MJ's demise

I wanted to post about the different realms of media coverage yesterday when the networks picked up the story the Michael Jackson was sick but now the focus shifted because of his death. This blogging thing is gonna be hard, I can only imagine how many holier than thou types started ragging about how irrelevant he was and then boom, he's dead. I will start off by saying that MJ's music was a big part of my life as a kid and while I agree he got weirder and weirder as time went on, I am not convinced he really was the serial molester the media made him out to be. Suddenly, the butt of all kinds of jokes is remembered as a ground-breaking musician and activist for social justice at a time (the '80's) when nearly 100% of the zeitgeist was about greed and screwing everybody for a percentage.

Guys my age will probably need to ask our dads what all the hubbub was about Farrah Fawcett, I heard Mark Belling talk a little about her yesterday and he gave some insight about it. And in surprisingly tasteful terms too, the way I understood it she was this enormous sex symbol in the '70's epitomized by that poster but Belling glossed over the cruder aspects of that. It was the first time I actually cared what that guy had to say.

What I really wanted to talk about though was the overload of media coverage in general. News seems to be broken down into well, three categories: important things that actually affect our lives, complete distractions and something that can be best described as "oh, that's interesting". These are quite arbitrary and what ends up in one column for one person goes into a different one for someone else. I don't religiously watch the news but I try to keep up so here are my categories for the week.

Important: President Obama's weak and watered down health-care reforms and the frantic attempts by insurance companies and their conservative commentator flunkies to suck as much substance out of it as possible.

Distraction: This Sanford clown who traipsed off to Argentina to get laid or something while pretending to be hiking. This isn't worth our time for two reasons, one: most of us don't live in South Carolina and two: no matter how many instances of Republican officials in sex scandals rise up like swamp gas out of the bog it will never break the frame of how "moral" and "family-values orientated" they are.

"That's interesting" or trivia goes to the celebrity deaths, and I'd have to posit the Iranian protests because even the most hard-core neocon has to come to grips with the fact that we're not going to invade that country. And there may be just the slightest admission by the elite that we do not have the right to interfere with other countries' business. These things will be an "oh yeah, I remember that" but little else. Like a sports event, it happens, we notice and then move on. Does it really matter who won a game last year? But it does matter that we're shedding half a million jobs a month and so forth.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm gonna watch some more MJ video clips.