Princess Diana (and, remember Mother Theresa died at the same time and the same conversations were had – the hysteria of the moment and the public. I think it relates to the fact that music, and some public figures, become entwined with our very own personal emotional lives. So, a Michael Jackson song isn’t just a MJ song, it’s the first time you learned to dance with a boy, or your first junior high dance, or something like that. I dunno. It’s a theory, anyway).

Did Elvis get this kind of attention?

People seem to like these celebrity death mass-catharsis episodes.

Too bad, really.

This sort of news process would, I believe, end up being cheaper to run, provide better information, and be a sustainable business model going forward. Why nobody funds this is beyond me. I can’t be the only guy who’s spotted this.

But the most important question is: why is their such a large audience for this kind of thing? Your post reminded me of something said by Sebastian Haffner in his book about growing up in Germany during WWI and beween the wars. He is talking here about a brief interval during the 1920s when the German political and economic situation had briefly stabilized:

“A generation of young Germans had become accustomed to having the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions…Now that these deliveries suddenly ceased, people were left helpless, impoverished, robbed, and disappointed. They had never learned how to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful and worth while, how to enjoy it and make it interesting. So they regarded the end of political tension and the return of private liberty not as a gift, but as a deprivation. They were bored, their minds strayed to silly thoughts, and they began to sulk.”

Do we have a large number of people who have become accustomed to having their emotional lives delivered “gratis, by the public sphere?”

OK, seriously now – what really angers me is those 8 Repubs; if they voted “no” the bill wouldn’t have passed.

Dan: tangentially OT (speaking of carbon and “green” credits)
Have you heard of “commissioning” in HVAC&R? I’m reading LEED guide for commercial inteiors – and it sounds such a sham; insertion of a third intrusive party between designing engineer and a contractor to monitor both – not a cheap party, too, I’d guess. Nothing like this in all other consultants – not in electric, IT, plumbing, civil, etc. What’s up with that?

I am very happy that I don’t watch too much TV besides sports things, the weather channel, and the occasional cooking show.

Satellite radio (I have XM) has really helped me a lot getting news. I listen to a lot of Bloomberg radio and they for the most part pretty much ignored the Jackson death, other to say that he died $400M in the hole. The conversations there are intelligent and respectful.

Other news stations on XM also kept reporting news, with a small mention of the Jackson death.