[Marxism] Traffic spike

[Louis Proyect]

On a good day my blog gets 1400 visits based on an 8pm deadline when the 
counter gets reset to zero. I just checked--it is 2664! What do you 
think accounts for all those hits? My critique of Jared Diamond? No, it 
is a Michael Jackson feeding frenzy based on the search results 
maintained on the Wordpress dashboard:

Search		Views
michael jackson	1,993
michael jakson	20
michael jackson bad	18
louis proyect	17
micheal jackson	13
michael jackson elvis presley	12
bird	8
salton sea	7
maikel jackson	6
michael jackson elvis	5

I can't imagine what the average Michael Jackson will make of my 
observation:

The picture that emerges about Presley and Jackson is one of the 
tendency of power to corrupt. Lord Acton’s dictum was applied mostly to 
states, but it applies to individuals as well. They surrounded 
themselves with sycophants who never had the nerve to tell the Kings 
that they were jeopardizing their health. Telling the truth might have 
cost someone a job.

But isn’t that what bourgeois society is about ultimately? Both Jackson 
and Presley came from working class families. Joseph Jackson was a crane 
operator at US Steel in Gary, Indiana while Elvis’s father was a 
sharecropper before becoming a truck driver. The two pop stars not only 
climbed their way out of their class roots, but became as wealthy as 
many ruling class figures at their pinnacle.

Elvis was fortunate enough to have a shrewd manager in Colonel Tom 
Parker who invested the singer’s income wisely even as he squandered his 
natural talents as a singer.

But Michael Jackson was not so fortunate. Once his career took a 
nosedive, he continued to spend money as if he was still on top. They 
report that he might have had $500 million in personal debt the day he 
died, which puts him in good company considering the state of the 
American economy.

It would appear that cultural and economic decay go hand in hand.