The early death of Diana, Princess of Wales, was a uniquely British tragedy, involving as it did a young and beautiful woman thrown into a crusty, stolid, and obsolete environment that could only crush her character and suffocate her spirit. From the day that Diana – a headstrong, impetuous, but essentially compassionate woman – married the British heir to the throne, her fate was sealed. Even if her body had not been mangled in a horrible crash, her soul would surely have atrophied. Either way, she was doomed to be a lifeless corpse.

In a very different way, Michael Jackson is the archetypal American tragedy, destined not to die an early death like his friend Diana or his idol Elvis Presley, but to live on in squalid infamy, reputation in tatters, appearing as more beast than being. It is a quintessentially modern story of corruption and hubris.

Both the British aristocracy, born of blood, and American celebrity royalty, born of fame, are anachronisms. Man is not designed as innately superior to his peers, nor is he constructed to live as a god. While humility keeps humans grounded, institutionalized arrogance is a noxious poison that kills off all that is healthy in man. The aristocracy of birth and the celebrity of fame both lead to a hollow and suffocating narcissism. But whereas the curse of the British aristocracy is to live disingenuously and hypocritically with a fraudulent mask of propriety, the sin of American celebrity is to live with one’s sins bared for all the world to see. To be a celebrity is to live in a glass house, subject to the adoration or fury of the public, who may throw rose petals one day, stones the next. The British aristocracy plays out their lives behind high walls and in secretive palaces, the American celebrity aristocracy, in front of millions of people on concert stages and television sets. British royalty tries to hide its indiscretions and feigns embarrassment at its sins. American celebrities, by contrast, become more famous through theirs.

This, it turns out, was the fateful craftiness of Mr. Jackson’s life. He took the celebrity calculus to an extreme, becoming convinced that the stranger he became, the more noticed he would be. And endless stream of bizarre stories emanated from his camp: that he slept in a hyperbaric chamber, that his favorite companion was a chimp, that he purchased the bones of the Elephant Man.

Plastic surgery did the rest. In the public’s mind, Mr. Jackson was transformed from talented boy wonder to human freak. Some people embrace eccentricity. Mr. Jackson put all his creativity into it.

Mr. Jackson is a modern morality tale of where celebrity at-any-cost must perforce end up. Well before the concept was even invented, Mr. Jackson became America’s first reality TV star, a constellation consisting of fame without virtue. His was “The Truman Show” come true.

And like every reality TV star, fame chewed him up and spit him out, leaving a sad and hollow shell of something that once resembled a man. To be sure, Mr. Jackson got a full hour rather than just 15 minutes of fame. But the overexposure made him wither under the powerful lights until he had shriveled up and even his undeniable talent could no longer redeem him.

Now, Mr. Jackson has everything he ever wanted. His upcoming trial is guaranteed to make him even more famous than the Beatles. But while some sell their soul for a place in eternity, Mr. Jackson sold the very image of God in man.

It is lamentable that America exhibits little sympathy for Mr. Jackson. The utter disfiguration, the teetering near bankruptcy, the squandering of his precious gifts generate only contempt.

Even Martha Stewart was shown compassion after her arrest and conviction. But to elicit pity, one must first be perceived to be human. And in the eyes of the public, Mr. Jackson has become pure caricature, more mannequin than man.

Stewart could never be completely hated because she was never completely loved. Strong emotions can be flipped, and this is precisely what happened in the case of Mr. Jackson. The public once loved him. They grew up with him and in their eyes he was always a boy, an innocent and fun-loving man-child.

In his shyness they believed in his innocence. In his naivete they still remembered their own youth. In seeing him surrounded by children, they were convinced that he was an adolescent at heart. But hell hath no fury like a public duped. Peter Pan has become Peter Porn. The public now maintains that Mr. Jackson was not innocent, but corrupt, not clean, but calculating. Neverland was built not as a shrine to youthful precociousness, but as a lair to lure the unsuspecting. With Mr. Jackson, they thought they were getting a choir boy. But instead, they’ve concluded, they’ve gotten someone as adept at manipulating the public as he is at moving his feet. Now, they expect, his famed moonwalk may be replaced with a perp walk.

As for me, I still want to believe that Mr. Jackson never molested any child, and we dare not rob him of the presumption of innocence. But it almost doesn’t matter now, because the inspiration he once provided to so many has all but disappeared. He has become the very thing he once most feared: ordinary.

In the close friendship we once shared, where I endeavored to reverse the downward spiral, I would often tell Mr. Jackson that without an authentic connection to God he would never survive life as a celebrity. But celebrities don’t listen to ordinary mortals. And they don’t need God, since they are gods themselves.

Mr. Jackson once told me how he had dreamed of being romantically involved with Diana. Perhaps these two lonely and misunderstood people would live together happily ever after, comforted by their mutual sense of isolation. But things like a happy ending happen mostly in the fantasy movies that Mr. Jackson so adores. His life, by contrast, has become all too real.

Rabbi Boteach is a nationally syndicated radio host daily from 2-5 p.m. EST on the Liberty Broadcasting Network, and was named by Talkers magazine as one of America’s 100 most important talk-radio hosts. A best-selling author of 14 books, his latest work is “Face Your Fear” (St. Martins Press).