Had enough of Michael Jackson's afterlife here on earth? I sure have, and I tuned out 99% of it. But some 31 million people watched his memorial service on 19 channels, and Chris Hedges explains why that's scary in a brilliantly written column at Truthdig. Yet Hedges' accounting falls a bit short in a way that's as dangerous as the choreographed swooning he so rightly condemns:

"In celebrity culture we destroy what we worship. The commercial exploitation of Michael Jackson's death was orchestrated by the corporate forces that rendered Jackson insane. Jackson, robbed of his childhood and surrounded by vultures that preyed on his fears and weaknesses, was so consumed by self-loathing he carved his African-American face into an ever-changing Caucasian death mask and hid his apparent pedophilia behind a Peter Pan illusion of eternal childhood. He could not disentangle his public and his private self. He became a commodity, a product, one to be sold, used and manipulated. He was infected by the moral nihilism and personal disintegration that are at the core of our corporate culture. And his fantasies of eternal youth, delusions of majesty, and desperate, disfiguring quests for physical transformation were expressions of our own yearning. He was a reflection of us in the extreme."

Hedges grows even darker, damning the satanic corporate minions among us:

"Those who created Jackson's public persona and turned him into a piece of property, first as a child and finally as a corpse encased in a $15,000 gold-plated casket, are the agents, publicists, marketing people, promoters, script writers, television and movie producers, advertisers, video technicians, photographers, bodyguards, recording executives, wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public announcers and television news personalities who create the vast stage of celebrity for profit. They are the puppet masters."

Hedges then visits his preacherly wrath upon the rest of us:

"We measure our lives by these celebrities. We seek to be like them. We emulate their look and behavior. We escape the messiness of real life through the fantasy of their stardom. We, too, long to attract admiring audiences for our grand, ongoing life movie. We try to see ourselves moving through our lives as a camera would see us, mindful of how we hold ourselves, how we dress, what we say. We invent movies that play inside our heads with us as stars. We wonder how an audience would react.... We have learned ways of speaking and thinking that grossly disfigure the way we relate to the world and those around us. Neal Gabler, who has written wisely about this, argues that celebrity culture is not a convergence of consumer culture and religion so much as a hostile takeover of religion by consumer culture."

But Hedges himself is caught in that hostile takeover. He writes as a Jeremiah who's lost his God and his community of believers, preaching mainly to casual visitors to Truthdig or Salon, or, now, TPMCafe. That's a start, I suppose, but the 31.1 million he'd like to reach, and millions more, are worshiping false gods, and, more important, it'll take more than anti-capitalism alone to redeem them.

I have more than a little sympathy with this man's predicament. Hedges , who grew up in Maine and in rural upstate New York, where his father was a Presbyterian minister, comes from a tough, Calvinist, working-class Yankee culture with which I have a somewhat intimate if testy acquaintance.

A one-time Harvard Divinity School student, Hedges erupts regularly along the lines of a New England Puritan Jeremiad, a sermon that gets under your skin until you're writhing in conviction of sin and are ready to abandon the City of Destruction for stony pathways to redemption.

America would have been worse off without such preachments. Calvinist chastening steeled Lincoln in his melancholy determination to assist the divine inexorability of bloody justice. It fortified Martin Luther King, Jr. and others to face fire hoses, police dogs, and death. Show me a neo-con or neo-liberal who can do that, rather than let moral proxies do it. And yet we are approaching a time when it will have to be done again.

And say what you will about Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright; his United Church of Christ and Wright's own first name come straight from the Puritans, with a black inflection. Puritans didn't exactly cry "God Damn America," but, good Calvinists, they did cry that God was damning America for dancing with Satan. Similarly, Hedges calls the Jackson death dance a "spectacle to divert a dying culture from the howling wolf at the gate." Hedges' wolf is the Satan in your own heart and hearth.

But unlike Wright or King, who addressed covenanted congregations with an indomitable faith -- and unlike Lincoln, who spoke to an America that G.K. Chesterton would call "a nation with the soul of a church" -- Hedges is addressing no community or country that's waiting to be mobilized like the Church Militant or the civil-rights movement. And, while he has inveighed against performance atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, he doesn't show us what he's for, so his jeremiad leaves listeners in despair and impotent fury, showing no way out.

