(Since we're talking about Saddleback, here is an article I wrote about the church's "Disturbing Voices" conference, held on World AIDS Day in 2005. After covering the event, I was slightly less skeptical of the church's intentions, but they are still overlooking and tip-toeing around one major issue.
***
Baby Steps Or Status Quo: Evangelicals Put On An AIDS Show
By Zachary Sire
Kathi Winter is bespectacled, dowdy, and carries herself like a school librarian. She’s not necessarily the image one conjures when thinking of the disease that has now infected over forty million people worldwide, but this in no way negates the relevance of her testimony at Saddleback Church’s World AIDS Day conference, “Disturbing Voices.” She is one of three women living with AIDS that will speak at today’s conference-closing prayer service in the main congregation hall. The other two, one a single mom from Orange County and the other a clinic founder from Rwanda, make impassioned pleas for prayer.
Also taking the stage: a blonde nurse with the story of how an infant baby died in her arms after acquiring HIV from its parents, the adoptive white father of a black orphan whose biological parents died of AIDS, a youth pastor who reminds everyone to pray for those infected with HIV but don’t know it yet and, finally, the parents of Kay Warren, the wife of Saddleback’s pastor. They are here not to relay a personal connection to the global pandemic, but to instead reflect on what it means to have raised such a compassionate daughter.
Indeed, if it weren’t for Kay Warren, this conference would not be taking place. After seeing the magazine images of emaciated Africans in 2003, Warren vowed to do everything in her power to prevent the spread of HIV and care for those already infected. Her visit to Africa a few months later brought the devastation into focus and set events in motion. Among other things, Disturbing Voices seeks to create a shift among evangelical churches from what has been a long-standing tradition of not discussing an illness with sexual implications. The three-day event has garnered national attention with reporters from the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times in attendance, despite some initial reluctance from pastor Rick Warren to even host it. Kay Warren admits it took some convincing, but her husband eventually realized his wealth and fame (being the author of “The Purpose Driven Life”) could attract scores of smaller churches across the country and ultimately result in a greater good.
With nearly two thousand attendees, Disturbing Voices has succeeded in drawing a myriad pastors, preachers, and reverends from around the world. They attend seminars like “The Local Church Engaged in Prevention/Treatment/Care/Support" where tips on ministering to those infected or affected by HIV/AIDS are provided. Videos are shown highlighting a mixed bag of tragic statistics: fourteen million orphans, over fifty percent of new cases are found in women and, curiously, infections among senior citizens have been increasing at an alarming rate. “That means,” said Kay Warren in one film clip, “those of you in Leisure World need to watch out; it’s not a joke!”
The Warrens founded Saddleback Church in 1980, with a congregation of just two hundred people on an Easter Sunday. In the past twenty-five years, that number has jumped to over twenty thousand, making it one of the nation’s, if not the world’s, leading mega-churches. Conveniently located adjacent to one of South Orange County’s somewhat desolate toll roads, it’s removed from urban centers and is a sort of city in and of itself. The parking lot alone is not unlike one found in Disneyland, complete with available shuttle service when it overflows and guests are forced to park far from church grounds. Perched atop over one hundred acres of beautifully landscaped property on a Lake Forest hillside with multiple service halls, patios, and meeting rooms, Saddleback attributes its success to God.
Of course, one would be remiss to not take into account the aforementioned influence of Rick Warren’s bestselling book, “The Purpose Driven Life.” Selling over one million copies a month worldwide, it is conceivable that the book, which has landed Warren interviews on CNN and Oprah, has had something to do with Saddleback’s success. The book contends that God has planned everything and everyone (which would include the book itself), therefore every person has a purpose to carry out God’s plan. Readers are encouraged to seek that purpose through God, not themselves or the material world. It would be reasonable to assume that some of today’s prayer service visitors are carrying the book in their “Purpose Driven” insignia bearing tote bags.
Kay Warren’s parents finish speaking to the audience and then encourage them, as have all the previous speakers, to assemble in groups of two or three and pray for all those living with HIV/AIDS. There is, understandably, not a dry eye in the house as some parishioners have dropped to their knees sobbing. Others wail with their hands outstretched in front of them. A video montage of dying sub-Saharan Africans plays on the two large projection screens book-ending both sides of the stage. Music is played with muted ambiance by a band that would presumably join in the prayer if it weren’t commissioned to perform. Before all this, other speakers gave more compartmentalized prayer instructions:
“Pray for the heath care workers who treat patients with HIV/AIDS,” said the blonde nurse.
