Fame's Funhouse Mirror

Fame's Funhouse Mirror

Michael Jackson's circus of a memorial was heartbreaking. Not because Usher broke down while singing. Not for most of the reasons given by the overwrought international press corps. When a 12-year-old former contestant on "Britain's Got Talent" sang, (just a few years older than Jackson when he was first inducted into the media spotlight), it suggested that no one's learned anything.

In the wall-to-wall, breaking-news coverage of Jackson's death, there was much speculation about the pain in the singer's life that could have been responsible for his often bizarre behavior -- though many of the scandals and ugly rumors that...