Dear Celebrities: Please Stop Dying…

Topics: News and/or Media, Political Rantings, Sports Talk | 10 Comments »

10 Responses to “Dear Celebrities: Please Stop Dying…”

1. Jeff Porten says at July 13th, 2008 at 5:49 pm :
   
   Hmmm… I thought that obituaries were meant to be stories about what made the man newsworthy, not hagiographies. I fail to see what is partisan about the paragraphs you cite — provided, of course, that we agree that factually accurate statements are nonpartisan.

   I note that you make a joke about a presidential assassination a few posts later (about which I have no qualms), so perhaps we can also agree that there are perhaps boundaries in speaking of the dead which fall into a gray area?

   BTW, speaking of factually accurate, I’d love to see a citation of a single TV commentator saying “I hope that sonofabitch dies.” I suspect that such a citation does not exist. I further postulate that similar examples of Snow’s attitude that the truth is whatever he decided to say on a given is part of why, while no one should be celebrating his death, his passing is not particularly mourned by some.

2. Brian says at July 14th, 2008 at 2:40 pm :
   
   I thought that obituaries were meant to be stories about what made the man newsworthy, not hagiographies

   Bobby Murcer struck out 841 times and made almost 100 errors in his 17-year major league career. Did you read about that in any of his obituaries? Why not? They are, after all, just as much a part of his baseball career as his four All-star appearances, his 252 home runs or his Gold Glove award. And if someone had mentioned it? It’s not that they aren’t true statements, it’s that they’re INAPPROPRIATE AT A TIME LIKE THIS.

   I fail to see what is partisan about the paragraphs you cite

3. Jeff Porten says at July 15th, 2008 at 3:40 am :
   
   Can’t comment on the Murcer obits because I haven’t read any of them, and prior to the man’s death I had never heard his name. I doubt this surprises you.

   I think what’s “appropriate” in obituaries is probably the core of our debate here. My opinion is that it’s a truism is that an obituary doesn’t matter at all to the subject of the article, who is likely beyond caring. (Exceptions are notable, such as Alfred Nobel and Mark Twain.) So an obituary should balance between two audiences: friends and family of the deceased (small population, high receptivity), and the general public (vastly larger population, low receptivity). The general public should be seen as the primary audience, because in the absence of a general public interest, no obituary is written.

   As for the factual content of the obit, I can personally attest that I’ve seen the following: “During daily briefings, he challenged reporters, scolded them and questioned their motives”. As for the conclusion of the sentence, “as if he were starring in a TV show broadcast live from the West Wing”, I think that logically follows from his skills as a broadcaster; if it’s opinion, it’s one that can be easily inferred.

   I agree with you on the issue of “‘Critics suggested’??? That reads to me like a 3rd person way of saying ‘I believe…'” (Amusingly, until I copied and pasted this comment, I thought you wrote “3rd grader”, which makes your point even more strongly.) I also think that this phrasing is perhaps a way to sidestep what might be “inappropriate at a time like this”, or at the very least a method of achieving brevity and not emphasizing the negative.

   But really, the key here is that “the story he told often” is one that is likely to be untrue. We have perhaps gotten used to the idea that presidents may lie whenever it’s convenient — which I wish were not the case — but here’s someone whose job was journalism and whose highest public position was one of dispensing facts to journalists. The idea of a journalist who doesn’t much care whether the stories he tells are true is repellent, IMO, and is indicative of why I feel no need to manufacture a phony air of respect for the man on the occasion of his death.

   while I wouldn

4. The Vast Jeff Wing Conspiracy » On presidential spokesperson fatalities says at July 15th, 2008 at 4:01 am :
   
   […] on I Should Be Sleeping, Brian and I are having an interesting discussion on what’s appropriate following the death of a perhaps-controversial celebrity. By all means, […]

5. Brian says at July 15th, 2008 at 5:18 pm :
   
   I firmly believe that our ability to excessively abstract ourselves from mourning the death of others is precisely why we are able to engage in politically expedient wars and continue to think of ourselves as good, decent people. This is not a good thing, in my view.

   And in my view, you seem to be explicitly commiting the sins that you’re accusing Tony Snow (and the generic “us”) of committing. If we wrongly gloss over the death of the faceless masses that die in war, why is it less wrong to gloss over the death of someone whose face we are familiar with?

