When I was eight or nine, I read Life on the Mississippi, where one of the many American folkways Twain skewers is the nice Victorian writer-lady whose specialty is churning out reams of doggerel-to-order for local newspaper obituaries. That was my introduction to what Kelly Conaboy, in Gawker, calls grief porn:
… Last week, there is a good chance that Facebook served up to you a Buzzfeed post entitled “A Father Sings To His Dying Newborn Son After His Wife Dies Following Childbirth.” Below the site’s iconic yellow buttons—”LOL,” “win,” “omg,” “cute”—sits, indeed, a video of a father singing to his dying newborn son after his wife died following childbirth. As the incubator hums and clicks, you can, if you want, watch a man in anguish sing for the end of his small family. In a tab next to Gmail, you can watch his helpless son die.
“The video has spread across the world,” BuzzFeed boasts. According to Buzzfeed and YouTube’s public statistics, the post has been viewed over three million times; the video, over 14 million…
This most recent post is just one example in an Internet full of oddly hectoring tributes to fallen strangers. Gawker, true as always to our name, isn’t exempt from cashing in on this desire. A quick look at our “tragedy” tag offers abundant examples of grief-for-grief’s sake…
Grief porn is as old a tabloid category as sex scandal. Like regular pornography, it offers a packaged, heightened jolt that mimics a natural, human experience. It’s voyeuristic, addictive, and compulsively attractive. It grabs at a desire to indulge when indulgence is otherwise unavailable. It promises a brief, satisfying release.
And, like regular pornography, the internet has transformed it. Freed from the already relaxed constraints of tabloid journalism, grief porn is no longer obligated to fake newsworthiness or importance. You don’t need to die in a particularly tragic way; your death doesn’t need to be the occasion for punishment or law-enactment. You just need to have produced consumable, shareable content before your untimely death. Rather than a news angle allowing a writer to smuggle grief porn into a paper, a grief-porn angle allows a content creator to smuggle a shareable unit onto Facebook…
And, yes, Conaboy’s essay has already generated 241 comments and 649 Facebook ‘likes’ in just over 24 hours.
raven
Jesus, fuck the rain I’m going back down and try to catch some fish. What a bummer.
chrome agnomen
good grief!
Baud
Who took the video in the first place?
Tree With Water
You reading level as a kid was off the charts. You were reading Life On The Mississippi at an age when I was reading comic books and the Weekly Reader.
satby
I won’t click, but I will say that 2 different mothers I know, both of whom lost daughters (one to murder, one to suicide) both keep their girls Facebook pages updated as if the kids were still alive almost. I hope it helps them cope, but I wonder if it just keeps them stuck in grief.
raven
@satby: There was a regular at FDL who was a buddy of mine. He was single and there was no one to take down his FB page so folks still say hi and send him RIP wishes.
Belafon
I guess blogs are just meta-porn sites then.
srv
It’s like ogrish, but with music.
Just Good Sense
I don’t remember that from “Life,” but there was Emmeline Grangerford in “Huck Finn,” one of my all time favorite literary side characters:
“Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on hand with her “tribute” before he was cold. She called them tributes. The neighbors said it was the doctor first, then Emmeline, then the undertaker. The undertaker never got in ahead of Emmeline but once, and then she hung fire on a rhyme for the dead person’s name, which was Whistler.”
Steve from Antioch
Good essay and the analogy to porn is apt.
The “outrage of the day” stories serve a similar function: Oh my God, Bill Cosby is a pig — can you believe the sexist shirt that guy wore — Obama is shredding the constitution — she left her babies in a hot car while getting her nails done — some stupid shit said some stupid shit — ad nauseam.
These stories allow the reader/poster to feel righteous and outraged for a few minutes without any actual personal risk and (this is where the problem lies) without having to actually do anything.
satby
@raven: Like I said, I hope it helps them cope with their grief.
Another Holocene Human
I did not read this article because it just reads as moral scolding or mockery. “Hur hur, people with empathy.” Oh and scolding the people who create the “content”. Sounds like redditors screaming down an icky girl who gets “karma points” for posting her own selfie.
The hate rolling off is just palpable. Is this supposed to be newsworthy because of the “internet” angle?
Has this dumbass never read the old Newsweek? Or the old nightly local news? How about history class? Illustrated magazines. Harpers.
Ever gone to an Italian opera? Suor Angelica?
Catholic services? On the holidays? With the meditations?
People with human emotions watch this stuff because they’re still human too. Of course a clinical sociopath or narcissistic wouldn’t get that.
different-church-lady
“Grandpa, what was the world like before Facebook?”
“Well, Jimmy, we had this magical thing called ‘actual human contact’.”
Baud
@different-church-lady:
That sounds horrible.
different-church-lady
@Baud: One did have to shower more frequently, yes.
Gin & Tonic
@different-church-lady: You get germs that way.
Another Holocene Human
@satby:
I would be concerned as well. I think to some extent such actions can soothe the pain but if you get too stuck you actually start destroying all of your relationships with the living and it becomes a real problem.
