From a forum:
There was some ill spoken of a certain recently deceased intellectual on this board in a thread about his passing. That same intellectual took an opportunity to speak evil of a certain leader who had recently passed (who, to go hand-in-hand with your thread topic, may have deserved it even in death), and spared no harsh criticism just because the person died. It was kind of odd to see that person defended because he had done the same thing.
I actually just got into it with a very popular pundit about this.
I wrote this in 2009: http://defiantarchive.wordpress.com/2009/09/12/leave-michael-alone-and-farrah-and-jeff-goldblum-06-26-09/
If you can’t find the restraint and decency to wait more than 24 hours after someone’s passing to start talking shit about them, I’d suggest that a personal gutcheck about your own humanity is in order.
The intert00bz were abuzz with everyone and their horse bad mouthing MJ even before the story was confirmed. What does THAT say about our society? That we are such a raving pack of egomaniacs that the urge to spit out some snarky bon mot trumps the compassion and sadness at the ending of a person’s story, no matter how complex or tragic.
As for the “perspective police” crying about Farrah and Iran, and Darfur in the face of “celebrity”, again, why is it so hard to let people have a mourning period? We’ll get back to the serious business of ignoring World events soon enough.I don’t think that taking a day or two to talk about people who have given us so much is going to cause the universe to implode.
Everyone wants to be the cool, hip contrarian on teh intert00bz, to stroke their own “I’m not one of those celebrity obsessed sheeple” ego, I get that. But when we are so addicted to it that we throw common decency – and thought for the friends, families, and people who’s lives were directly affected by these people – under the bus, it says to me that we need a deep reassesment of our ideas of respect and decorum.
We have the rest of our lives to critique people’s lives after their death. But I think there needs to be a grace period for the friends, family, and supporters to deal with their grief. I hated when Hitch would come right out after a passing and rip into them, as I found it classless and morally reprehensible. It’s for no reason other than to stoke one’s own ego.
We saw this with Steve Jobs as well, the “perspective police” shouting down the fanbois. But I felt this way about MJ, Pope John Paul, and even Jerry Falwell. And I feel this way about Kim Jong Il – brutal, awful dictator who has ruined generations upon generations of Koreans, who will rightly be pilloried for decades to come, but for right now, he’s just a man, a story that has come to and end. To start yelling about his faults without at least a period of some reflection on the most basic of human journeys just bothers me. It’s just tacky, and shows how little compassion we have for the people who have actual feelings involved.
And I feel this way about anyone.
No matter how bad a person is, there are people in their lives that loved them. Sometimes good people. They were a son, a brother, a sister, a parent, a friend. It is out of respect for the people in their lives that cared about them, or even just those whose lives they affected, that we should allow them to mourn in peace without the need to provide the negative “balance”. What’s important to me is the feelings of the living.
Yes, in the wake of a loss, the tendency is to romanticize and lionize. But so what? You can tear down their feelings in a few days. Is it SO FUCKING IMPORTANT to people that their petty opinions on the deceased be aired IMMEDIATELY, with zero regard for people who might need to go through their grieving process?
Do we as a society have so little self control that our egos need to be fed with our kneejerk anti-fanboi haterade every second of every day regardless of the emotional consequences to others? Is that who we are, who we want to be? It’s not about being “holier than thou” it’s about not being a narcissistic sociopath, about having a basic sense of humanity, and acting with a modicum of common decency to wait until we swoop in like vultures to pick over the corpse.
All I ask for is a grace period – Hell, 3 days, whatever – before the yammering yahoos with their snark descend. Let them get the person IN the grave in peace before you come to piss on it.
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