THIS REALLY HAS TO STOP...!

This really has to stop! I mean, really, this can't go on! Michael Jackson is only the latest example of our nasty nature!

Why oh why do we always wait until someone is dead before we choose to say and feel something good about them? To test this question, pay attention at the next wake, and see if you can bear the mawkish gusher of goodness people finally find in the life of the deceased. I always picture the corpse rising up and snarling: "Where were you when I was still alive, and could have used some of those feelings...?"

Psychiatry has an explanation for this, but stripped down to its essentials, it's simply our prideful defenses now being safely dropped. There's no longer any reason to be on guard. Which is a kind of silliness that borders on madness.

Classic examples in public life are the obvious. Lincoln was a war-mongering buffoon the day before he was assassinated, a national god the day after! FDR was a secret socialist who insisted on four unprecedented terms in office as far as his enemies were concerned; the day he dropped dead in Warm Springs, he suddenly had no enemies!

Marilyn ...JFK...Bobby...Martin...Elvis...Lennon ...Princess Diane...and now Michael. In one big collective epiphany, the masses quickly find compassion in their hearts and love on their tongues. The same applies to all the kids gunned down in the streets of gang-infested cities, whose grades and goodness would never have made any front page any other way.

Marilyn Monroe's biographer callously -- but accurately -- quipped that her death made her an icon. "Best damn career move she ever made." Sometimes, though, death only brushes us; as with Pope John Paul and President Reagan. If we survive with their kind of forgiving panache, we are rightly endeared to them.

But just think how much more so if only those bullets had really found their target....!