VULGARITY - AT 7:33 A.M. ET:  We will now await day two of the bizarre coverage of Michael Jackson's untimely death.  We're all sorry, of course, that he died at such a young age, only 50, but you'd think by the media bombardment that a president had died.  The wall-to-wall orgy has been largely tasteless and over-the-top.  The man was not, after all, Frank Sinatra, one of the great popular artists of the last century.  Even Jackson's family has had to plead for a little privacy.

I suspect that the lurid coverage has much to do with our worship of the youth culture, a worship that's been magnified considerably since the juvenile decade of the sixties. 

Of course, Al Sharpton was front and center, holding a sidewalk news conference to talk about himself and his relationship to Michael Jackson, which seemed awfully vague. 

I hope the press calms down today.  Fans can appropriately mourn, but there are adult things happening in the world.

June 26, 2009