Don’t blame it on the blankie

This book’s thesis is that such displays of empathy [such as buying flowers for a deceased celebrity] do not change the world for the better: they do not help the poor, diseased, dispossessed or bereaved. Our culture of ostentatious caring concerns, rather, projecting one’s ego, and informing others what a deeply caring individual you are. It is about feeling good, not doing good, and illustrates not how altruistic we have become, but how selfish.

I’m not quite as harsh as West is. But I would observe that, paradoxically, it seems people are more comfortable with expressions of grief about the death of a celebrity than they are about the death of a loved one.

I can’t help thinking of a discussion I had with a friend whose mother died about 10 years ago. Apparently I had said something that really reminded my friend of her mother, and she laughed with pleasure. I had never met her mother; she had died before I knew my friend. We then talked about some other funny things her mother had done. “I like talking about Mum,” said my friend, “She was a great person”. She said it had been really difficult once the initial grief had receded, because she had wanted to talk about her mother and her feeling of loss, but no one knew what to say, so they just avoided the topic entirely.

The conspicuous display of grief in the wake of the death of a celebrity is an odd phenomenon. In some ways, I think people feel more comfortable with displaying grief in those circumstances precisely because they didn’t really know the person who died. Perhaps, for some, the death of a celebrity is a proxy allowing them to express grief about other losses, and to breach the subject of their own bereavement with friends. Perhaps there are positive aspects. But I cannot help feeling that the whole thing is bizarre.

When Princess Di died, I went into the city, and had to step over piles of flowers outside St Paul’s Cathedral to meet my friend at Flinders Street. The messages on the flowers were variations on a theme: “I loved you so much Diana, what will we do without you?” Reality check, please. Unless you were a close friend or family member of Princess Diana, I suspect you went on very much as you did before. Of course it’s sad, but it’s not comparable to the distress of losing a person whom you genuinely loved and knew. At the time, there was a real sense that if you didn’t share in this bathetic mourning, you were somehow heartless or nasty.

Conclusion

How do the two points I raise link together? I think we have a sense that we really know celebrities - almost a sense that we own them. And songs are potent stuff indeed: songs which had importance in a particular time in our lives make us feel like we know the person who wrote and performed them.

But let us be under no illusions - this sense that we know celebrities is false. It is manufactured by the media, for their own purposes - primarily, of course to make money. They make money because most of us are fascinated by the stories they print or show.

Of course we can feel sorrow for the death of someone like Jackson, but it’s as well to remember that we didn’t actually know him or own him. At least now hopefully he’s at peace.