When my wife was grieving she sat shiva. It didn’t make the pain go away but it kept her from doing anything more self-destructive during the worst of it and helped her frame before and after. Irish culture has the wake. But a lot of times in our culture people are under pressure to make the funeral arrangements, close up affairs, and then run right back to work without taking any time to grieve. If you’re a middle-aged mother who buried your daughter you were probably responsible for taking care of all of the final arrangements so the funeral was not a time for you to let go. So I think unfinished grieving must be very common in such circumstances.
Another Holocene Human
@Steve from Antioch:
Righteous and outraged is a totally different emotional and brain setting from watching something you know is going to make you bawl your eyes out.
Watching stuff that makes you cry is an old tradition, not new.
Hate radio isn’t anything new either but it went away for a while except for those freaky backwoods preacher shows when you went in between civilized places on the interstate but then Limbaugh took the act national [eta: with less Jesus] and the volume has been cranked up ever since, replaced by hate TV because his fans retired and watch cable in their recliner all day.
Self-righteous slacktivism isn’t new. I’m sure the number of concerned liberals who wanked about segregation and Jim Crow back in the 1960s well outnumbered the whites who actually risked their lives to travel to Mississippi to do something about it.
Amir Khalid
I find the term “grief porn” offensive for what it suggests. When you post your bereavement on the internet, as many a Balloon Juicer has done here, are you really offering a kind of titillation? Are strangers who join in the mourning doing so for some sick form of gratification? No and no.
Keith G
@satby:
I am beginning to feel that this is part of the snow flake-azation of the ‘first world’ human experience.
That is: “What I am going through is so unique and so special that it must be documented for others to experience.”
Also communal displays of grief have become a replacement connective tissue temporarily joining strangers in a low-cost emotional buzz – hence the shared, spontaneous shrines that usually are seen popping up after some affecting death.
Baud
@efgoldman:
It’s a wonder they were able to conceive a child.
different-church-lady
@efgoldman: I have a rule for myself: if I wish to communicate with someone in a home, I must be in the same room as they are. I will not yell across a house, and I will not phone or text.
People think I’m weird. I’m good with that.
Another Holocene Human
@efgoldman: If actual human contact caused a lot of pain and anxiety, you’d reach for the computer too.
While we’re ranting about kids today, just remember there are a lot of blind people who have a social life and jobs because of the computer. There are autistic people who are able to make friendships that spill over into face to face. There are people in isolated rural places who are able to meet people who share their interests and talk to them in real time instead of waiting for a monthly newsletter to come (late) in the post. There are people in the Bible Belt who were able to find other atheists online … and translate that into activism that never would have been possible in the days when each freethinker thought they were the only one. There are poor families in desperate circumstances who have been able to reach total strangers for help.
And then there’s twitter. Organizing revolutions. Pushing back against the media. Black twitter. Black twitter’s hashtag campaigns have pushed through institutional barriers to challenge the biased representation of African Americans in the media. The Black press used talk about this but whites never saw it.
Because of facebook, a post by the Coalition for Immokalee Workers can bounce clear across the country in hours. Before? You’d only know if you subscribed to obscure lefty-anarchist-labor newsletters.
I could keep going but I think I’ve made my point.
jake the antisoshul soshulist
I may be The Grumpiest Old Man, or maybe just a misanthrope. But sometimes human contact is overrated.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
I don’t do phone or text, but I’m more than willing to yell.
gogol's wife
@Keith G:
I don’t know what ever happened to having tributes to the dead confined to the cemetery. We have a shrine on the street near our house commemorating a motorcycle accident that happened at least five years ago. I find it strange and very pagan. Should every spot on which someone died be piled up with stuffed bunny rabbits?
Another Holocene Human
@Keith G: Communal displays of grief are as old as humanity. What the hell are you talking about?
And I remember those shrines since I was a child. Some places they even use taxpayer money to make them official.
different-church-lady
@Another Holocene Human: There’s nothing wrong with using a computer to bridge distance.
There is something wrong with using a computer to create distance. Especially with those who are nominally considered “loved ones”. We get to pretend we are ‘interacting’ with people, when what we are really doing is failing to do any actual interaction. Instead we broadcast our parallel monologues.
I’ll take one dysfunctional Balloon Juice conversation over a thousand digital McThoughs parading across my screen from people who are hooked on a digital social “toy” that rewards them for quantity over quality.
Baud
@Another Holocene Human:
What was your point? I doubt anyone here longs for the days when we didn’t have the Internet at all.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Sexting.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
Is there any other kind?
Omnes Omnibus
@Another Holocene Human:
Like these?
different-church-lady
@Baud: I’m in a charitable mood.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Sexting causes pregnancy?…
I’m in deep shit.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: NO. SATSQ.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: Anal won’t result in pregnancy.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Omnes Omnibus: It could, but the probability is very, very low.
Omnes Omnibus
@BillinGlendaleCA: Fair enough.
PIGL
@Amir Khalid: I partly agree. When tales of loss are shared here, I feel something, even for commenters I don’t recall much about…that’s because this is a community that I have chosen to involve myself in, although mostly as a lurker.
