Anna Nicole

Anna Nicole Smith died yesterday, and it makes me feel sad. I was no particular fan of Anna Nicole’s, but I watched the car-crash of her life, along with all the other rubber-necking gawkers who slowed down to catch an occasional peek at the carnage that lay scattered alongside the road. It seems to me that we were all terribly cruel to her. We were all so amused. We were all so detached. But now her death proves to us that she was more than a cartoon, more than a blow-up sex doll. She was a real, breathing human being who had a heart and a soul, who lived and died. And now we feel bad. Now we stop to think about how our words and our incessant voyeurism may have caused her pain. Now the media and our discussions around the water cooler choose to show her some compassion. Now that it’s too late to help her. Now that it’s too late to really do any good.

We do this every time, and I can’t help but wonder why. We laughed at President Ford when he fell down the stairs of the airplane. We called him a clutz and an oaf while he lived. We called him a dignified statesman when he died. Did he change, or did we? He was a living, breathing person all along, with a wife that lived and breathed and felt the stress and pain of his burdensome position too, just as surely as he did. Just a surely as we do now. We called Nixon a crook. We ran him out of office. We hated him for decades. We laid the weight of our cynicism and our loss of faith in leadership on his shoulders. And then he died, and people wept out loud. People mourned the loss and recalled all of his accomplishments. His crimes were suddenly relegated to a footnote in our collective consciousness. Where did all this forgiveness come from? Where had it been for 30 odd years? I’ll bet it would have felt good to Nixon if we would have shared a bit of it with him earlier.

And now it’s Anna Nicole’s turn, like Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield before her. She was the pinup girl that we loved to hate. She was the fallen beauty queen that we chastised for showing us just a little too much, or way too much, even though we always looked anyway. She was the train-wreck that made us feel oh so normal. Part of our hatred was born of envy. She may not have had our respect, but she had money and fame and beauty. She had the holy trinity of every American girl’s dream. She had what we want and she didn’t even have the decency to be happy. What a tramp! So we watched, and pointed, and criticized her until she was gone. And now we realize that she was flesh and blood all along. Now we have just a tiny bit of respect, just a tiny bit of forgiveness, just a tiny bit of compassion. As with our dead presidents before, why were we unable to bestow these gifts upon Anna Nicole when she needed them, while they were still able to warm her heart and ease her pain? Perhaps the reason we did not give these gifts sooner was because we’re not really giving them to Anna Nicole at all. Perhaps we are really just giving them to ourselves, selfish as always, to ease our guilt and pain. Perhaps we are trying to convince ourselves that we didn’t really laugh and point at the poor woman who was already down. We didn’t really keep kicking her while she lay there on the ground, broken and crying - did we?

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