   You seem to have spun a web of logic that makes a convincing argument that we shouldn’t mourn Tony Snow’s death as a form of political protest against the policies he supported. Without attempting to untangle that web, I’ll just say I think it’s the wrong conclusion. It’s perfectly logical and normal to feel more for the death of someone you know (or know of) than someone you’ve never met or heard of. It doesn’t make their death more significant or their life more important; it’s just a difference in your perception of the two events based on the facts you have at your disposal. To wit, I wouldn’t expect a woman in Iraq who has lost her son to mourn for Tony Snow more than her son, and for the very same reasons.

   Oh, and as for travelling to the Middle East, I don’t know if he did or not. I do know that he spoke to many, many service men & women returning from Iraq, and would often get disbelieving stares (and boos) when he would talk of their pride in being a part of something as noble as the Iraqi war. No one wants to hear or believe that these days, despite the fact that 90+% of the quotes you read from military personnel (in blogs, editorials, etc.) offer the same sentiment.

   So the irony is this: Tony Snow likely knew more about what it’s like in Iraq than either of us ever will. How he relayed that story to the public while doing his job is certainly open for criticism, but it doesn’t affect my feeling that the guy died way too soon.

6. Jeff Porten says at July 16th, 2008 at 3:29 am :
   
   If we wrongly gloss over the death of the faceless masses that die in war, why is it less wrong to gloss over the death of someone whose face we are familiar with?

   Two answers and a commentary:

   1) The operative word is “masses”. At the moment, I’m looking at 4,120 dead US troops, and a guesstimate of 89,872 dead Iraqi civilians. These numbers exclude non-US allied casualties, and excludes the count of those that we deemed needed killing. (Does a website provide a body count of those that needed killing? Realizing for the first time that I don’t know of one.)

   2) Tony Snow died from an act of God, to use the oldstyle phrasing. The numbers I quote above are acts of human [insert word here]. I’d use “choice”, “malfeasance”, and “reckless stupidity”, but you can use others as you like.

   Commentary: I’m using factual answers above, but essentially my thinking here is emotional. Yes, I think we collectively don’t give two shits about misery and suffering of people Not Like Us — in some cases, we’ll give a single shit and do just enough to make ourselves feel better about being Caring, Decent People. Tony Snow is sufficiently Not Like Me, in my view, that yes, I think I’m not immune to what I’m talking about. I think what might be upsetting or provocative about what I’m writing is that I’m failing to go through the culturally expected motions of giving that single shit.

   You seem to have spun a web of logic that makes a convincing argument that we shouldn

7. The Vast Jeff Wing Conspiracy » On American nobility says at July 16th, 2008 at 3:57 am :
   
   […] crossposting a comment I made in the ongoing thread over at Brian Greenberg’s ISBS, mainly because I think it’s a fine bit of writing that […]

8. Brian says at July 16th, 2008 at 5:06 pm :
   
   As to Tony Snow, I think we need to agree to disagree here. Your answer boils down to this: deaths are more/less mournful based on how they happen, in what quantities they happen, and how you feel about the person(s) they happened to.

   This is completely antithetical to how I view the topic. Maybe this example will help: two men were killed in the World Trade Center. Both left behind a wife and two small children. One was a greenpeace volunteer, a 20-year veteran of the ACLU, and loved coffee, cigarettes and any product made by Apple. The other was an Ivy League-bred executive at a large investment bank that made a six figure income and profited from investments in, among other things, big oil companies. Which widow sufferred the bigger loss? Which kids will miss their father more at their first graduation? Which family’s lives were torn apart more?

   Do your answers change if the second guy was me?

   You seem to be saying here that, regardless of what the political objectives are of the war, or whether the war can be judged a success on various terms, that there is a value imbued to the effort by the sacrifices made and pride taken by the participants. You call this nobility.

   I agree with what you said on your blog – this commentary is very well written. And so it pains me to poke a hole in it’s very premise, but I didn’t call it nobility. Tony Snow said that the troops called it nobility. Big difference.

   And this brings us to the million-casualty question, Brian. If it is inherently noble to die for your country or your beliefs, then are the Iraqi insurgents imbued with nobility? Were the 9/11 hijackers? Palestinian suicide bombers? Timothy McVeigh?

   This strikes me as a deceptively simple question. Nobility is in the eye of the beholder. So, here in America, the American troops are noble, and the hijackers, suicide bombers, and domestic mass murderers are not. It would be foolhardy to suggest that the suicide bombers don’t consider themselves noble. After all, we know for a fact that that’s exactly why they commit these acts. Because they believe they are acting nobly.

