Newsweek's list of ten "accidental" celebrities is a fun read. I'm not sure who picked the ten (which includes Jessica Lynch, Jeremiah Wright and Lynndie England), but the profiles by the likes of Diane Sawyer, Raina Kelley, and Errol Morris are nicely written accounts for some undeserving of the tribute (Joe the Plumber?).
Andrew Sullivan linked to Nick Hornby's short paean to Levi Johnston. To my mind, you can never go wrong reading Nick Hornby, but my personal favorite was Elizabeth Edwards heartfelt memorial to Terry Schiavo:
Terri Schiavo has a wretched kind of immortality. She will never be the pretty, lively young woman who married the first man she ever kissed. Instead, she will be middle-aged and open-mouthed, her hair flattened by the hospital beds where she’d lived for 15 years. Schiavo’s cardiac arrest in 1990 resulted in extreme hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy. The result was a sad schism: on one side, a husband who accepted that she had no higher cortical function; on the other side, parents who saw life in their daughter’s reflexes, drew comfort from her presence, and did not want to bury a child if there was a single chance she might improve. Schiavo’s family was not, however, the only party to the conflict. She became a symbol, used by politicians to curry favor with a segment of the population who view the removal of feeding tubes as euthanasia. The use of death as a political tool is long-standing: effigies burned, martyrs’ coffins marched through the streets. It remains an ugly part of rhetoric today, as opponents of health-care reform suggest “death panels” would decide whether a patient deserved the expenditure of precious dollars. But it defies description. We all face death with as much dignity as we can muster. We swing our arms out at it, pushing it away, for ourselves, certainly for our loved ones, as long as the pushing makes any sense at all. It is not unnatural that those who love the same patient might disagree about when that moment has come. But the use of death to court political constituencies is unequivocally heartless. For Terri Schiavo, it means a contorted grimace on a vacant face has replaced, for all time, the bright smile of a young woman who died too soon.
Comments