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ONE YEAR LATER |
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 Gerald Nachman is based in San Francisco, CA |
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By GERALD NACHMAN
of TheColumnists.com
With Sept. 11 looming, the anniversary of Elvis’s
deathday just past, and child abductors on a spree, this has
been a black-letter month for grief peddlers who have taken over
the media. Every day’s a holiday for death in the global
village, where the “town crier” has taken on all new
meaning. Will the lamentations never cease?
Not bloody likely. An ad in the New Yorker last week was peddling
a silver “Twin Towers” pin, which should go well with
a red, pink, or black arm band to fully accessorize the well-turned
out mourner--the target audiences for maudlin trinkets of all
kinds. These are the same folks who stand in line for hours,
rain or shine, to grieve for Princess Diana, John Kennedy Jr.,
and the latest beached whale with a cute name. A glossy brochure
went out weeks ago hawking a leather-bound, gold-embossed book
commemorating you know what. “Yes,” wrote San Francisco
financial columnist David Lazarus, “it’s Sept. 11--all
the drama, all the misery, all the pathos. Only $69.75 (plus
$5.25 shipping and handling). Satisfaction guaranteed.”
When did all this outpouring of public grief and cheap displays of sentiment begin in America? I date it from the AIDS quilt, or maybe it goes back even beyond that--to the on-camera sobbing of James Bakker and his vestment-rending televangelist cohorts. Since then, the TV screen has been awash in genuine and crocodile tears. Public weeping has become a national mania, led by Oprah Winfrey, who first packaged it in an attractive gift box for handy home consumption. Sob Central would seem to be, if not Oprah, “Larry King Live,” which specializes in grieving parents whose children have been murdered, kidnapped or otherwise subject to every manner of mortal agony.
Recently, it was Pat Boone’s
turn to tear-up on camera. He and his family were parading his
mentally damaged grandson, who had fallen out of a window and
been reduced to a near vegetable. Plenty of home movie shots
of the family cheerfully interacting with the poor guy, whose
tragedy was being marketed by Larry and the entire Boone clan
for their own purposes. The ostensible theme of the show was
The Power of Prayer, but in fact it was just an excuse to trot
out another gruesome personal tragedy for a public handwringing.
However well meant, it came across like a thinly veiled version
of feel-good TV--viewers feel so good that, miserable as their
own lives may be, at least they’re not dead and have full
use of all their appendages.
If it isn’t someone’s murdered or injured child, it’s
a celebrity who has “survived” a grotesque illness
or personal misery and is only too eager to discuss every grisly
detail while King hovers sympathetically and asks imploring questions.
Larry is just the most visible and persistent; every night on
“Dateline,” “20/20,” “Inside Edition,”
or any of the magazine shows--plus the morning shows and even
“Nightline” has hopped aboard the black arm-bandwagon--presents
a sideshow of freaks and victims and valiant family members only
too happy to blubber on camera.
Should anybody cheat death, King is undaunted, chasing every celebrity ambulance. He routinely rolls out Christopher Reeve for TV’s celebrity accident rubber-neckers. It’s a long roster of tragedy, but those King shows I quickly avoided featured Barbara Eden’s dead son, Katie Couric’s dead husband, Johnny Carson’s dead son, Bill Cosby’s dead son, Joan Rivers’s dead husband, Carroll O’Connor’s dead son, not to mention Nancy Reagan, Michael Milkin, and a raft of other celebrities (or their spouses) stricken with this or that dread illness (prostate cancer is King’s disease of choice), anxious to Go Public With It.
If famous victims of death and physical decay are somehow unavailable, King will toss off a jolly show about bipolar disorders with celebrity depressives like Mike Wallace, Art Buchwald, William Styron, Dick Cavett, and John Nash (he of the beautiful, formerly twisted mind), all of whom have told their stories--not merely to grab a little face time, of course, but “to help others.” (Their agents and bookers, anyway.)
In the past, you could blame the buzzard-like media for circling the victims, but now the victims are busily and efficiently merchandising their own grief and have learned how to behave to grab an audience quickly. Once some new kid has been abducted, the family can be found standing before the cameras holding up 8x10 glossies of the child, like extras in some tired drama--their arm bands and ribbons in place as they read prepared statements to the hanky-wielding, Uriah Heep-like press.
