There is something about the Internet that brings out the
worst in people. And then there are those individuals who are truly sick and
demented and the Internet merely allows them to share their perversity with the
world.
Death is about the most serious subject there is. It is
feared because of its finality and its inevitability. We fear our own deaths,
and we fear the deaths of those we love because we know the loss is permanent
once the Grim Reaper’s scythe has severed the tenuous connection called life
that binds us to one another.
In this respect, death is sacred in most cultures.
Ceremonies honor the recently deceased and grave markers memorialize them for
ages to come. Mourners “pay their respects” at funerals and cemeteries.
Necrophilia and defiling of a corpse (even in wartime) is universally
considered reprehensible and disgusting.
But on the Internet, it’s another story. When comedian Robin
Williams died, some Twitter users posted Photoshopped images of her father's
dead body on Zelda Williams’ account, along with disturbing messages including
blaming her for his death. When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
died, the floodgates of cyberspace opened to a sea of vitriol. Social media lit up with comments celebrating and
mocking the death of a public servant whose opinions and judicial philosophy
were at odds with many (including my own), but who was a good man merely
performing his job in a competent manner. Within hours of musician Prince’s
death, a woman on my Facebook feed posted a cartoon of a heartbeat flatlining
with the tagline “Princes new symbol.” She followed up with a photo of Prince
tagged “He was a composer, now he’s a decomposer.” Many of her followers
commented “Too soon” as if there were a moratorium on poor taste and
disrespect.
Robin Williams, Antonin Scalia, and Prince were all
celebrities, famous for having reached the pinnacle of success in their chosen
professions. Maybe you didn’t care for Williams’ brand of humor, or Scalia’s
jurisprudence, or Prince’s music— but they were each uniquely talented
individuals and far more talented and accomplished than any of their posthumous
online detractors. Celebrity elevates ordinary mortals to a god-like pantheon,
whether that Mount Olympus is in Hollywood or the nation’s capital. They lead
larger-than-life lives that the rest of us follow voyeuristically through a
mosaic of tabloid gossip. While it’s true their lives are certainly far
different from our own, lost in this truth is the reality that they too are
people. Antonin Scalia had nine children and 28 grandchildren; I cringed at the
thought of them reading the horrible comments other people had posted about
their father and grandfather. You know those children are on social media; you
know they saw those posts, just as you know Zelda Williams saw the post about
her father. “In this difficult time, please try to be respectful of the
accounts of myself, my family and my friends,” the 25-year-old pleaded on
Twitter. Contrast that appeal with the sentiment of journalist Glenn
Greenwald’s tweet “Don't even try to enforce the inapplicable
don't-speak-ill-of-the-dead ‘rule’ for the highly polarizing, deeply
consequential Antonin Scalia.”
Every celebrity is nonetheless a real person, with real
family and real friends who love them and feel their loss as deeply as you
would one of your own. I cannot imagine how I would feel coming home from a
funeral and reading such comments about a loved one I had just buried. Can you?
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