John Cole reacts to yesterday night’s post about how he treated the news of Anna Nicole Smith’s death. Hmmm.
Go take a look at that original post. He rightly takes MSNBC to task for wall-to-wall Anna Nicole coverage, but it’s afterwards that he gets untracked. Because all of the vitriol in the post and the comments is reserved for the dead woman–drunk, addict, gold-digger, horrible mother.
The emphasis to me seems strangely misplaced. Our expressions of nausea ought to be reserved for the media that commodified the woman’s misery and cynically fed it to people, creating the stage for this denouement. I can’t find the link, but there’s a haunting photo out there of the woman passed out on the Hard Rock floor, with a bunch of shoes pointed at her in a circle, about 5 feet away from her, on the last night of her life.
So, now they’re saying that she may have choked on her own vomit. And what are we choking on?
All over the net, many of the same people who were so outraged by the manner of Saddam’s death seem to think that this is a cause for levity, and more pointed vilification than he got. So, I guess I got it wrong about some things over there; what can I say? I’m an ass. I just think that the really dangerous pathology isn’t Anna Nicole’s.
MayBee asks the question, “What would we say if ANS wanted her ashes shot out of a cannon?” I wouldn’t have thought to ask it, but it’s kind of interesting. What do you think?
Ace brings out the whupping stick on the WaPo. Should Carl Levin be fired from a cannon?
“Our expressions of nausea ought to be reserved for the media that commodified the woman’s misery and cynically fed it to people”
Hey, man, I’ve got plenty of nausea to go around.
Except I call mine *nausee*, because … it’s cooler that way.
*snapping fingers*
*combing out seeds on an album cover – is it Bread? Is it the Mothers? I’ll leave you guessing.
It’s probably Bread.
Real men use Big Bamboo
That would be Big Bambu, and only pussies use Big Bambu.
I’m with MayBee from last night: I thought Cole was just saying that it was ironic that the uber un-feminist was going to distract the public’s attention from Marcotte’s screw-up. Which, I think, is giving Marcotte credit for taking more real estate in the public consciousness than she really was.
Our expressions of nausea ought to be reserved for the media that commodified the woman’s misery and cynically fed it to people…
As with all celebrities (who remain celebrities), they need the media more than the media needs them, and therefore are complicit in their own freak show. (According to something I saw a couple weeks ago on the History Channel, something like this was true of actual circus freaks as well. They resisted the attempts of the well-meaning to close the freak shows, thus ending the freaks’ livelihoods.)
You seem unusually exercised about this, Dan.
You were right about that Think Progress thread, though. Woof!
It’s a relation of mutual parasitism, I’ll give you that. I’m not sure, though, that celebs need the media more than vice-versa. If she had died an obscure alcoholic in a little Texas town, would we feel it necessary to bugger her corpse? Her indecency doesn’t excuse ours.
On the one hand I’m with Dan, we have no ownership of someone by dint of their celebrity, we dehumanize them at our own peril.
On the other hand I sometime think the ancients were right. Players are an unsavory lot, often unworthy of much consideration.
I didn’t realise you were a half-witted sidekick. I thought we’d settled on ‘henchman’.
They aren’t very bright over there are they?
Real men use Frampton Comes Alive.
If anyone is interested in the photo, here it is. The webmaster’s suggested caption Oh, don’t everyone help at once … I’m good, thanks … oh no, stop, your concern is getting embarrassing…”
It was this picture that made me think of Hunter S Thompson. In the last months of his life there were reports and photos of him similarly passed out on the floor, with the likes of Benecio DelTorro partying on with the prone body. No five foot rule for him. Thompson’s addiction was cool and counter culture. Anna’s was pathetic. Right?
Ah well. At least I find it interesting.
I do, too, MayBee. But in PC land, the larger your chest, the less human you are. And I don’t mean just in percentage terms.
Imagine the kind of response I’d get if I opined that it was pretty fucked up to cap himself while talking on the phone.
The official explanation was that she “choked on vomit.”
You can’t dust for vomit.
/Tap off
Oh and by the way, I have no sympathy for ANS either–not because she had a big chest or was an alcoholic buffon who made Alphie look intelligent–but because she was of that subspecies of women who make their living by deceiving other people with not the slightest hint of concern for the fact that she might be hurting others. I’ve run into this type before (back in my youth). Their m.o. is to try to get as many naive people as possible to believe that she really is getting “in to them” and would like to have a relationship, when in fact all she wants is all the cash she coax out of their wallets. Of course, many of the clientele of such strumpets are rich old men (see JP Marshall), in which case they deserve each other. But these less-than-whores are every bit as willing to steal money from young naive boys with their first decent jobs who really can’t afford to come back night after night but continue to do so because they’re led to believe that they’re really liked and that love/relationship is a real possiblility. Someone like ANS would not give a fat flying fuck if she utterly ruined a hundred basically decent young people and perhaps their families along with them with her lies, as long as it meant a few extra bucks in her pockets. Utterly despicable, and no, I can’t conjure up any more sympathy for her now than she ever felt for any of her victims. That, plus she was a fat-ass.