Adventures In Celebrity Death Etiquette

Trump Derangement Syndrome knows no bounds. Even the helicopter crash death of basketball star Kobe Bryant on Sunday has managed to stir up its own Trump controversy.

One of the weirdest sidebars in a whole series of weird sidebars in the saturated and overwrought media coverage of the tragedy is the accusation that Donald Trump plagiarized Barack Obama's anodyne sympathy tweet. It wasn't copied word for word, but the sentiments and the cadence were just too suspiciously similar for comfort, according to one alert reporter whose observation then spread like a flash flood throughout the parched corporate media landscape. 

Obama's tweet:

“Kobe was a legend on the court and just getting started in what would have been just as meaningful a second act. To lose Gianna is even more heartbreaking to us as parents. Michelle and I send love and prayers to Vanessa and the entire Bryant family on an unthinkable day.”

Trump's tweet:

“Kobe Bryant, despite being one of the truly great basketball players of all time, was just getting started in life. He loved his family so much, and had such strong passion for the future. The loss of his beautiful daughter, Gianna, makes this moment even more devastating. Melania and I send our warmest condolences to Vanessa and the wonderful Bryant family. May God be with you all!”

These facile bursts of condolence are standard fare. Both tweets draw freely from the long human history of sympathy sentiment - which after awhile begins  to sound unoriginal even among the best of scribes. Whenever I read one of these presidential missives claiming that "Laura and I," "Michelle and I" or "Melania and I" feel this or that, I've always imagined the wives hovering in the background, duct tape over their mouths. This is despite the fact that these guys have publicists who actually write this stuff and get the sentiments straight from some computer-generated sympathy tweet program. An algorithm would ensure that similar words and phrases would be jumbled around a lot and never used more than three times in a row.

We should probably give Trump just a little bit of credit in the sympathy tweet etiquette department, though. He somehow managed to restrain himself from copying Obama's brilliant sending of prayers to the grieving Bryant family.

The one similarity between the two tweets that struck me in a particularly bad way was their mutual dismay that Kobe Bryant's "second act" had been cut short. This was an oblique reference to his parlaying of the hundreds of millions of dollars he had earned as a basketball player into a financial and media empire. In other words, Kobe Bryant was well on his way to becoming a billionaire. His "just getting started" in venture capitalism actually took precedence over family in both Trump's and Obama's tweets - although Obama did hasten to add that the loss of the 13-year-old was "even more heartbreaking."

When it comes to plutocrats having sympathy for the financial setbacks of other plutocrats, originality and creativity do have a way of becoming extremely limited.

The other disturbing sidebar in the Kobe Bryant celebrity death saga is the controversy about whether it's proper to bring up his arrest on charges of raping a teenage hotel worker in 2003. The victim's refusal to testify after being hounded by the press and lawyers and an undisclosed financial settlement and apology from the superstar seemed to placate everybody at the time.

As one Washington Post editor discovered to her chagrin, the #MeToo movement does not apply when it comes to the newly-deceased Kobe Bryant. When she linked to (in what else but a tweet) a story about the rape charge only hours after the crash,  a Twitter backlash ensued, Felicia Sonmez was then very publicly suspended from her job. And when a newsroom staff backlash against the suspension ensued, Sonmez was reinstated.

But not without the Post brass still insisting that Sonmez, despite not having violated the paper's social media policy, had still exhibited "poor judgment."

And rather than issue an apology to Sonmez, the Post proclaimed in a headline that it had "cleared her" as regards the rape allegation link: in effect, linking her to a crime or insinuating that she was an accessory to a crime.

Managing Editor Tracy Grant stressed that although Sonmez was cleared on a technicality, she is still guilty of a breach of celebrity death etiquette:

 “Reporters on social media represent The Washington Post, and our policy states ‘we must be ever mindful of preserving the reputation of The Washington Post for journalistic excellence, fairness and independence.’ We consistently urge restraint, which is particularly important when there are tragic deaths. We regret having spoken publicly about a personnel matter.”

Meanwhile, the Kobe Bryant Death Cult and its various factions show no signs of backing down or letting go. Not only has it become the latest linchpin of the #MeToo movement, it has also exposed the class aspect of the #MeToo movement. If Kobe Bryant had been accused of raping a fellow celebrity, or an aspiring celebrity, rather than an unknown hotel concierge, would his career and reputation have not only survived, but thrived and mushroomed into a "second act" of movies, philanthrocapitalism, corporate branding, and untold riches and fame? 

Call Kobe Bryant a rapist at your own peril, particularly if #YouToo are a plutocrat or work for one and you dare to be a traitor to your own class.  Heiress Abigail Disney is only the latest to face criticism for her own breach of celebrity death etiquette, after defending fellow celebrity Evan Rachel Wood from the backlash that she has received for defending the suspended Washington Post editor.

