A Friendly Rant From Captain
Spaulding
TREES 2,
CELEBRITIES 0
Writers are
ghouls. Every single one of them knows that human
misfortune is the greatest fountainhead of
interesting writing. Untimely death, which ranks
right up there at the top of the human misfortune
sweepstakes, is perhaps the biggest motherlode of
fascinating writing that there is. Scribes
ranging in chronology and talent from William
Shakespeare to Albert Goldman have known this.
Some days a story-hungry writer opens up the
newspaper to the obits and feels like a little
kid who has just been handed a McDonalds Happy
Meal.
It's feast time
for the jackals of the Fifth Estate here in the
bleak calendar-replacing days of early January.
Last week a Kennedy, the middle child of Bobby
Kennedy's brood of ten thousand do-gooders, was
killed while playing ski football in Aspen by
running into a tree. This week America's
homegrown Ringo Starr, U.S. Congressman Salvatore
"Sonny" Bono (R-Calif.), reprised
Michael Kennedy's fatal encounter with scenery on
the slopes near Lake Tahoe.
One celebrity
skiing accident is fodder for us parasites of the
press. Two is a banquet. Or is it? Must you then
shoehorn two remarkably similar deaths into one
celebrity eulogy? Who gets the prominence and who
gets the oh-yeah, Mother-Teresa-also-died
treatment? And can we all just skip the
wear-your-helmet ski safety lectures?
Lucky are the
pundits who were quick to jump on the Kennedy
death before Sonny Bono made it a timber twofer.
They were able to launch via print and without
distraction into one of the favorite games of
opinionated Americans everywhere: What is with
those Kennedys? Even their manners of death are
worthy of comment. The older generation died
tragically and in the service of the country--Joe
the WWII Flyboy, JFK, RFK. But beginning with
Senator Ted's impromptu swim at Chappaquidick
back in the Nixon era, the family has ricocheted
from one tawdry revelation to another.
Jack scored with
every good-looking woman within a hundred miles
of the White House (including a mafia moll) and
his father the ex-bootlegger bought the election
for him with the help of Chicago's first Mayor
Daley; Ted got kicked out of Harvard for
cheating; the family had had another child
lobotomized and hidden away in a sanitarium for
decades, etc., etc.
And the younger
generation seems more inspired by the scandals
than the achievements--from detoxes to O.D.s to
rigged annulments to Michael's own contribution,
that of sleeping with his kids' teenage
babysitter. All done with the same patrician brio
with which the clan plunges into everything they
do. Including playing ski football at dusk on
Aspen's Copper Bowl run in defiance of repeated
ski patrol warnings. Like his brother David,
toe-tagged after a run-in with heroin back in
'83, Michael seemed bent on reversing the one
thing the family had left...the tradition of the
noble death.
The word
"Kennedy" seems to always have the word
"tragedy" following it like a macabre
caboose, but the tragic aspect of the family
legacy is wearing thin. It is a tragedy that he
died in that he left behind children who no
longer have a father and in that his mother Ethel
has known more loss in her lifetime than anyone
should ever have to suffer.
But the senseless
death of someone who died in part because he and
his family have always felt that they were above
the rules does not in and of itself fall into the
tragic category. Sonny's death is a bit more
problematic, for two reasons. First, his was a
genuine accident and not the result of arrogant
stupidity. Second, he carried no baggage with him
that made him tempting to the media vultures.
Sonny seemed to drift with ease from one
customary Tinseltown celebrity venue to
another--musician to TV star to restaurateur to
politician--without leaving knives in anyone's
back or skeletons in his closet. He was affable
in that slightly askew, plasticky, and somewhat
guarded L.A. manner with which they measure
affability. All four of the women to whom he was
married at one time or another cried when the CNN
cameras were turned on them this week. Now that's
a beloved Hollywood entertainer for you.
The press, in
looking for the ultimate Sonny angle, hit upon a
wrong turn. They have chosen to highlight him as
the less-important front half of Sonny and Cher.
