Two weeks ago an international music hero died. Two days ago he was laid to rest. Yesterday at the gym, the television in front of my treadmill force-fed me a few more facts about the track marks in Michael Jackson’s veins. At the bar later last night I caught a glimpse of Janet Jackson’s attempted intervention with her brother years ago.

Meanwhile, a ticker on the bottom of the screen said something about two American soldiers dying in Afghanistan. I wish we cared more about their names, their story, the reason they died for our country than why and how and who enabled Jackson’s various addictions.
 
We lost a legend. I get it. You get it. CNN, NBC, ABC, FOX, and every other newstainment channel and website gets it. But when was the last time our legend did anything public but appear in court? Great public figures die daily. Those nameless soldiers who died for us, for the public, were great public figures. Our obsession with Jackson wasn’t consumed with his genius; rather it was his self-destructive behavior. That same obsession doesn’t exist for the selfless.
 
Long live the King of Pop. But let him live in our iPods, on the dashboards of our cars, in our guarded record collections. Lay him to rest in nighttime news, throw another fist of dirt on the obsessive and invasive questions “are you the father?” (Larry King should know better), and say another eulogy for a society seemingly more obsessed with the loss of one troubled man than the loss of several thousand soldiers in a war we seem to have already forgotten. 

Charlie Berens is a correspondent for “The Millennial News Briefs” series and is a producer on “The Civic Life”.