In a 2008 issue called 'Gone Too Soon,' PEOPLE magazine's editor admitted that when Elvis died in 1977, PEOPLE, then a new magazine, feared that featuring the passing of the acknowledged scion of modern rock and roll in a magazine devoted to "the headlong energy of celebrity and popular culture" would be "too morbid." Readers, the editors feared, would recoil.

Instead, the magazine gave 171 words to Presley's death -- above an item about a new Dorothy Hamill ice-skating doll. The editors of the special issue on dead icons explained, in the same introduction that this choice was "stupendously wrong." "Readers made that clear in 1980" when the issue devoted to John Lennon's murder became the most popular issue ever. Since then, PEOPLE, along with everybody else, has made a point of covering the passing of famous people.

Death sells. People, nay PEOPLE! Did a house have to fall on you? As Don Henley sang,"Get the widow on the set/Give us dirty laundry."

The recent endless, unrelieved unrelievedness of the press feast over Michael Jackson's bones -- in which Larry King invited everyone who'd ever met or even shaken hands with Michael Jackson, from his spiritual advisor, to his trainer, to his erstwhile bodyguard to Liza Minelli, who seemed not to know for sure if she were in town or not -- for night, after night, after night of repeated anecdotes and speculations, proved this in spades. As the King of CNN rightly predicted at the hour of the singer's untimely death, and I paraphrase here, "If you think the uproar over Anna Nicole's death was something, you ain't seen nothing yet." King, who also repeatedly called Lou Ferrigno, Lou "Ferragamo," was referring to the death of Anna Nicole Smith -- an event for which he had also appointed himself the video cantor.

Long have I heard -- and often, often, often -- we in America, among our many other emotional failings, do not really "deal" with death. We prettify and ignore it. We avoid its significance.

"The colonists,' wrote an anonymous scholar, "would sooner bury the corpse than mourn."

Well, that might have been so before refrigeration. I don't know if Michael Jackson, dead now longer than the Latin language, is yet to be buried. *

We do not ignore death. We lionize. We slurp it. We bathe in it. We revel in sorrow over the famous far more than we might over the demise of our own estranged father-in-law. In our mass character autopsies of the page and the air, we leave no headstone unturned. Websites are devoted to autopsy reports of the famed. Websites are devoted to photos of the victims of murderers.

Call us not avoiders. We sing songs that sweeten suicide. We reverence the blighted rose.

In fact, as we recently saw with the oft-reviled Sen. Edward Kennedy, we actually prefer our prestigious posthumous.

The only good former child star is a late former child star, preferably by his or her own hand.

Does that make you sick? Does the word "tribute" have an undertone of ka-ching? What `ya, cynical? Or have you been paying attention?

* Editor Note: Michael Jackson has finally been buried.