is-not-dead-20090626-cywm.html">Jeff Goldblum is NOT Dead Yet!

What is it with people? Seriously? What is the collective mental illness that makes us wallow in shallow and very public grief over people we do not know personally? What on earth makes that acceptable? What lack in ourselves are we over compensating for?? What makes people go LOOKING for death so they can wail and gnash teeth and show up in hospital parking lots IN COSTUME!

We have long since reached our era of 'bread and circuses'. I look for Caesar at the Arena tossing crusts of bread to the poor masses.


Yes Ed, Farrah, and Michael were human beings. They are intimately connected to other human beings: family members, employers, employees, real friends. And those people, in those roles, with that person will genuinely be in mourning and experience deep, personal grief.

Guess what. We are not any of those. The definition of 'Fanatic' (from which we derive the word FAN) is: Someone motivated by an irrational devotion to (a person, place, thing, cause...) IRRATIONAL is what all this public wailing and media circus is.

We seem to need this sick, public, mass catharsis on a regular basis. Without it what are we? Would we expect hundreds of thousands of people to pour out like this for our Gran? our Son? our Dad?

My grandfathers died and a few hundred people showed up in mourning, in person. Lives expressly touched by their hands over the years. a million others, world wide, did not know and could not have cared less.

And today's news of double celebrity tragedy must spawn rumors and false lies of the deaths of other celebrities (Jeff Goldblum, Harrison Ford as two examples) so we have even more excuse to whip ourselves into a public frenzy or worse yet to merely prey upon the easily led, the gullible, and to inflict shock, grief, and horror out of sheer malice and glee.

It absolutely sickens me.

Yes these individuals were talented in their fields, in the public eye and recognized by many. But that talent, that recognition does not buy me a first class ticket to carry on like a professional mourner. There is something SERIOUSLY wrong here that needs to be fixed.

And guess what--the media sure as hell is not going to fix it. They prey upon the reaction and the subsequent ratings spike like a parasite which drains but somehow doesn't quite kill it's host. They feed upon the frenzy in a negative feedback loop of approval and then say "we only tell the people what they want to hear." As I told a friend on FB: Governments and the Media need to accept responsibility for their role in pandering too and elevating as 'holy' the most base and lowest common denominator of human mob-behavior.

But oh hay, that won't sell papers, will it? That won't bring in the millions in advertising to have the all-star line up on Larry King live to reminisce. That wouldn't bring the zombie masses flocking to their tvs, computers, and radios, providing record ratings which feeds back into the same loop.

We are the ghost in the machine, but we're selling our own souls for the bright plastic glitter of humiliation and we accept that now as if it were the most precious of treasure.

I think I'll go throw up now.