I don't know about you, but I'm getting whiplash from all this backlash.

The lashing goes something like this: if you point out that Bryant was an accused rapist, then you also deny and ignore that he was a good father and philanthropist. It's the same argument that wealthy celebrities like Ellen de Generes and Michelle Obama use when defending war criminal George W. Bush and their "shared values" and especially his bizarre habit of sharing candy with his fellow plutocrats at celebrity funerals.

It's all about the worship and defense of extreme wealth and power.

It only falls apart when the wealthy powerful man in question behaves so egregiously and so blatantly over a period of so many decades that his various friends, associates, fans and hangers-on can no longer defend him. Doing so would irreparably harm their own reputations. Thus the self-serving and very calculated lack of mourning for dead serial predator Jeffrey Epstein. Ditto the lack of class empathy for Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein.

Kobe Bryant only (allegedly) raped and throttled one lowly hotel worker lacking any money and power and celebrity of her own. In her case, #MeToo apparently does not apply.

People need to sanctify Kobe Bryant in death. Consumer Nation is trying to come together and heal as it ghoulishly devours all the grisly footage and the audio distress recordings.  So give the guy a reputational break already, and stop spoiling our outpouring of self-righteous and ever so enjoyable grief!

Culture War Cats Edition

Just in case you still had any doubts, Donald Trump's official job description is our self-proclaimed culture warrior-in-chief. His latest act was to disinvite Super Bowl champions, the Philadelphia Eagles from a White House celebration. He instead used the occasion to outdo embattled Culture Warrior Princess Roseanne Barr in belting out one of our great national hymns. Donald didn't have to take a knee to disrespect the flag. He kneed the sensibilities of the entire nation with his botched lip-synced rendition of God Bless America. The god in question, of course, being himself.

Vying for attention with the latest rendering of Great American Culture Wars is the new game show sensation, "Where In the World is Melania Trump?" Except for a blurred glimpse at a different, closed military-themed White House affair this week, she hadn't been seen in public for nearly a month, ever since undergoing a minor kidney procedure in May. My own catty theory is that she had a little cosmetic surgery - a facelift, an eyelift, a whatever-lift - along with, or even instead of, the alleged kidney embolization. This is what extremely wealthy, famous women do after plastic surgery. They go on an extended vacation to a secret location, or they stayed holed up in their mega-mansions until the scars and bruising fade, a process which can take many weeks. So when I read a report that Melania had been spotted wearing dark glasses indoors as she strolled through the West Wing, my cat-sense went into high alert.

If my theory is true, then my recommendation to Melania would be to go the iconoclastic Betty Ford route and become a national spokesperson for the benefits of cosmetic surgery. Betty was the trailblazer, having had the first ever public First Lady Facelift, frankly admitting at the time that she had an eye job and neck tightening because "I wanted a fresh new face to go with my beautiful new life." 

Betty Ford was also forthcoming about her mastectomy during her husband Jerry's truncated White House tenure, an announcement that encouraged many women to seek out mammograms and detect early cancers. She was later famously honest with revelations about her drug addiction.

  Again, assuming that I'm right about Melania, she could even out-do Betty and become an advocate for making cosmetic surgery available under Medicare and Medicaid --  or, to make her hubby and his party really pissed off, Obamacare silver and bronze plans.

Of course,Donald (who decades ago underwent his own scalp reduction surgery) would probably nix the idea, given how he'd so cattily Twitter-mocked former friend Mika Brzesinki's "bleeding face" last year at Mar-a-Lago (she later staunchly denied having had had a facelift) as well as mean-spirited remarks from Trump supporters about Hillary Clinton's own rumored work and reputed Botox injections.

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Speaking of cattiness, Paul Krugman has been having a field day lambasting fellow Ivy League academic Niall Ferguson for urging his conservative Stanford students to do "oppo research" on the life of a liberal student activist on campus.  This act of unseemly cattiness, the New York Time's chief Bernie Bro-bashing intellectual writes, is emblematic of the "bad faith" of conservative intellectuals in general:

And yes, I do mean “conservative.” There are dishonest individuals of every political persuasion, but if you’re looking for systematic gaslighting, insistence that up is down and black is white, you’ll find it disproportionately on one side of the political spectrum. And the trouble many have in accepting that asymmetry is an important reason for the mess we’re in.

But how can I say that the media refuses to acknowledge conservative bad faith? While some journalists remain squeamish about actually using the word “lie,” and there’s still a tendency for headlines to repeat false talking points (which are only revealed to be false in the body of the article), readers do get a generally accurate picture of the extent to which dishonesty prevails within the Trump administration.

True, Trumpism is infectious -- but the anti-Trump oligarchic resistance antidote of more austerity and more corporate Democrats in Congress and more allegiance to the authorities of the "intelligence community" is an equally addicting and dangerous off-label regimen. Manufactured "divisiveness" sells, and both sides of the corporate Duopoly profit, whether they be electoral winners or losers.

