One month later: Michael Jackson is still news!

So today I was reading the news online and I must've found like two thousand different articles on Michael Jackson. If it wasn't some freaking audience to determine the fate of some movie deal, or some random paternity claim from some dude, it was some recycled biographic story that most likely everyone has read at least ten or twenty times already. It was weird, because, you know, the dude has been dead for like, what, more than a month now?

I understand that he was the king of pop and all that shit, and I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I was exposed to his music when I was little, but seriously. My first reaction was to blame it on the money-hungry media, because this is exactly the kind of thing they'd milk for all it's worth, but then I have to remind myself that, well, it is the media... this is what they do. And if they're doing it, there's a reason for it, and it all became clear when I checked iTunes and other music sites and saw that MJ's record sales are going through the roof!

So, clearly, it's not that the media is obsessed with Michael Jackson. It's that WE are obsessed with Michael Jackson and the media is just being the good provider/crack dealer that it's always been, and spoon-feeding us these news because they know we'll take it with a grin. So it's clearly not their fault. It's ours.

Seriously, world. Sometimes I wonder how we've survived so long and invented stuff like cars and the internet when our attention span is oh! so limited! If this is all that matters to us right now, then what does that say about us as a whole? Is humanity really this shallow? Because if we are, then we're really, really lucky that we've made it this far.

Now, I don't hate Michael Jackson. I think he was a great artist, and as far as the allegations go, to me it's innocent until proven guilty, which he never was, so I have no reason to judge him on that. But it's a damn shame that he had to DIE for people to remember again how incredible he really was. It's just sad. But I guess that's the way it goes, right? You never know how great something really is until you no longer have it.