“Pray for the women who are victims of HIV/AIDS,” asked Kathi Winter.
“Pray for the families of adopted children who have lost their biological parents to AIDS,” said the white father.
“Pray that those who don’t know they’re infected with HIV yet find out soon and seek not only treatment, but God’s forgiveness,” the youth pastor said.
“Pray for the organizations around the world that provide services to those living with HIV/AIDS,” said the Rwandan clinic founder.
One of those organizations is AIDS Services Foundation of Orange County. ASF, now in its twentieth year of providing assistance to people living with HIV/AIDS in Orange County, accepted over $5,000 worth of food and supplies from Saddleback Church last year. More recently, Saddleback donated one hundred cases of food collected from a food drive at the church. By all accounts, ASF has stumbled upon a partnership of infinite value, considering the reach and influence the church maintains in Orange County.
Ty Rose, ASF’s Outreach Chaplin, recalls it was the church who approached them and that their clients have directly benefited from Saddleback’s generosity. But while these clients can rely on the tangible items Kay Warren helped send their way, most of them will not be prayed for at Saddleback Church on World AIDS Day because seventy-one percent of them are “MSM,” or, men who have sex with men. Homosexuals are not spoken of at today’s prayer service.
MSM, a coded term used by heath care agencies nationwide, accounted for fifty-one percent of new HIV cases in 2004 in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Heterosexual women made up twenty-one percent. The CDC monitors infections by age too, and can reveal that those eligible for Leisure World residency clocked in at less than one percent, or 3,132 senior citizens across the United States.
To be sure, these statistics are disproportionately dwarfed by worldwide figures; most global infections overwhelmingly occur in male and female heterosexuals. Still, the intent of Disturbing Voices is to develop local (i.e. stateside) ministries. Consequently, one could be within reason to expect that such a conference would make mention of America’s most HIV/AIDS infected demographic, gay men.
Well, Saddleback does take gay men into consideration, but not in regards to HIV/AIDS.
Listed at the bottom of the conference program is a seminar entitled “Loving Homosexuals As Jesus Would,” co-chaired by Tim Wilkins and Chad Thompson.
Recognizing this slight but significant acknowledgment from a religious institution not known for embracing alternative lifestyles is Doug Vogel, ASF’s communications coordinator.
“They’re slowly getting it,” Vogel says, in regards to evangelical attitudes towards gays.
Indeed, it’s a far cry from statements of the past like “[Homosexuals] want to come into churches and disrupt church services and throw blood all around and try to give people AIDS and spit in the face of ministers." That was Pat Robertson on the “700 Club” in 1995, someone the Warrens seem to be distancing themselves from.
“The Gospels repeatedly show that Jesus loved, touched, and cared for lepers — the diseased outcasts of his day. Today's ‘lepers' are those who have HIV/AIDS," said Rick Warren in an interview with the Associated Press.
However, AIDS does seem to carry a relentless stigma in this country as being a gay disease. When one HIV-positive homosexual man, who has elected to remain anonymous and will hereafter be referred to as Robert, was admitted to the hospital with AIDS like symptoms, the first thing asked of him by an attending physician was “How’d you get it?”
This of course would have no bearing on his medical treatment, but his doctor’s first inquiry is indicative of a culture that Saddleback has masterfully tiptoed around throughout the three day Disturbing Voices conference. If an American male is identified as being HIV-positive, it is an unfortunately natural response to assume he is also gay. A recent UC Davis poll showed that more than half of those surveyed first think of gay men when they hear the word “AIDS.”
While ASF’s Rose fights to bury this stigma, he is up against years of conditioning, not to mention a unique approach from Saddleback. Their solution to addressing the issue is found in their non-address of what is actually a non-issue: There’s no such thing as gay people.
So says Wilkins and Thompson, the co-chairs of “Loving Homosexuals As Jesus Would.” Wilkins, the founder of Cross Ministry in North Carolina, believes that gays can be freed from the deceptive illusions of homosexuality.