   I think the difference between your opinion and mine is that I’m not afraid to declare nobility a subjective thing, and then favor my culture’s definition of it over all others. This means I don’t have to rely on past actions to imbue current Americans with nobility. I can, instead, judge them on the information I have and the situation that they are in.

   Which provides a good segue to my last point: whether he chose to ignore information or act on it, it is undeniably true that George W. Bush knows more about what’s going on in Iraq than you (or I) do. I say “undeniably true” because he is briefed daily by the world’s most advanced intelligence community and surrounded by hundreds of people who study the situation full time and with primary sources. You and I have never even been there.

   This, I’m sure, is disconcerting to hear, beacuse you deeply want to believe that if George W. Bush knew what you knew, it is an absolute certainty that he’d react the way you’d react. There is no room for the possibility that either a) he knows more than you know and if you had the same knowledge, you would react the way he did, or (more likely) b) he knows more detail about the same things you know, and has a strong belief that his reaction is better for the country than yours.

   It’s amazing to me that when the President, with the knowledge at his disposal is convinced he’s right about something, he’s acting on “gut instinct and a near-messianic belief in their own rightness and closeness to God,” but when you are convinced you’re right about something, armed with second, third, or fourth hand knowledge of the same events, you’re a well-read intellectual.

   You can

9. Jeff Porten says at July 17th, 2008 at 12:31 am :
   
   Your answer boils down to this: deaths are more/less mournful based on how they happen, in what quantities they happen, and how you feel about the person(s) they happened to.

   Well, yeah. And I’m guessing you do too. When five kids aged six through thirteen are gunned down in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania for the sin of being female, we mourn that more than most deaths we read about in the newspaper.

   But, in my case at least, not mourned well enough that I didn’t have to go looking that up in Wikipedia before I wrote that paragraph.

   What bothers me — and I can’t say I’ve been particularly coherent on this point — is how we treat the deaths of those with some notoriety, versus the deaths of the anonymous. And we treat anonymous deaths differently — my RSS feed today reported 28 dead police trainees in Iraq. I doubt I’ll be looking up this event in Wikipedia two years after the fact. I’ll be surprised if it has its own entry.

   I freely admit that much of my argument is based on an inchoate, emotional, and thoroughly helpless sense that the world should not be as it is, and that those of us with any power to make a difference are miserable failures in doing so. This is not rational, arguable, or particularly sane, so I’m not really stating this as a debating point. Just pointing out the known weaknesses in my own argument.

   This is completely antithetical to how I view the topic. Maybe this example will help: two men were killed in the World Trade Center.[…]

   Last time I checked, I’ve got close friends who are investment bankers, employees for Big Oil, credit card processors, even a few conservative Republicans in that mix. I’m fairly certain that if any of these people happen to stop consuming oxygen in the next three decades or so, and presuming that I still am at the time, that I won’t mourn their loss any less.

   On the other hand, for people I don’t know, I don’t have much to go on. You seem to make the argument that I should mourn their death by dint of their being human — which baffles me, honestly. This is a noble belief which is demonstrably untrue of all of us. Death is all around us. Avoidable death is all around us. It seems to me that if we truly mourned their deaths or suffering, we’d be spurred to action of some kind. Instead, we add a tablespoon of bathos to our daily lives and go about our business.

   As an alternative example: I liked Heath Ledger’s performances. It’s rather pathetic that he dropped dead at an age that’s ten years off of how long I’ve had so far. But I wouldn’t call these sensations “mourning”, and fundamentally I think that he deserves a Darwin Award for the way he took himself out. No one said so, of course, because we were too busy talking about the “tragedy”. Seeing as how Tony Snow never made any movies I enjoyed watching, this might clarify my lack of feeling.

   Finally, keep in mind that you’re corresponding with a guy who can feel like his dog died for no reason whatsoever. I’ve noticed that I don’t mourn the death of loved ones the way other people seem to. Wouldn’t be a bit surprised if this is having a large impact on our conversation.

   I didn

10. Bo Diddley says at August 15th, 2008 at 3:19 pm :
    
    I was sad to hear that Bo Diddley died. That guy had an amazing career and life. And I just loved his guitar, the Twang Machine. It looked so cool and unusual for a guitar! He sure could make is sing.