But mostly, I disagree. Turning a personal tragedy into a million-viewer phenom seems different to me, because there are no relationships or community from which the grief manifested would normally develop, or through which action can be taken if called for.
We can not feel all the pain and misery and loss in the world; but we should not squander what ability to feel and respond that we have on random selections made by others, which pop from nowhere, and vanish like a burst soap-bubble.
I see this as another form of commodification.
Another Holocene Human
Good luck trying to extirpate that “pagan” impulse out of humanity. It’s been tried–oh it’s been tried.
And yet the human subjects stubbornly prefer that which they can see and touch.
Nobody asked, but here’s my silly theory. The fluffy bunnies are a way to offer love to someone who can no longer receive it. As Americans, statistically, we don’t touch each other very much. And this lack of touch is psychologically harmful. The plushies are a safe way to express painful emotions. Anyway, don’t expect this is a good theory. Do think the shrines have gotten bigger and more elaborate but they’re nothing new.
PIGL
@different-church-lady: My sibs and mother had a habit of starting a conversation while walking out of the room. It still drives me bananas. And I am afraid I may do it myself.
Another Holocene Human
@PIGL: only to the extent buzzfeed and other clickbait sites do it, and nobody is forcing you to go to those sites … just like nobody makes you watch local news half hour or subscribe to Snoozeweek.
Aimai
@Amir Khalid: thank you.
Lee
I’ve watched a lot of harsh shit on the internet and there is no fucking way I’m watching that video.
Aimai
@Keith G: jesus christ have you never met anyone from the third world who has lost an adult child? People grieve life long in many societies. Women wear black for decades. People go to mass every week and mourn. People make and keep memorials. Have a little fucking pity for people suffering loss. Its not something that being “first world” insulates you from.
Baud
This conversation has caused me to remember General Stuck. :-(
sm*t cl*de
Catholic services? On the holidays? With the meditations?
I am not convinced that “part of a European death cult” is synonymous with “emotionally healthy”.
Jay C
@Baud:
Direct “human contact” isn’t really needed much for that anymore, given advances in medical science. Our best friends’ son and DIL will celebrate their son’s second birthday on Jan. 2. She had had cancer: and so, pre-chemo, they in-vitro fertilized some eggs, froze the embryos, and later, when she was in remission, and they were ready (i.e., had the financing), they thawed an embryo, and had it carried to term by a surrogate mother. Their kid is “theirs” legally, and genetically, but arrived in a definitely “hands-off” manner. Their hands, anyway……
Violet
Haven’t read the article. Does it say who took the video of the dad? Who posted it? If the dad didn’t post it or didn’t give permission then that’s a terrible thing to do to him. If he did post it, then he must have had some idea of how the internet works, even if he never expected it to go viral. Once you post it, it’s out of your control.
Timurid
I’d rather watch two hours of ISIS beheadings than watch that video…
Felonius Monk
@Tree With Water: I agree with you. I didn’t read Life on the Mississippi until freshman year in college.
dance around in your bones
@Baud:
Yeah, I’d like to know that, too. Maybe if I go back and read the comments someone will fill me in. A weird thing to do…..
chopper
@Violet:
It could be he gave permission to whomever captured the video to post it to a limited group like family. And someone then put it out in the world.
Violet
@chopper: Right, and if that’s the case, the person who did that is a complete dick. Horrible thing to do to anyone in that situation. Just cruel. I wish there were penalties of some sort when people do that kind of shit.
Karen in GA
Maybe it’s growing up in a fucked up family that thrives on misery to the point of resenting people who are happy, and using their self-inflicted unhappiness to get attention and manipulate everyone around them — but the “look at me” aspect of people posting personal tragedy online (outside of an existing community of people they’re already familiar with) makes me cringe.
Probably says more about me than about the people posting, though.
Keith G
@Aimai: Yes, M’am.
Amir Khalid
@Violet: From the Buzzfeed and Gawker stories, it doesn’t appear that the grieving father had any problem with the video being seen by the whole world. He expresses only gratitude for the love and support of strangers.
John Revolta
I don’t remember this bit in “Life” although I’ve read it a buncha times. However, it reminds me of one of my favorite parts of the book, where Twain describes the two “scoundrels” who go around selling margarine and cottonseed oil in place of olive oil and butter. Shocking!
Keith G
Is not much different than…
Anyway, back to work.
ruemara
I have had a crash course in public grief and human nature. And I get to learn this lesson daily, because I get constant helpful guidance on how I’m doing my job wrong from people who never knew her personally or worked with her, but understand better than the people she trained, what she wanted. But, people feel connected and I don’t begrudge them both the need to feed that desire to feel or for protecting the people that made them feel. It’s why all this is, is a new version of the same old thing. It’s why people write romances and tragedies. Nothing new under the sun.
Tommy
@Karen in GA: This has just become a “thing.” I read a story the other day talking about how strange it is when we die, our Facebook and Twitter pages just sit there. Well a family the other day after their son died took over his Facebook page and made it basically a virtual memorial service. I thought that was kind of cool.