Now, depending on how you grew up, you may rather enjoy writhing in self-reproach, at least ritually, like Shiite pilgrims flagellating themselves on pilgrimage, Opus Dei members mortifying their flesh, penitential Puritans under the minister's glare, or certain liberals and leftists in thrall to those they adopt as guilt-processors -- Freud, Fanon, Fidel or Foucault. Hedges hands out the hair shirts, but he points us toward no Teacher or Savior or Way.

He does want us to rise up and smite the money-changers of finance and corporate capital who are driving and insinuating so much decadence into our private and public lives, and so do I. But remonstrance alone seems futile against a people whose false gods include the golden calf of capitalism itself.

Hedges' failure to offer a convincing alternative is a serious, dangerous default. People who are thrown into despair and rage by their would-be tribunes are susceptible to the demagogic appeals of a corporatist national socialism or national-security-statism, or to theocrats' calls for their submission on the grounds that the flesh is too weak for freedom in a fallen world.

Hedges doesn't sound as if he actually thinks that his angry economism can offset this, and no wonder. Even John Maynard Keynes, who outflanked the left's dialectical materialism by spreading capitalist materialism, noted decades ago that the economic opportunity and equality he'd promoted couldn't free the human heart from evil - perhaps especially in prosperity.

Vital to freedom though his work had been, he confessed it couldn't get to the root of the real dangers to civilization and that he'd been wrong to think that economic progress would herald "a continuing moral progress by... reliable, rational, decent people, ... who can be safely released from the outward restraints of convention and traditional standards and inflexible rules of conduct."

Keynes and his cohort had "completely misunderstood human nature, including our own.... It did not occur to us to respect the extraordinary accomplishment of our predecessors in the ordering of life... or the elaborate framework which they had devised to protect that order."

He meant the order of Victorians and Calvinists and Hebraists, who emphasized conduct, duty, and strictness of conscience over romantic and even materialist rebellions, dialectical and otherwise. What a rebuke to economistic liberals! What an apparent vindication of Burkean conservatives' call for traditional, even sacred, ordered liberty!

Here in America, the Calvinist theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, too, warned that liberals and leftists overlooked the "demonic and the primal in man's collective behavior." Good American and Christian that he was, Niebuhr also insisted that alongside our depravity is an irrepressible dignity that can make a way out of no way, but only if the people have enough religious wisdom and discipline to humble original sin, which he defined as the tendency in all individuals to make much more out of their own individual desires and accomplishments than any objective or moral view would justify.

Overcoming that tendency requires a faith stronger than threats of death and Satan's capitalist seductions - deeper and more powerful, that is, than the punishments and blandishments of those powers -- from Fox News to Dick Cheney to Goldman Sachs to the promoters of Michael Jackson -- that trade day and night on original sin and magnify it in our hearts.

Does Hedges have a faith that strong? He doesn't testify to it in print. Does he have a secular-humanist equivalent to it that's religiously deep, even if not religious? Communism tried to be that, but it wasn't. Love of the American republic (not the national security state) as a trans-national, civic-republican experiment may run that deep,: Observing the best of the civil-rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s, the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas marveled at the depth of what he called Americans' "constitutional patriotism."

But how deep is American civic faith, really? I'm reading the Yale historian John Demos' absorbing The Enemy Within, which tells how America has turned to witch-hunts or something close when we've lost our civic-republican balance and, with it, our constitutional patriotism. And I'm writing a book about a particular, emblematic American effort to achieve and sustain that balance, tracing its ups and downs from its Puritan/Hebraic beginnings through its miscarriage by the Bush/neoconservative alliance, until Barack Obama's victory.

In 2008 Obama re-wove the old Puritan, Hebraic, and humanist strands into a lifeline for the republic, and on the night of November 4, students at Yale and other colleges amazed their elders by pouring into their courtyards and singing "The Star Spangled Banner" spontaneously, with no orchestration by producers or promoters. So doing, they took "constitutional patriotism" back from the flag-lapel-pin poseurs and re-grounded it in something vaguely civic-republican.

But Hedges makes you wonder if young Americans loved Obama's campaign mainly because they mistook it for an extended Michael Jackson performance. It'll take more than a Keynes or even a Jeremiah to tease the truth out of us as we and Obama turn now to face our wolves.