Mourning and Celebrating Michael Jackson's Life Is A National Humiliation

American popular culture since the invention of mass media has often not been a pretty phenomenon. And the mourning and celebration of Michael Jackson is a pop phenomenon that is not pretty. It's painful to watch. American mass pop culture is far from its ethnic roots, far from the memories of foreign homelands, the lived experience of ordinary people struggling to get along, the oral tradition, the domesticity of ethnic heritage, the confusion of assimilation from non-English tongues, the succor of earned religion with institutional memories of persecution, the existential situations in which people self-invent artistic expression as a means of transcending their troubles, celebrating their pleasures, marking life's course from baptism to tossed ashes. Mass pop culture lacks, in a word, authenticity. It has given up experience for entertainment. It's easy to listen to, to follow, to hum along, to dance or swing, to recite, because it's been emptied of substantive human content. Ten year old children can become famous singing about the pain of sexual love when the words have no possible meaning to them. You don't have to know anything to put on pop culture. Its empathies are mass produced and shallow. It has been stripped of humanity and clothed in avarice.  It's about nothing but money. Its value is glitter and abstract. The popularity of pop culture is a measure of the depravity of America's street soul. And so with the celebration of Michael Jackson's life. It's painful to watch. It's a national humiliation. It's an exercise in cultural depravity.