As to this video. Generally speaking, I am a sap for stuff like this. I just don’t actively seek it out and it sounds too painful to watch. I can’t nor won’t fault the guy. The Internet lets us express ourselves in ways we couldn’t not that long ago. I post personal stuff here. Stuff I am sure that would make most people in my family cringe. They NEVER talk about their lives, how they feel, what they think to those they LOVE. To folks on the Internet, well unheard of.
Omnes Omnibus
@Karen in GA: Some people need support from others in stressful situations. Others need to go off and deal with it on their own. Human nature has some major variations.
Omnes Omnibus
@sm*t cl*de: Doesn’t just about every society have mourning rituals?
Mnemosyne
@gogol’s wife:
The one time I participated in one of those was when this happened. I did not know the murder victim well, but I was a regular at the Buster Keaton screenings and I had interviewed him for a freelance story I was working on about Keaton.
Sometimes there are people that we know in public life, so to speak, who are not close friends or family but who we miss when they’re gone. I’m not sure why it’s a problem to do that same acknowledgement in a public place rather than hiding it away in a cemetery.
(BTW, despite the pessimism of that story, the theater did re-open and is currently known as The Cinefamily. I still have not been back since the murder.)
Violet
@Amir Khalid: Then I don’t have much problem with it. People grieve in different ways. I might not like a video like that taken let alone turned into a viral sensation, but he finds it helpful. So that’s good that he’s finding comfort in what is a terrible, tragic situation.
Who’s to say what will comfort the grieving and what is right and wrong in that difficult process. People grieve in their own ways and what works for someone may be horrible for another. So long as he’s okay with it, then that’s fine with me. Doesn’t mean I have to look at it or comment on it but that’s another issue entirely.
Omnes Omnibus
@gogol’s wife: @Mnemosyne: One that I see far too many of are ghost bikes (bicycles painted white and placed at the site of a car-bike fatality). I think they are a good thing – especially as a safety reminder to driver and rider alike.
mai naem
I wish the media would leave this stuff alone. When Joan Rivers died, they showed a pic of Melissa Rivers with her kid outside the funeral home while the casket was being moved. Not during the funeral – this was the day before or so. I know she was a celebrity but god can’t we give just leave these people alone at that time. I can see covering the funeral for a country leader in depth but otherwise, leave these people alone.
Tree With Water
@Felonius Monk: Next she’ll be telling us she translated Life On The Mississippi into Latin when she was 10 years old..
Karen in GA
Yeah, suffering a tragedy and being very open about wanting support makes sense, and I have nothing against people who deal with it that way. I’ll be first to admit my perspective on it is pretty warped. I just can’t deal with people who spend their whole lives going “Look at meeeee! I’m suffering!”
Really, though, the more I think about it, the more I realize this is a whole other topic.
Never mind! /Litella
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
They’ve started putting ghost bikes around the Los Angeles area, but they’re usually pretty anonymous. The ones I’ve seen don’t have any indication of the victim’s name, just the bike itself and sometimes some flowers.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne:
Same here. Although the name may be on it somewhere. I have never looked that closely.
Tommy
@Violet: Yeah I clicked over for the story. Coudn’t bring myself to watch the video when I saw he was singing Blackbirds (about my favorite Beatles song) and had named his child Lennon James Picco. The pics were heartbreaking enough. To lose your wife during childbirth, if that wasn’t enough to lose the child. Wow.
@Omnes Omnibus: Yes to more of that. I spend more time on my mountain bike than I spend in a car. Been hit by a car. They as you said remind people. I know when I am on my bike almost nobody “sees” me. I got to take care of myself. “gogol’s wife” mentioned roadside memorials. By me we don’t have stuff animals, but there is an intersection where there are a number of crosses. People it seems too often die there. They make me mentally think to be hyper-aware when driving around/through it.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Omnes Omnibus: Drivers around here would probably just end up hitting them, too busy talking/texting on their cell phones.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tree With Water: I don’t know about AL, but I translated it into Sanskrit when I was nine.
/completely mendacious boast
wasabi gasp
@different-church-lady: I kinda flipped out on a roommate once. I was in the kitchen with hands full of dinner fixing when the phone rang. It was my roommate asking for computer help from another room.
Violet
@Mnemosyne: @Omnes Omnibus: You can look up who the ghost bike is for here: http://ghostbikes.org/. Although I’ve found it to be a little out of date sometimes.
Mnemosyne
@BillinGlendaleCA:
I know for sure there’s one on Glendale Ave. at the strip mall where World Market is — it’s on the sidewalk in front of Rubio’s.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Tommy: Interesting, Blackbird was a McCartney song, Lennon probably wasn’t even in the studio. He didn’t show for alot of the white album sessions, he was off with Yoko(Clapton played on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”).
Summer
I don’t remember Life on the Mississippi, but in Huckleberry Finn poor, dead, teenage Emmaline Grangerford pens the immortal “Ode to Steven Dowling Bots”:
Despised love struck not with woe
That head of curly knots,
Nor stomach troubles laid him low,
Young Stephen Dowling Bots.
O no. Then list with tearful eye,
Whilst I his fate do tell.
