The week just past brought some notable passings, both literal and figurative. The most portentous was, of course, the least discussed.

Michael Jackson, a devoted disciple of 19th-century entertainment impresario P.T. Barnum, wanted nothing more than to make his life "The Greatest Show on Earth." He'd be pleased to know that his death certainly is.

His untimely passing Thursday at age 50 launched the endlessly repetitive, unenlightening, round-the-clock coverage that's the ghoulish specialty of cable television. Not coincidentally, it also sparked sales of his music and videos, made briefly relevant again and downloaded to new technologies that are light-years removed from the little 45s of his childhood debut.

Barnum once said, "Without promotion, something terrible happens ... Nothing!" Barnum, the first King of Hype, would have loved the King of Pop. So complete was Jackson's mastery of life-as-entertainment that some media mavens have confessed they first assumed his collapse was simply a ploy to promote his July comeback tour.

I couldn't bear to watch more than the first 15 minutes of a Thursday night special on his life. What I remembered, and want to remember, was the young boy I'd discovered at a schoolmate's house in 1970. We were 8, he was 12, and his music was like nothing I'd ever heard at home.

"A, B, C, one, two, three, baby, you and me!" He was very cute, and we had instant schoolgirl crushes on him.

But his look soon changed. A photo retrospective aired last week showed his evolution from dark-skinned, broad-nosed, Afro-wearing teen idol, to lighter-skinned, small-nosed Diana Ross look-alike in his 30s, to little more than a big-eyed, tip-nosed anime figure at his death.

Fame devoured him. It devoured his gender, it devoured his race, it devoured his face.

Farrah Fawcett's celebrity was more manageable. She was already an adult -- almost 30 -- when her swimsuit poster suddenly appeared on American boys' walls and her haircut on American girls' heads.

Through the decades, she occasionally reasserted her claim to fame with Playboy pictorials or acting triumphs, but as she documented her recent battle with cancer, she seemed to be using that fame to draw attention to something bigger than herself. Her friends made the media rounds for her, debunking rumors, affirming her courage and helping her control how her story would be told.

If her death was accorded the dignity she desired, it may only be because it was overshadowed within hours by the media frenzy focused on Michael Jackson. The expected gives way to the unexpected, the fading star to the supernova.

Perhaps this rule explains the vastly different amounts of attention devoted to two figurative deaths last week in the political realm.

Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina and leading Republican prospect in the 2012 presidential sweepstakes, committed career suicide by disappearing for five days to visit his mistress in Argentina.

Mr. Sanford, a fiscal conservative, had leaped to the political forefront in recent months by refusing federal stimulus money for his state, a decision that had plenty of support at home, where it mattered. Mr. Sanford had convinced many constituents that the strings attached to the stimulus money would leave their state much worse off than before.

Though uninterested in such matters of governance, the national news media did care very much that a conservative Christian politician had fallen from grace. People who'd never heard of Mr. Sanford's principled political stand are keenly aware of his failure to live up to his own moral ideals

And the week's other political death? It's nothing new, really, just the umpteenth death of a sacred illusion -- the left-wing plutocrat as "man of the people." Ted Kennedy, Democratic crusader for social equality and economic justice, kicked off the week by appearing in a new ad for his beleaguered ally, Connecticut's Sen. Chris Dodd, in which he declares "quality health care [is] ??? a fundamental right."

But Sen. Kennedy's health care bill specifically exempts members of Congress from the rules that would govern the rest of us. They will continue to get their gold-standard health care options because, well, some pigs are more equal than others.

This is a political hypocrisy that actually matters. It will affect our lives far more deeply than a pop idol's tunes or pol's peccadilloes. But it concerns policy substance, rather than personal stumble, so it doesn't make for very entertaining pictures, does it?

Those who follow such things laugh at Mr. Kennedy's brazen double standard, but the tears it will cause haven't fallen yet. So the nation's media handlers keep us entertained with the players themselves, weeping and wept over, as they shuffle on and off the stage.