I lived outside of the US for many years and it was an excellent way to get a fresh perspective on the country. One phenomenon I observed from afar that I’d never noticed up close was what I came to call The Gorp Syndrome. It works like this. Private minds create a useful product to meet their needs: like Gorp, or trail mix, a blend of raisins and nuts made by campers to deliver a natural and healthy blast of energy during a hike in the woods. Some smart company gets the idea to package and sell the product. After the product reaches its full customer base of, say, hikers and health-minded snackers, the company seeks to expand the product’s appeal while maintaining its identity. So they add carob or yogurt covered raisins: sweeter, so more people will buy it, but still arguably “natural,” and “healthy,” although now with quotation marks. Then someone at the company says, well, hey, if people like sweet stuff so much, why not add something really sweet like, say, M & M’s? So ultimately Gorp, while weirdly retaining some completely undeserved aura of healthiness, is transformed into sugary garbage.

Thus rice cakes become caramel rice cakes and Broadway theater becomes The Little Mermaid and journalism becomes in-depth reporting on every other dead blond and Marilyn Monroe becomes Madonna – and an entertainment icon becomes Michael Jackson. Hey, a free and democratic market is a beautiful thing but, without a commitment to values, it has a way of transforming creations of use, beauty and substance into ultra-saleable crap. What can I tell you? Everything has its downside.

Michael Jackson was a good dancer and sang pretty songs and changed nothing and represented nothing and meant nothing. Leave aside the alleged fondling or whatever it was – a man can be a creative genius and a monster too. But when you think of pop music greats like Louis Armstrong or Sinatra or Elvis or the Beatles, you can see how they stood at the crossroads between the musical era that created them and the era they helped to create. This is an era of pop junk mostly and Jackson, at best, contributed by helping to expand the reach of the music video. Well done, I guess – but, really, so what?

I lived in England when Princess Diana died and I was there for the upsurge of maudlin anguish over the death of that similarly tawdry and self-destructive figure. I thought she was ultimately meaningless as a personage—though not, of course, as a person—but that the paroxysm of helpless grief marked the emergence, or possibly rebirth, of a dangerously sentimental and dishonest method of experiencing the world. Not coincidentally, it came just at the beginning of the Prime Ministry of Tony Blair, which gutted the nation’s Thatcherite prosperity and self-esteem in the name of a sentimental and dishonest vision of what government can achieve.

And not coincidentally, this current outpouring over Jackson comes at the beginning of the Obama administration… But then, when one remembers that we once had presidents like Washington, Lincoln and Reagan, Obama may be seen as the presidential version of The Gorp Syndrome himself.