My two-part published response focuses on the suppression of free speech and dissent:

 "Registered Republican professional historian" is an oxymoron.

Phony intellectuals like Ferguson are, in fact, really nothing more than the "snowflakes" they love to accuse liberals of being.

Meanwhile, a recent survey by the PEN press rights group shows that more journalists are actually self-censoring out of fear of government reprisals.

With no real ideology other than Greed is Good, the right wing's m.o. is the stifling of the very First Amendment rights they purport to champion.

Take the case of Cal State writing professor Randa Jarrar, who sent the phony moralizing hordes to the fainting couch this spring when she tweeted that the late Barbara Bush "was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal."

Although the college initially seemed to bow to demands from reactionary media for her firing, she kept her job.

These same reactionaries are now having conniption fits because Samantha Bee got away with calling Ivanka Trump a bad name for her insensitivity to Daddy's ripping tots way from their mothers' arms at the border, while complaining that Trump Show prima donna Roseanne Barr got unfairly fired for her louder, crasser racism.

Ferguson is simply a bully and a coward for "punching down" on a student from his position of power. He might as well declare himself Roseanne's replacement as best supporting actor in the Trump Show, which is what the GOP might actually rename itself.

If it were honest, that is. Which it most definitely is not.

(And following up with a reader pointing out that renowned war critic and historian Andrew Bacevich is a registered Republican) --

Notice that I used the term "reactionary" -- not conservative -- to describe the modern Republican Party.

Not all conservatives are alike, and of course they should not be painted with the same broad brush. Maybe Ferguson is a smart guy, but he was very stupid to buy into the divisive tactics perfected by Trump.

I hadn't realized that Andrew Bacevich, whose work I admire, was still a registered Republican. He writes for, besides outlets like TomDispatch, The American Conservative. While I strongly disagree with much of this site's sexist and even "colorblind" racist content (Pat Buchanan is a regular), it is also reliably critical of American imperialism, endless war and especially neoconservatism. They publish a variety of viewpoints.

Here, for example, is an article on the US drone war, which has gotten especially vicious and unaccountable under Trump:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/targeted-killing-donald-...

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 To his great credit, centrist Times columnist Frank Bruni is not taking Bill Clinton's appearance on the Today show (see my Monday post) kindly. In a scathing piece aptly called "the Sultans of Self-Pity," he writes:

Move over, Alec Baldwin. Bill Clinton does a much better impersonation of Donald Trump.

The hair is wrong but the air is right — self-righteous, self-pitying and suffused with anger that anyone would peddle a version of events less heroic than the one that he prefers. We’re shaming him about ancient groping when we should be showering him with eternal gratitude. And what about his pain?

“I left the White House $16 million in debt,” Clinton said, in an interview that NBC’s “Today” aired on Monday, batting back questions about whether he had demonstrated sufficient contrition for converting a 22-year-old’s romantic idolization of him into sexual favors and setting off a sequence of events that savaged her. I don’t know what legal bills have to do with a moral ledger. But I can see that his fixations on money and martyrdom are intact.

The Clinton team is now in full damage control mode. The Times swiftly disappeared Bruni's column from the top right corner of the digital home page, and Stephen Colbert invited Bill on his Tuesday show not for a comb-over gag, but for a moral makeover - or as Colbert termed it, a "do-over." Now that Bill has summoned up enough moral courage to finally utter Monica's name right out loud, maybe he hopes he can get on with his book tour without further ado. Let us hope that he cannot. (Hiss, scratch.)

My published response to the Bruni column:

One common theme in the MeToo movement is that the perpetrators aren't getting called to account until relatively late in their lives,often decades after their predatory behavior was an "open secret" within the overlapping spheres of power they inhabit.

Better late than never, of course, but oh what damage these men have done, not only to their female victims, but to the country and society at large.

During the Lewinsky episode, leading feminists, most notably Gloria Steinem, came to Bill's defense. His abuse of power was cast as a purely partisan issue, with blame deflected from him onto the much nastier and hypocritical Republicans. At the same time he was castigating Bill, Newt Gingrich was cheating on his own wife.

Meanwhile, Bill had connived with Newt to "end welfare as we know it" with the ensuing cruel reform package condemning millions of women to whole lifetimes of poverty.

 It's not surprising that Trump and Clinton, who were both once considered "outsiders" in New York high society, golfed together at Trump's club. It's not surprising that the Clintons attended Trump's third wedding. Not because they liked Trump, of course, but because these "transactional" things are what rich and famous people have to do to maintain their lifestyles and images and status and power.

How ironic that Bill is now promoting pulp called "The President Is Missing."

In reality it's the presidency that's missing, since Trump's organized crime cartel has effectively hijacked it.

(photo credit: Bob's Blog)