People like Mark Klaas, daughter of the slain Polly, has become the poster parent on the media maudlin-go-round. Klaas had a natural feeling for the limelight and was before the cameras the day after his daughter's body was found--looking properly and authentically mournful but uttering well-crafted sound bites. When Klaas (the Jesse Jackson of child abductions) popped up in Utah after the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping, a woman came up to him and said, “God sent you,” to which Klaas countered, “No, Fox.”
After Smart was abducted, an endless caravan of aunts and uncles appeared on the King show mouthing the expected pieties in reply to Larry’s ritualistic parries: “How is the family dealing with it?” “Do you still have hope she will be found alive?” “Is prayer helpful in these situations?” To which the guests obligingly genuflect, adding “And thanks to you, Larry, for helping to throw light on these horrible crimes.”
King and his band of professional grievers (Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters, Stone Philips, Matt Lauer, Katie Couric, et al.) couch it all as an attempt To Get the Word Out and Bring Little (fill in the blank) Home Safely Again. Maybe so but it’s also a handy ratings grabber and an excuse to zero in on somebody’s personal nightmare--which have all become public nightmares.
Even if the survivors are not exactly cashing in, many appear to be getting off on all the media attention and quickly have warmed to playing their assigned roles. The nine miners who were pulled alive from a cave-in were signed up by Disney before the men had showered. The widow of Todd Beamer is just out with a book on her husband’s valiant work aboard one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center, continuing her journey on the talk-show circuit to hawk her book. She lost a husband, so it would be cruel to claim she’s exploiting his memory, but Ms. Beamer is by now a pro, a regular in the three-ring media circus surrounding the events of 9/11, which threatens to bring the nation to a halt again for weeks more of somber reflections and moments of silence.
We have been mourning the day continuously for eleven months, cheapening whatever gestures are planned for the actual anniversary. As Jon Stewart told Jim Lehrer on his “Daily Show”: “How can we remember 9/11 if we haven’t been allowed to forget it?” Maybe there should be a Twin Towers channel, for people who want to rerun the horror whenever they need their daily national tragedy fix.
The furious heartstring plucking of “9/11,” as the ghastly death of some 3000 people is now called (like a trademarked brand-name), has begun in earnest with TV shows, newspapers and magazines working overtime to see who can wallow longest and most tearfully. ABC is planning a five-hour “special” to mark the occasion. Sept. 11 was a bonanza for the grief merchants and will be for years to come, just as every Nov. 22 for decades was an occasion to rerun the Zapruder assassination film and the shot of John-John saluting Dad-Dad for the two millionth time.
TV and the press just can’t get enough of Sept. 11, 2001, which has been reduced to a carnival of horrors and numbed any actual feeling left. What began as one of the worst events in the nation’s blood-soaked history has somehow been turned by the media into the biggest fire they ever covered.
The public seems to love this stuff, or is it just that they can’t avoid it? I suspect most people are pretty sick of it all, but the media keeps on shaking the death rattle decades after the event. Witness the ongoing march of World War II vets gathered at Pearl Harbor or Normandy Beach, all of it neatly choreographed by Tom Brokaw and his Greatest Generation crew. Or the unceasing footage of Japanese internment camps, German concentration campus, and countless vigils for death row prisoners.
And if there isn’t a tragedy to exploit each day, TV and even decent mainstream newspapers have learned how to exploit past catastrophes with regular anniversaries of this or that tragedy: “It’s been seven months since little Timmy Johanson was mauled at a tractor pull by a runaway tractor. Let’s visit Timmy now after months of reconstructive surgery to replace his damaged face”…” Or: Just four years ago, six-week old Wilma Muncrief underwent open-heart surgery that went horribly awry. Since that awful day, her parents have waged a non-stop campaign to focus attention on bungled surgeries. This is a photo of Wilma as she lies in a vegetative state surrounded by teddy bears from well-wishers. Let’s meet a few of them now.…”).
Once the tragedy itself has passed, there are still all the videogenic funerals to be covered, and follow-up survivor stories: “We last visited the grieving Gumperts in May, when their entire family was consumed by a giant squid, and we thought we would go back now just to see how they’re handling their tragedy”--while file footage displays the giant squid being hacked open to retrieve the remains of the Gumpert clan.
© 2002 by Gerald Nachman.
The logo illustration is © 2001 by Jim Hummel.
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