His soul did from this cold world fly,
By falling down a well.
They got him out and emptied him;
Alas it was too late;
His spirit was gone for to sport aloft
In the realms of the good and great.
Her poetry writing was only a brief respite from painting pictures of funerals and whatnot:
Tommy
@wasabi gasp: Yeah. I spend time with my family throughout the year, but this time of the year with Christmas and Thanksgiving, many days together. We have sleepovers at each others homes. If somebody texted another person while in the same house there would be both yelling and mocking. More mocking. And I build websites for a living and my brother is a Cisco networking engineer. “Nerds.”
CZanne
@gogol’s wife:
We have one, too, on a busy street. It memorializes a local organizer who was hit while cycling. It serves to get people to slow down, watch for cyclists and pedestrians, be aware of others. John left many legacies, but even now, several years later, he’s still making the world a slightly better place.
Mnemosyne
@different-church-lady:
One of my co-workers Skypes with his wife while they’re sitting on the couch together playing World of Warcraft.
He thinks it’s weird that I sometimes text my husband when we’re at home. Though, usually, I do it to send him a website or photo.
satby
@PIGL: I think you said what I was sort of feeling. I’m unwilling to be a voyeur to someone else’s private grief.
And I am Irish, we’re traditionally fine with death and grief and celebrating the lost, but a clip like the one described above seems voyeuristic. But who am I, maybe for this father the idea that thousands felt his loss for a moment made it bearable.
dance around in your bones
I read voraciously as a kid. I still remember my sister and I sitting in the living room together, both reading from different books, and saying “Listen to THIS!!” and quoting paragraphs to each other.
We had all our parental unit’s college books to read, no holds barred (The Glass Family, anyone?) and all the classics (including that series of blue, gold, green and red Fairy books, as well as the knights in shining armour stuff (Good education for Monty Python later in life!) , the Baba Yaga stuff, that wild girl on a pony with a knife strapped to her hip (who I SO wanted to be!!) and Twain, Poe, Kafka (The COCKROACH!!!!) and Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy,……hell, I even read Ayn Rand when I was about 11 or so and was captivated for about all of a week.
Not bragging, just sayin;. Reading IS GOOD. Like BACON IS GOOD! Like my wallet says Bad Ass Motherfucker on it (ok, it doesn’t.)
Testify to reading.
Omnes Omnibus
@dance around in your bones:
I have never been able to read more than about 20 pages into Atlas Shrugged. I haven’t attempted The Fountainhead.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Omnes Omnibus: You got 10 pages farther than I did. And I had planned to translate it into Nahuatl.
Omnes Omnibus
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
You have disappointed many Aztecs.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
The movie version of The Fountainhead (with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal) is hilarious. There’s a good reason it gets four bombs in Bad Movies We Love.
gogol's wife
@Mnemosyne:
The best part is Henry Hull playing the Louis Sullivan figure.
God, that courtroom monologue is horrible! Gary Cooper sometimes seems like the greatest actor in the world (Ball of Fire), and other times he’s just deadly.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
Me either. I’d attempt it just to see what all the fuss is about, but I heard the prose is long and turgid.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: I also managed to avoid a libertarian phase.
Mnemosyne
@gogol’s wife:
As someone who grew up in Frank Lloyd Wright Land (aka the North Shore suburbs of Chicago), it cracked me up that they spent so much time talking about the “revolutionary” architecture that was clearly (and badly) ripped off from Wright’s work.
I think I read somewhere that Rand based the character partially on Wright, but left out the whole “Wright’s second family massacred by a disgruntled employee” part of the story.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
I was never a full-fledged libertarian, but I probably leaned more libertarian when I was younger and stupider.
Baud
And here I thought it was you and me.
Tommy
@dance around in your bones: Right on, right on! I grew up in a house of books, almost literally. They were everywhere. In the “rooms for books” as my mom would say, and in the kitchen, bathroom, you name it. At times we had to move books to do something. Dad is now retired and lives in the house his grandfather built. Bought the house across the street just for his books. He has already run out of space. When mom and dad come visit he usually comes with a sack of books he found at used bookstores.
I so loved this. Why I have a ton of books in my house. I think a bookshelf in every room, including my “library room” that is nothing but books. I’ll have a date over for the first time, or really anybody, and they see this room of books and are stunned. I find most people don’t read. I often say “tell me what you enjoy, think about, I can take you to any world.”
Books are cool!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: When I was about the age when libertarianism can first strike (15ish), I was introduced to Richard Hofstadter and John Kenneth Galbraith.
raven
@dance around in your bones: I read a book about this area, “The Rise and Decline of the Redneck Rivera”. I enjoyed it and emailed the author and told him so. We’re meeting for a cup of joe in the morning.
Omnes Omnibus
@raven: That’s cool.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
I think what saved me was that I was born with an internal BS meter. I had almost no exposure to liberal thinking growing up, but something about both the ideas and the people of the right just struck me as off, even before I was experienced and educated enough to articulate it.
