By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO — It would be presumptuous for me to say, “Oh my God, I am so personally aggrieved for the loss of Whitney Houston.” I did not know her in any way but for a voice that, when it was still healthy and young and pure, was like a bell from the heaven. I am too well-acquainted with the deaths of younger people through my work. Yet even in this category, I knew some of the kids better than others. And I also understand that no one knew the anguish of the parents or siblings or children of these needy angels.
However, when my wife called out to me last night from the other room that the television bulletin just came through about Whitney Houston, I heard myself howling in response, “WHAT?” A consumer-bystander in this tragedy, a fan, a devotee of her lyricism, I nonetheless felt pangs of authentic shock. And there was even anger: something went through my head to the effect of we are just killing off our flowers of talent and creativity.
Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Heath Ledger, and, in prior times, Janis Joplin, Marilyn Monroe, and Billie Holiday. The list is painfully endless. A lethal blur of drugs, alcohol, and intoxication with fame and its dark flipside—the unrelenting invasion of their privacy and their right to peace and quiet in exchange for the joy they bring to us. In recent decades, the spiraling, cynical media has driven this gossip culture into a white-hot and gothic skewing of profit-motivated and ruthless collective voyeurism.
In the end, every public figure carries the responsibility for his/her life and dignity. I don’t know why people don’t get it about cocaine, let alone other even more sinister recreational drugs and pills and hallucinogens.
We worship our celebrities, we bring their music and art to our milestone occasions, and then we speculate and judge and offer banalities when they are taken from their families by the limits of human endurance. But every time we purchase those insipid tabloids about them at the supermarkets or via the amoral and venal waves of the Internet, we indirectly contribute to their destruction.
Super-agents, pseudo-therapists, personal physicians, and the talking heads of television and video also chip away at the very vulnerabilities that have made people like Whitney Houston so impossibly brilliant. Hollywood and Motown and even Broadway have been co-opted by exploitation and we are happy to become their attendant idolaters.
I didn’t know Whitney Houston though anybody could see and even hear her pain. She died with the music still in her. Maybe the rest of us were also just making too much noise.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer in San Diego, who may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com