Or as Jimmie Hendrix put it:
It’s funny how most people love the dead, once you’re dead, you’re made for life.
Listening to Hendrix as I write this. Solos for Groovy Children. Vinyl.
I didn’t like Hendrix growing up. He was a bit before me. My sister’s time, but she didn’t listen to him. My friends didn’t listen to him. Maybe we weren’t enough of stoners. He was too much a jammer. I’m still not much a jam band fan. I wasn’t a Stones fan either, not that they were a jam band. I’ve come to like both late. Something about their bluesy rhythms attracts me.
Through tubes there’s a synergy of textures. The tubes. The blues. The needle riding the groove. Like it’s the only way to really hear good rock and roll. Oh, come now. Good music.
Kobe’s dead.
His daughter Gigi’s dead.
“and Seven others” are dead.
Nine tragedies.
What I came here to talk about. Hendrix’s observation.
The tragedies that are lives lost should not be weighted. Each is as tragic as the next. Yet, they are weighted. Weighted in press coverage. Weighted by talking heads who implicitly, if not explicitly, repeatedly emphasize the extent of certain losses while ignoring others.
Kobe, Gigi, and those seven others. The cult, our cult, our worshiping of celebrities, raises two tragedies above the seven others. Seven others who loved and were loved. Who will be missed. Nine holes. But the gross distorting effects of our envying of all that celebrities have that we want advertises how we conclude that the seven other losses were less deserving of our attentions. Somehow less tragic by comparison.
“And seven others.” Appended over and over, as if that somehow made it better and not worse.
Whose to blame? The media? Medium? Facilitators. Accomplices. To be sure. More effect than cause. We are our own causes. Our insecurities that our deaths will erase us more easily than will the deaths of celebrities erase them.
“And seven others”
Apparently they will.