David Rothkopf makes a good point:
Personally, I found the obsessive retrospectives about Michael Jackson a little disgusting. His commercial success for a few years as a pop singer seemed to trump the dark and of his life. But he was no hero. He was certainly no one to be celebrating. Unless of course, you were an ayatollah. Because one of the truly transcendental ironies of recent history has to be the fact that a symbol of the worst sort of Western spiritual and social corruption…celebrity worship, drug culture, financial excess, debauchery…ended up providing just the distraction that the keepers of the Islamic Revolution’s flame in Tehran needed to direct the world’s attention away from their abuses of their own people.