Is it just me or has our popular culture gone off the cliff from honoring the dead to creating a maudlin celebration of death?
Now, don't get me wrong, President Reagan deserves the full honors of the country he served, and a farewell from his legion of supporters and admirers, but once again, we've veered off the track of respect into a weird celebration of death, not life. Only the hardest of hearts or harshest of partisans could not have been affected by the sight of a wife laying her head on her husband's coffin, but what prompts people to want to participate in the grieving?
This phenomenon began in earnest with Princess Diana's death and continues with tragic events such as Laci Peterson's murder.
There is something off-kilter in the instant shrines of kitsch that appear and an invasive media peppering grieving families with banal questions that no one has the right to ask or needs to know. People drove hundreds of miles, bringing young, uncomprehending children to place flowers, candles and teddy bears on the Peterson's front yard. Sorry, but to me, that is just weirdness. Does a lack of community or intimacy in their own lives create this need to connect to others with faux death rites?
Perhaps it is simply a side effect of the instant communication effect, the trivialization of sentiment and embrace of celebrity, our insatiable need to witness events as they unfold or the media's need to fill bandwidth. I find it unseemly, but then maybe I'm becoming a fuddy-duddy throwback to other times when privacy was possible and necessary.
Posted by feste at June 9, 2004 08:10 AM | TrackBackStems from a lack of good churchin' and the feel-good need.
That, and sometimes a fellow just needs to acknowledge the supernatural, and the only time one doesn't get shit from the left for it is when a funeral rolls around.
Posted by: GE at June 9, 2004 08:42 AMI suspect you're right about the lack of community, and that's it's a tranference of emotions people find difficult to express in their own lives.
Others seek to share the deceased's 15 minutes of fame...sort of a weird "Kilroy was here" moment.
Or none of the above.
Posted by: feste at June 9, 2004 10:20 AM
Linking Laci and Reagan is a stretch.
Linking Diana and Reagan is more plausible,
to make your point.
Bottom line, great leaders deserve
great farewells.
Agreed, we only go off the cliff with Laci
and her "types."
If I lived near DC or Simi, I might have
visited Reagan's remains.
He was certainly the greatest President
in my lifetime.
The manifestations of sympathy aren't
pseudo-events.
;)
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Posted by: jaspar at June 9, 2004 06:17 PM
Sorry, but I thought the public reaction to Princess Diana's death became borderline pyschotic.
There is something wrong with a public that won't stoop to lift a child from a gutter, but will build a shrine of teddy bears when that same child is murdered.
I should stop digging.