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Paul was right.

Not the Pope Paul, the Beatle Paul or even the Prime Minister Paul – but the apostle guy.

Where is the sting? Paul asked. All he could see was “victory” in leaving this mortal coil. At least that’s the way one commentator in the Evening Herald sees it. The Jakarta Post goes even further with a headline, When Dying Is A Smart Career Move.

Today, funeral day in L.A., sees Michael Jackson at the top of his game. He has 27 singles on Britain’s Top-100 chart. So crazed are the Brits – who some say invented public mourning – over his death that British Airways has been swamped. Flights are not only sold out to Los Angeles, but also to Denver and San Francisco, where fans hope to catch connecting flights to complete their pilgrimage.

As of Sunday evening, 1.6 million fans had applied for the 17,500 “tickets” being made available for the memorial. Will scalpers respect the dead? Get real.

The television broadcast of the event, rather ironically, is expected to rival the original moon walk for worldwide interest.

Surely it doesn’t matter what you think of Michael Jackson – brilliant musician or the last person on Earth you’d ask to babysit – there is something bizarre about all this.

They call it the Diana Phenomenon, dating the near-hysterical mourning for someone you’ve never met back to that Paris accident 12 years ago, but in fact the flowers and handwritten notes and trinkets were around when John Lennon was shot in New York and Elvis Presley died at Graceland.

But given its popularity since Diana – Pierre Trudeau in 2000 and the Queen Mum in 2002 being just two examples – we should perhaps be grateful that florists and teddy bear manufacturers were not there at the beginning when television made the funerals of JFK and Churchill admissible to everyone.

Today, each outpouring seems to require a new “record” – almost is if death for celebrities has somehow become a reality television competition for those who never even met the ones being buried.

The attractions of second-hand grief

They study it now – trusting that, one day, someone may actually make sense of it.

They have written scholarly books and journals on the outpouring of grief that followed the assassination of John Lennon and the accidental death of Princess Diana in that Paris automobile accident.

Both may pale, however, depending on what happens today in Los Angeles, where Michael Jackson, who could find no rest on earth, will be said to have finally found peace. In truth, it will be nothing of the kind – his brothers already spatting over whether to involve religion in the hockey-rink memorial and police concerned that the tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of fans who find themselves without “tickets” to the funeral will attempt to storm the Staples Center.

No one fully comprehends what it is that makes certain people more upset about the death of a celebrity they have never met than they might be over the passing of a grandparent. Some experts have speculated that this faux mourning, or long-distance mourning, whatever it might be called, is actually the mourner mourning some aspect of themselves.

Certainly in the case of the somewhat un-Canadian outpouring of grief over the passing of Pierre Trudeau at a ripe old age and after a long, well-known illness, it was as much boomers weeping for their hair, their music, their Centennial Year sexual escapades and once-endless prospects as it was for the former prime minister.

The truly incredible thing about long-distance mourning is that it seems, somehow, to make people feel good about themselves rather than badly for themselves, as in the case of a death of someone truly in the family.

It’s an easy, and largely harmless, emotional hit – you see a far smaller version of it around baggage carousels in large airports, where voyeurs will openly stare at a teary reunion, simply imagining what such joy or sorrow must feel like.

And, of course, there is always the chance that you or your handwritten note or even your bouquet of flowers will appear on television – thereby proving you were a legitimate part of the event.

But there is a great difference between being at arm’s length and being in the centre.

I have covered such events for Trudeau and for the Queen Mother, and while the notes and flowers were curious and interesting and often very touching, they were nothing compared to a small memorial erected in a field outside Shanksville, Pa., in September, 2002.

It had been a year since the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington and a memorial service was being held to honour the 40 crew and passengers who died when United Airlines Flight 93 was brought down, it was said, by “citizen soldiers” who simply refused to let the terrorists carry through with their plans.

Most people there had a genuine connection, from direct family of passengers and crew to the young White House interns who perhaps owed their lives to the brave passengers who fought back.

There were flowers and handwritten notes there, too, and some so powerful it made the reading of others impossible.

I recall one small poster, in red ink, written by a small girl named Jody that said, “I really miss you and love you, dadey.”

Nothing long-distance or faux about that …