Today's haloes have shorter expiry dates
No one is allowed to be a god for very long these days, it seems.
The death last month of Apple founder and driving force Steve Jobs is a case in point. In keeping with someone who built his fame and fortune by melding technological advance with creative design, his was a thoroughly modern death - and so was the backlash.
Just as his products save us time, time was shaved off the otherwise predictable shift from gushy adulation to a more sceptical sneer.
The man heralded as the 'radiant Sun King of Silicon Valley' was soon being slammed as some kind of corporate cultist and misanthropic tyrant.
Some questioned his personal hygiene during his long years of geekdom, while others speculated about his state of mind.
The International Herald Tribune this week put a figure on Jobs' posthumous reversal of fortune - a brisk 18 hours.
The paper noted that this was a far cry from the days when warmth of the memories of divisive figures - John Lennon, for example - glowed for months across the media firmament, even though there was plenty of the dark side to come. Princess Diana was another case in point. Her death set off a sustained outpouring of public grief that many Britons now recoil from when reminded of it 14 years later.
Jobs enjoyed no such glow - although one only has to walk down a Hong Kong street to see his real legacy, the legions of people plugged into the world through his products.
Pop artist Andy Warhol told us that, in the future, everybody would be famous for 15 minutes.
In death, it seems, some of us may not even be granted that.