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: It was funny, he was a prof at a school in North Alabama and he had just retired and moved into the house his grandmother had bought down here when there was nothing but sand roads. I emailed him last week to tell him we were coming and it he was three blocks away in Athens with a buddy going to the UGA-Auburn game!
Mike J
@Omnes Omnibus: I was eleven or twelve when the Sex Pistols played Memphis. Of course I didn’t get to go, but I was fascinated. I did pick up an early understanding that bad ass anti-establishment posturing often isn’t well thought out.
Tokyokie
A year or so ago, I was looking up stuff on the
Intertubz about Preikestolen, an almost 2,000-foot cliff above a fjord in Norway, and found a YouTube video. It was some dude goofing for his friend with the camera, but it showed the view from up there, when suddenly the goof disappeared from the bottom of the frame, apparently going over the edge. I was repulsed and turned it off immediately, but I still wonder what sort of person trivializes his friend’s death for a moment of Internet fame? He must be proud.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: The other thing for me was that my family is full of pro-labor liberals. It makes for reasonably peaceful holidays- at least on the politics front.
Mnemosyne
@Tokyokie:
If it makes you feel any better, it was probably a hoax — the majority of the videos showing accidents conveniently caught on camera turn out to be hoaxes.
But then you have to wonder what kind of people fake an on-camera death to get web hits.
Violet
@Omnes Omnibus: Last Thanksgiving we found out that everyone but us owns guns. Plural. And they’re not afraid to use them. On people. Yay.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
I have one relative who is a mild wingnut, and we just try to avoid politics. I really can’t imagine liberals whose family is majority rabid right-wing.
Tommy
@Baud: Interesting.
I have often wondered how I became a far left liberal while my parents are moderate Republicans and other family members, far, far right. I’ve pondered this for many hours.
What I come to is something I guess is clear in hindsight. They never forced their views down on me. Gave me access to books and knowledge. Like paying for college and grad school. As I have said, let me figure stuff out for myself. No judgment. Then I came out the other side different than them.
Mnemosyne
@Baud:
(raises hand)
It wasn’t really all that bad until Fox News and the election of 2000. Then things got pretty ugly. If I ever meet Roger Ailes and/or Rupert Murdoch, I will kick them repeatedly in the balls for making my family insane. They were Republicans before Fox News, but they weren’t bizarre conspiracy believers. (Did you know that Mussolini was a Communist, so therefore fascism is a Communist plot? Straight from Fox News, yo.)
ETA: I’ve called myself the “white sheep of the family” for years because I rarely drink, don’t smoke, don’t do illegal drugs, and vote Democrat.
raven
HAHAHA, Notre Dame missed a chip shot for the tie!
Baud
@Tommy:
Right. I really didn’t have that much exposure to liberal ideas. Some, but I had much more exposure to the conservative worldview. I guess I just got lucky.
Baud
@Mnemosyne:
I’m very sorry to hear that. I really don’t know how I would handle the if it were me. My patience and tolerance of people is extremely low.
Mnemosyne
@Baud:
Being in therapy helped. A lot. It made it a lot easier to ignore the bait my dad and brother would try to drop and change the subject to something else.
Harder to do when Fox News was blaring in the background, but sometimes possible.
Tommy
@Baud: I will then invite you to the holidays at my house. Or really the house of my brother’s wife’s family.
This is my next few weeks. I’ve learned over the last six years or so he married into this family to pick my fights. I have learned not to fight. They have learned not to fight with me, because I will engage. Now we just don’t fight. We don’t talk politics. We talk sports, cars, weather, but not politics.
Kind of like a truce …..
Ruckus
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
@Baud:
Neither of you missed a thing. In fact you are better off never having picked up one of those horrible tomes. One of the worst authors ever. How her books every got published is beyond me. The style is horrible and the content is fucking stupid. All in all a complete waste of time, paper and ink. I’d much rather read anything from scientology, and I wouldn’t touch that crap with a ten foot pole and rubber gloves, just in case some of the stupid were to rub off.
Howard Beale IV
Enough greif porn-time for kitteh porn!
dance around in your bones
The Kabouters (The Gnomes, or Elves) in Amsterdam used to leave white painted bikes around the city for people to use. You’d pick one up, ride to wherever your destination was, and spozedly leave it there for another to use.
Well, A’dam is a heavily bike friendly city (I rode a bike there the whole time I was pregnant, often with my girlfriend’s kid on a child seat) – but even in friendly Amsterdam, people would steal the bikes, repaint them, and claim them as their own.
A’dam even has BIKE police – I remember getting stopped by a couple of (cute) bike police as I was returning from De Kosmos, because my front bike light was out. They stopped me dead, took the bike, and left me to walk home all pregnant and shit.
That was harsh.
RSA
I’m on board with the comments of @Another Holocene Human and @Amir Khalid. Here’s another bit from the article:
I’ve been in this situation, as some of you know, having written about a personal tragedy in an essay in the New York Times. I think it’s a pretty clear example of what the writer of the article calls grief porn.
