Given his recklessly eccentric and peripatetic personal life, Michael Jackson's premature death seems almost foreordained -- one of those deaths Yeats had in mind when he wrote of a friend's lost son: "What made us dream that he could comb gray hair?"
Still, the global outpouring of grief and the frenzy of public attention focused since Thursday on Jackson's death is an acknowledgment not only of his popularity but of the reach and influence of America's most successful export: popular culture. Jackson was an icon and, in the end, perhaps, a prisoner of that now all-pervasive, world-girdling force.
American popular culture's triumphant appeal around the world is the product of several forces: First among them is this country's historic aversion to assigning distinct values to high and low culture. Some would say the result has been a pervasive Philistinism -- that, as Oscar Wilde put it, "America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between." Others would say that a level playing field has opened high culture -- literature and classical music, for example -- to a valuable cross-fertilization with popular media and made it more vigorous by forcing it to compete for its audience.
The real strength of American popular culture, in fact, is its democratic impulse -- a willingness to take into account the reality that, for most people, entertainment is an end in itself. American entertainment bows to what economists call "consumer sovereignty," and Jackson's popularity, with its demonstrable impact on music, dance and fashion, was a clear example of that.
That accounts for the fervor that has the performer's fans organizing candlelight vigils around his star on Hollywood Boulevard and mass "moonwalks" in London. But what explains the saturation media coverage of Jackson's death -- coverage that crowded out virtually every other news story since midday Thursday? Friday, for example, was an extraordinarily busy news day: Repression tightened dangerously in Iran, and President Obama traded words with his Iranian counterpart; the brewing crisis with North Korea bubbled along; the House passed major legislation on climate change; and, in California, the budget crisis took another suicidal turn.