Of course, not everyone is a C-SPAN junkie (or
even minimally in touch with politics); for many
Gen-Xers, Sonny is the Other Bono, the one who
isn't Irish and doesn't front U2. If they are
lesbian Gen-Xers, Sonny probably ranks third
behind his ironically-named gay activist daughter
Chastity as well as the Achtung Babysitter from
Dublin. And if someone likes football, NFL
quarterback Steve Bono is also probably more
familiar than Sonny. While there is no doubt that
Sonny's second wife, infomercial spokeswench and
bad actress Cher, is a significant celebrity,
let's not forget who made her--and who,
ultimately, had the greater cultural impact. He
was the one who wrote the songs that made them
famous as a singing duo, and he was her
underrated comic foil on television. And while
Sonny served in the House of Representatives (OK,
so that's not the honorable line on the c.v. that
it used to be), Cher's contribution to the public
life of the nation seems to consist of straddling
a battleship gun half-naked in the video of one
of her hits...which the Navy may reluctantly
concede serves as a sort of recruitment
inducement.
Sonny was more
than just the goofy-looking short guy basking in
the high-octane Morticia Addams smolder of his
ex-wife and partner. For one he was a true
rags-to-riches story, born to impoverished
Sicilian immigrants in Detroit in 1935. While the
Sonny and Cher songs he wrote are mostly
forgettable, let's not forget that the man penned
(with Phil Spector's arranger Jack Nitsche) the
immortal and oft-recorded pop nugget
"Needles and Pins". His contribution to
The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour (one of
television's last great variety shows and a
seventies staple) was vital. And he was that
rarity of the latter-day U.S. Congress, a guy who
got along with everyone on both sides of the
aisle. He was a conservative partisan who was
also well-liked by the liberals. Panned as the
ultimate lightweight when first elected, he made
friends and earned respect at the same time; his
Democratic nemesis on the House Judiciary
Committee, New York Representative Charles
Schumer, remembers that Sonny used to have pizza
delivered for his colleagues during long
committee hearings.
So where does a
writer turn when trying to deal with the bizarre
coincidence at hand? Two famous men die within a
week of the same violent cause, a rare method of
demise which only claims an average of 34
Americans a year. Whither now, fellow ghouls?
Here's where:
Celebrity death categories. Anyone who has ever
paid attention to office dead pools knows that
certain types of celebrities are prone to die in
specific manners. Rock stars have their choice
between vomit asphyxiation and plane crashes.
Princesses die in automobile accidents in France.
And R&B singers and rappers are shot to
death.
Now celeb
politicos have their own death mode--skiing
downhill into a tree. We will not look for
Madonna to schuss headlong into a grove of piney
doom, nor will we expect a mogul-hopping David
Copperfield to eat bark at 30 mph. You, the
overprotective soccer mom--don't lock up the
kids' skis or snowboards or Flexible Flyers
inside your hubby's gun cabinet.This death is now
and will forever be the domain of the servants of
the people (or, since Michael Kennedy had
orchestrated his brother's campaign for
Massachusetts governor as a prelude to his own
run for office, the servants of the servants of
the people). Skis and politicians will forever be
linked, like motorcycles and members of the
Allman Brothers Band.
And don't hate the
trees for it. A word to diehard Kennedy liberals
and vengeful Bono conservatives alike--put down
that chainsaw. You can't blame the trees in
skiing accidents. They were just standing there,
as is their God-ordained task in the cosmos. As
any basketball ref or Indy-car driver will tell
you, whoever occupies the space first has the
right of way.
I'm serious. This
isn't mere pro-tree rhetoric along the lines of
the NRA's "Guns don't kill people, people
do." I'm sure that if a tree could step out
of the way of a flailing Bono or a Kennedy
heedlessly looking over his shoulder for the
pass, it would be more than happy to.
Let's give trees
the benefit of the doubt. After all, where would
we be without them? They produce oxygen, the very
stuff of life. They give us wood for fuel and
shelter. They filter carbon dioxide and
impurities out of the air. They hold down the
topsoil with their roots. They are a source of
medicines and delicious maple syrup. They provide
a home to the birds and the squirrels and all the
happy little animals. They are a vital link in
the perpetual organic cycle of loam and life.
They are the linchpin of our planet's biosphere
and the key to preserving our environment--tall,
erect, humble, complex, sturdy, omnipresent,
vital, and lethal to politicians hurtling
downhill at high speed.
I wonder if Al
Gore skis.
Captain Spaulding
E-Mail CaptainSpaulding
Previous
Mountaintop Experiences with Captain
Spaulding:
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For Me #16-- Of Hissy Fits and Human Freedoms
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For Me #17-- Naked Raygun's Hook Back in Anger
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