Afterwards I received maybe 50 email messages from people I didn’t know. Some offered encouragement, others shared the stories of their own lives. I answered all of them. It was heartening to me, and apparently what I wrote helped other people as well. Not that I expected that–I put my thoughts out in the open because it was hard to do it over and over with everyone I know, face to face. So was it worth it? Well, yeah. If the writer can’t imagine people in pain feeling gracious to strangers expressing sympathy, then I don’t think she understands what’s going on. She’s making judgments about the people at the center of tragedies and about the people responding to them, and I think she’s getting it completely wrong.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: I spent a Thanksgiving at the family home of a conservative army buddy with his conservative family. I was just out of law school and living in Columbus and he was teaching ROTC in Indianapolis (his hometown). I arrived and was introduced as a liberal. There were some jokes during the day, but since I was a guest it was fairly lighthearted and I responded the same way.
dance around in your bones
Ok, totally misread the concept of ‘ghost bikes’ and left a lengthy reply that is in moderation prolly fer the next fucking week.
Hope y’all get to read it some year.
Another Holocene Human
OT:
NPR: Is Bill Cosby Right (Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind)?
Very well written, nuanced essay but I had to quit halfway through. The author thinks [ETA: sorry, speculates would be more accurate] Cosby was ragging on poor Blacks because of the shame he feels about their behavior but I wondered if he was ragging on supposed Black criminality because he IS a fucking criminal. It’s always projection.
I wonder if he’s one of those serial criminals who part of his steps back and wonders why he’s gotten away with it for so damn long. These kinds of sadistic criminals often buy into very black/white religious/moral thought, meaning they know right from wrong but part of the thrill is both the cruelty and pain inflicted and the transgressive nature which makes them feel powerful. But they wonder why they haven’t been stopped yet.
dance around in your bones
@Baud:
A friend of mine used to call that a BS antenna, and you either had it or you did not. If yer antenna were up, coolio. If they were locked and in the closed position for landing. all bets are off.
Another Holocene Human
#thatuncomfortablefeeling when you realize that NewsOne is not a RW noise bleater repeater like NewsMax and WND and DailyMail.
TBF, it’s a pretty shitty name for a website. I’ll go slither off and feel silly now.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
I suppose it’s different when you can just walk away from the family if things go south.
dance around in your bones
@Mike J:
We took our daughter to an X concert in LA back in the day when she was 8 or so. Mom was in the mosh pit duking it out with the boys, and Dad had her on his shoulders in the back of the room. She was terrified.
Also when we went to see “The Decline of Western Civilization” with all the punks and their hairdos and tats. She STILL talks about that and she’s 42 years old.
How could we have been so insensitive??!! Bad parental units,BAD!!
skerry
Today is the anniversary of the death of good friends’ daughter. She was 24 and murdered in cold blood. I watched her grow from a young girl. People grieve in their own way and time. I have learned to not question another’s grief process. This is always a dark day for me.
Tears flow sometimes happy,
Sometimes they flow sad.
The path in which the tears create
Remind of times we had…
~ Unknown
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Ruckus: You’re too hard on Alisa. Her stories were entertaining and hard to put down if you were the right age and in the right frame of mind.
If you want an example of a book that is impossible to read, try Hans Küng’s Does God Exist?. I tried to read it before he came to give an address at my college. I was probably at the height of my ability to read and absorb difficult concepts. The book was horrible. I couldn’t finish it. $0.01 is too much for such a book… It was quite a disappointment to me, even as an atheist. I can’t imagine anyone being able to read that and get anything out of it.
Though some reviewers on Amazon claim to have liked it. Inconceivable!!11
YMMV. ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
dance around in your bones
@Omnes Omnibus: Gaawd, when I got to the 50 page speech or whatever? I about tossed it across the room, but some cool guys at UNM had told me to read it, so of course I had to.
Was just a TINY bit cowed by the college kids – I was all of 11/12/13/14? and trying to keep up with the big kids.
(We lived right near UNM, so I walked through it every day to get home from school. Hung out in the school cafeteria and listened to dudes bloviating about ‘teh ego’ and how we all had to get RID of TEH EGO, and even then I thought, well isn’t that kinda what makes us who we are?)
Ok, it was the 60’s.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@RSA: Thank you for sharing that. You’re a good man. Hang in there.
Cheers,
Scott.
raven
@skerry: That kind of day.
Suzanne
I didn’t watch that video of the dad singing to his son, because I think it’s vampiric to use a stranger’s tragedy to produce an emotional reaction in oneself. As weird as it is to me, some people really like crying and experiencing a degree of sadness because it tugs at their heartstrings and they get the strange emotional thrill of living vicariously through someone else. But when that’s someone else’s genuine loss, and the reaction doesn’t spur you to any sort of action, I think that is really fucked up and emotionally selfish.
“Love each other now because every day is precious and you don’t know how many of them you have!” is not so valuable a sentiment if I had to gawk at someone else’s loss to learn it.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
@Another Holocene Human:
He’s just Herping the Keith G. Derp. Disregard at will.
dance around in your bones
@Baud:
Please allow me to introduce myself……..
Howard Beale IV
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: +1
raven
This was a dopey topic hours ago. Let’s move on. . .
