The tombstone pictured to the left, for the uninitiated, is famously from Kurt Vonnegut's
Slaughterhouse Five. The day after Vonnegut passed away earlier this April, I decided to make said tombstone my facebook profile picture for a while(instead of what it had been, to that point: a shot of my dog Lady licking my face while we lounged on a floral-printed couch.) It was a small gesture, granted, but was undertaken mainly for my own personal reasons: namely the expression in a (microcosmically myopically limited) public arena of the very real grief that I--and countless other pseudo-literati, no doubt--felt at the passing of such an iconic monument of a writer. I cried when I heard that Vonnegut passed on.
Vonnegut was, as the avclub pointed out shortly thereafter,
simply better at stuff than his peers. To anyone who'd ever become familiar with the man's work(s), this truth was/is self-evident, and perhaps they would have appreciated the sentiment behind my facebook-pic gesture (if they'd ever seen it--unlikely though
that may be.) What Vonnegut's death meant though, to those affected by it, was that we would never read another new book of his; that by dying, Vonnegut's body of work became crystallized firmly in the past.
I raise the issue because it fits into the context of a newer, similarly re-reactionary phenomenon: the away message memorials and/or facebook profile-pic-publicized grieving of Redskins fans over Sean Taylor's recent shooting and death...and the response(s) to them. If you're on facebook and you know me, you've most likely seen at least a few friends who've, as I have, replaced whatever their old profile pic was with a shot of the Meast himself, #21 of our beloved Redskins. As I write, I count 11 facebook friends and acquaintances with Taylor-ized profiles...
Not that there's anything wrong with that...See, now I'm gonna get meta up in this blog. I'm gonna blog about (/react to) the reactions of
a few online friends to
my and
others' (already reactionary, emotional) choice of silly online memorialization following the death of a collective hero. I know, I know:
how masturbatory...how narcissistic...how unimportant. But how
appropriate to air out in a blog!
I've noticed the comments of several people in particular across my various buddylists and blogrolls. Each, I assume, is not a fan of the Redskins. And each's comments have seemed, to me, to serve to question the validity of the sentiments of profile Taylor-izers.
Paraphrasing the first [anonymous] away message, from the very *DAY* the shooting occurred:
"7 Marines died in Baghdad today. They didn't play football or make millions, but they were pretty fucking important too."I mean, really! What is this? A righteous sanctimony competition? Could this responder just be commenting to piss on a pity party to which they were never invited in the first place? Should they, you know, follow the advice their momma surely gave them and simply, um...say nothing when there is nothing nice to say at all?
Which brings me to the second [anonymous] status message I'll quote in this here post: "wondering why Rosa Parks didn't get her picture on Facebook more when she died, or the guy shot in southeast last week."
OK, you got us bereaved Redskins fans pinned right there. We OBVIOUSLY invest a whole shit-ton of emotional energy into an institution and a game that counts for absolutely nothing in the realm of things that Actually Matter--read: Are Capitalized. Are Important--in some hypothetical Real World where people waste none of their precious time...utils, whatever...on matters that aren't wholly concerned with some vague notion of an absolute greater good. And it goes without saying that all these questions of (relative...right?) value are ABSOLUTELY defined for us here by people who'd tell us what we should and should not care about. Convenient.
Anyway: if you don't get it, you just don't get it. Being a football fan means that you happen to use the same diversion as several hundred thousand people to escape so-called reality for a few hours every Autumn Sunday afternoon. And nothing more.
It's only natural: everyone needs to have silly stuff to care about; we'd all go nuts otherwise...Reality bites. Does it really matter if these silly emotional investments we all make happen to be into people or gods or football teams or television dramas or the myriad manifestations of art or sex? Is there a quantifiable difference?
No. What matters is that we have found ways to occupy our selves. To bond, even.
When tragedy affects these silly emotional investments people make, (silly or not,) there is a genuine emotional response on the part of the investor. And though we all may not share the same response or care when, say, a Kurt Vonnegut (/or Cobain) or Sean Taylor or Rosa Parks or a soldier anywhere (/or an innocent civilian anywhere!) dies: maybe it's better not to point out the fact that one
doesn't feel or care about the latest tragedy, and just allow the space
to actually feel or care to those silly, misguided emotion-investors who
do.And yes. This is indeed a motherfucking sanctimony competition.
Bitches.
I just came across (for those who don't know of him: former Redskins great) Darrell Green's blog...he had some nice things to say in remembrance of Sean Taylor. He does get a little overly overtly religious in his post for my taste, but basically Green makes, far more eloquently than I did, the point I wanted to get across in my facebook meta-grief post:
