There’s no such thing as a soul,” Bart Simpson once said. “It’s just something they made up to scare kids. Like the boogeyman, or Michael Jackson.”
You might argue that nothing helped Michael Jackson more than dying. It meant there were no more high-profile messes for others to clean up, no more accusations of child sex abuse to publicly play out, the man at the centre of them forced to issue denials or walk in and out of courtrooms. But the other boon to the sprawling Jackson estate was the sudden demise of the big, culture-wide Michael Jackson running joke.
