For the love of God, please bury Michael Jackson and place several concrete slabs above the sarcophagous.

Los Angeles, Cali-forn-ia--As the world rapidly and dramatically moves towards a wide conflagration, ecological catastrophe, and as the global economy starts really looking like a village (and none of this in the same order), we get wall-to-wall coverage of everything "Jacko."

Considering all of the aforementioned, it's not hard to understand why the coverage is everywhere, ubiquitous, and of course, pathetic.

Jacko, Jacko, Jacko, and more Jacko, 24/7 Jacko, until it feels like the 1980s all over again when the first three listens of Thriller were great until that 339th one came along. But fortunately for the young, nobody has to listen to the radio or watch television if they don't want to, the "captive audience" syndrome being a dead letter. There must be a God, after all.

There's a smell in the air, and it's the smell of dumb-laced fear with a twist of formaldehyde-impregnated clothing from China that we're told is "safe for humans," and a dash of dying free market extremism.

That's great, I hope that doesn't work out for you...

It goes without saying, so why not say it again since it's not sinking-in: yes, he was the "king of pop," and yes, he made a lot of moronic and corrupt assholes richer, just as Ronald Reagan did back in the "glory years" of the 1980s. Yet, the 1980s weren't that great, the economy was in the shitter just 26 years ago according to solid economic statistics, the time of "Thriller" when America was in-the-process of sticking its collective head in the sand just as we're attempting to do now.

It won't work, and it didn't for the last 20+ years, but nothing exceeds like failure and Americans think that they can just change the channel and things will go away. When that fails, firearms and widescale hyperbole are necessary.

Michael Jackson's story is America's story, and it's a pathetic one because he never owned or controlled his life. Like the rest of us, others who didn't mean him well and wanted to exploit him did, and that's not the worst of it amazingly enough: there's every reason to think that he was physically, if not sexually, abused by his ostensible "father," Joe Jackson (not the British pop singer). Call it the vagaries of poverty, but there was no excuse for it.

Jackson detailed Joe's emotional abuse in a few interviews over the years, as did some of his siblings and other witnesses to their lives. Joe Jackson was hardly the first or the last person to maim Jackson's life. Racism coupled with greed destroyed the pop icon, disfiguring his face and his mind.

If Michael Jackson's life embodies anything at all, it's that the American Dream has been a lie, a nightmare, and something that we're all waking-up from after sixty years. The music and entertainment industries exploited him (and still are), pushed him, used-him-up, and threw him away, just as businesses are throwing-away millions of American workers right now in their feeble and dying game of dazzling profits at everyone else's expense.

Did they ever care about Jackson's well being beyond how much money it might generate for them? Of course not, and they still don't. And yet, nobody is likely to ever hold them accountable, which is more than a little sad...and pathetic.