Even in his craziness, some people identified with him. In the weeks right after his death, several friends who are psychiatrists and therapists said that their baby boomer patients who were struggling with depression seemed to bring up Jackson’s death a lot. They wondered if watching Jackson’s steady decline since the early 1980’s tapped into the melancholy that these patients feel, along with the general sadness of lost or missed youth and the heaviness of adult responsibility.
So the Michael Jackson obsession, and the summer of death, may be only the beginning for those of us of a certain age. As each of our famous cohort passes, we'll lose another cultural touchstone who represented a certain time or state of mind in our own lives. The New Yorker recently pronounced that hip hop is dead. But the sadness of that may not be felt on a collective level until hip hop fans are old enough to believe that they too will die someday. Jackson's fans already know they will. But meantime, let's watch the movie.