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: Probably so.
dance around in your bones
@raven: That IS cool!
And Tommy, you so right about books. I used to just lose myself in them back in the day. I have a kindle now with about 700 books on it? But the experience isn’t quite the same. Great for traveling though! When we traveled back in the day, we all traded books like they were dope or something. I read all of The Lord of The Rings books, and also Shogun! Which was made into a fantastic TV series later – I learned a lot of Japanese from that show (“Hai, Anjin-san, wakalimaska – rendered phonetically cause I have no idea how to actually spell it…..)
Oh, those Samurai guys pushed my buttons!!!! The hair-dos alone! And the swords! And the machismo, tempered by “Ok, I’ll slit my guts out if I fuck up” kind of attitude.
Mike J
@Omnes Omnibus: I would consider it just good manners to not be an asshole to your guests or your hosts. Sadly, many people think it’s not as important to be polite with family.
raven
@dance around in your bones: I write Pat Conroy after I read My Losing Season and he wrote back too!
raven
wrote
skerry
@raven: Yep. My thoughts are with you, too.
Photo taken a couple of months before her death.
ETA: That link attempt was a fail.
skerry
@raven: Yep. My thoughts are with you, too.
<a href="”>Photo taken a couple of months before her death.
Ugh, Trying again.
skerry
Aysha
ETA: well, that links gets you to photo bucket, but not exactly what wanted. Ugh. Time for chocolate. I really need to learn how to link to images.
Anne Laurie
@Tree With Water: My mother the English teacher gave it to me, because we were reading Tom Sawyer in the second grade, and I came home & told her that Mr. Twain might be overrated because Tom Sawyer was terrible.
She told me later she figured Huckleberry Finn was “too sad”, but Life on the Mississippi was divided into small, easy-to-finish chunks, and most of the stories were entertaining enough to divert my childish mind.
raven
@skerry: A girl from our town was murdered in Chapel Hill a few years back. She was an incredible student at Carolina bound for a career helping people. Gone in a flash for nothing.
Anne Laurie
@Just Good Sense:
Yup, it was Emmeline I remembered! IIRC, Twain recycle/precycled a bunch of stuff from Huck Finn in Life… stuff about the bargemen and the Duke of Cumberland, too.
Anne Laurie
@Another Holocene Human:
Well, of course you didn’t. But there’s a difference between actual empathy — mourning for someone, even someone we “know” only as a block of text on the internet, or a famous author or politician or computer-builder — and the grief porn of seeking out strangers’ tragedies for the cheap thrill of SO SAD PLZ LIKE & FWRD. People here actually worried about General Stuck, for instance, and we’re genuinely sad he’s dead. Half a dozen front-pagers wrote posts when Steve Job died, and lots of commentors shared their own memories too. But if I went scrolling through DailyKos, looking for other peoples’ private tragedies to repost here, that would be grief porn.
RSA
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: Thanks, Scott.
Anne Laurie
@PIGL:
Excellent point!
Tree With Water
@Anne Laurie: I lucked out, too, being taught not only how to read, but how to enjoy it.
Anne Laurie
@Tree With Water: Nah, I didn’t take Latin until high school, and I was terrible at it — I only passed the NY Regents exam because I had such an extensive knowledge of obscure (Latin-based) English words.
PurpleGirl
@Tommy: I stutter. As a child I was bullied and made fun of by neighborhood children (even a few adults). From the time I learned to read, I haunted the library. In school I bought books from Scholastic. I’ve bought books and more books over the years. They took me to foreign areas and distant times and science fiction took me to the future and even more distant places. I bought books new and used and remaindered. My parents weren’t readers and didn’t completely understand their “baby”. But in books I found an alternate me.
Anne Laurie
@RSA: Thank you for your thoughtful response. And for reading the article, too!
PurpleGirl
@Howard Beale IV: Yes. While I know there are other cams to watch, soon there will kittens at John Bartlett’s Critter Room.
Mnemosyne
@RSA:
It may also be that people who are comfortable publicly sharing their tragedies would also be comfortable getting responses from strangers. IMO, it’s worse when a tragedy gets unwillingly shared, like when a murder or accident gets a lot of publicity without the family wanting it to happen. (This, sadly, happened to our family when I was in high school, so I know it really sucks.)
satby
@RSA: late, but just wanted to say what a beautiful essay. Thanks for sharing that.
Ben
@Another Holocene Human:
Not to mention that the Internet gave us seven more years of Roger Ebert after he lost his voice…
lizzie
@efgoldman: Huh. I was really resistant to getting phones for our teenagers (or for myself, for that matter), but one of the things I have found very valuable about them is that they cut down on the yelling up the stairs, or from one room to another. There have also been a couple of occasions when my eldest and I have had constructive conversations via text that, had they been face to face, likely would have degenerated into an argument. Sometimes, in the stress of a busy and crowded family life, a little distance helps a lot.
Applejinx
It’s not so much the people making the grief or the people responding to it. My concern is the corporations identifying that this is a thing and calculating how to get people to make more of it, and how to connect as many people to it as possible. THERE’S your problem.