Michael Jackson and Elvis

Not long ago, someone was comparing Jackson's death to that of his kinda-sorta father-in-law, Elvis.

What we have to remember is that for most of the last twenty years of his life, Jacko knew he was a wildly-spending (actually bankrupt) child-molesting drug addict who obsessively mutilated his own face. He knew this, the people around him knew this, everyone knew this. But he didn't seek real help, and the people around him didn't help him either. If anything they labored with might and main to protect him from the consequences of his own actions -- to shield him even further from reality, the last thing he needed. The people with whom he chose to surround himself were the enablers, the parasites, the yes-men.

At any point in the last two decades he could have fired all his handlers, made a few phone calls, done a month of rehab, hired a credible agent to handle his money, and gone into months of therapy, like any other denizen of Hollywood would do -- in fact, these days, they're almost like Hollywood's twelve stations of the cross. We know much more now about taking care of yourself, self-help, reaching to outside organizations for assistance, and even the hazards of peanut-butter-and-bacon sandwiches, than we did in Elvis' time.

So this is worse than Elvis, because back in the 1960s and 1970s they didn't have all this. Even the business of managing finances in the music industry was still in its infancy, as the Beatles found out when they realized how badly Brian Epstein, Allen Klein and the Apple idiots had frittered away their fortune. But these days, there was a whole phone-book-full of places Jacko could have gotten help, and he didn't make any kind of serious effort to do so.

And the guy had, what 5-6 brothers? What did they do to help him?