A self-proclaimed former homosexual himself, Wilkins equates his youthful indiscretions by stating that, “God got his hands dirty when He created man out of the dust of the earth. Jesus got his hands dirty when he washed the dust, dirt and sewage off of the disciples’ feet the night he was betrayed. Now if getting your hands dirty is good enough for God the Father and God the Son, it is good enough for me.”
Wilkins has become a hero of the American Family Association’s “Homosexual Agenda” agenda by contributing articles and speeches that further the notion that being gay is akin to simply being lost. His theory is best summarized in this strategic message:
“Heterosexuality is not the goal – becoming more like Jesus is! As discipleship occurs, the same-sex attractions diminish and in many cases, but not all, opposite-sex attractions emerge.”
Twenty-six year old Thompson, also an ex-gay, is the author of the book, “Loving Homosexuals As Jesus Would.” His teachings involve ministering to high school and college youth that heterosexuality is God’s design—there is no gay gene. While never admitting to engaging in homosexual acts, Thompson remembers being attracted to other boys as early as fourth grade. He was able to distance himself from what he considers unnatural urges by committing himself to Jesus Christ as a teenager. He proudly writes of his pseudo conversion, “My attractions are probably about 1% of what they used to be.”
Landing spots at Saddleback’s conference is an undeniable coup for Wilkins and Thompson, but some question how, exactly, they fit in with the rest of the church’s three-day slate of seminars. Robert is particularly skeptical.
“I think it's very deceptive for the church to hold the conferences they had with the people they used (Chad & Tim). These "ex-gays" are not experts in HIV/AIDS. Why are they equipped to speak during Worlds AIDS Day? I think it's disgusting that they would use this day and this event to preach their ‘Loving Homosexuals as Jesus Would’ agenda. And that's just what it is, an agenda.”
Whatever the motive behind Saddleback’s inclusion of Wilkins and Thompson, it’s clear the church isn’t spreading hate. Wilkins makes this clear in his ministry’s manifesto: “Do I hate homosexuals? Absolutely not! The truth is I love homosexuals more now than when I was one!”
But by ignoring homosexuals in all other aspects of Disturbing Voices, has Saddleback inadvertently propagated the stigma of AIDS being a gay disease by not acknowledging the stigma or the demographic itself? Considering their link to thousands of gays via their contributions to ASF, is it not their obligation to make such acknowledgements and then seek to fight against them? More importantly, does it even matter?
Rose invokes the bible when confronted with the fact that most of his clientele is all but subjugated by Saddleback, analogizing ASF’s receptiveness from the church with the “Good Samaritan” parable.
“While ASF staff may not agree with every aspect of Saddleback Church, we still think it’s a wonderful thing that they’re doing for us. After all, AIDS is not a gay disease. It doesn’t matter how you contracted it. The fact that Saddleback has come to us is a huge step in the right direction; we would never deny their support.”
Robert is more pragmatic.
“It’s a tricky thing if I would accept money or food knowing that it came from the church. I would not cease accepting assistance from the non-profit (ASF) since not all of the money that funds the non-profit is from the church. I would want to know how much they contribute though. I would also want to make sure that these "solicitors" did not try and preach/teach/hold seminars, etc. at the non-profit.”
It is World AIDS Day at Saddleback Church, and as the prayer service concludes, people who might never have otherwise thought about the disease emerge from an institution that has, until now, spent the past twenty five years telling them to do just that.
The cynic might point out that the speeches were contrived, the oversights were deliberate and offensive, and they’re not doing nearly enough. But the tears that have dried in the corners of their eyes and on the folds of their cheeks are real. And the cynic would have to relent, “They’re slowly getting it.”
November 9, 2024
November 7, 2023
The Meaning Of Anna Nicole
(Taking a brief break from the daily routine to feature some of my previously written non-fiction writing and reporting. The following piece looks at the media reaction to the death of, who else, Anna-Nicole Smith. Enjoy!)
The Meaning of Anna-Nicole
By Zachary Sire
I can still remember that surreal Thursday afternoon, standing dumbstruck in my living room with a tuna fish sandwich in one hand and the TV remote in the other, when Wolf Blitzer announced that Anna-Nicole Smith had died. I’ll never forget it. At home for what was supposed to be a quick lunch break, I was compelled to forego the rest of my day’s plans and sit in front of the television.
In a move usually reserved for terrorist attacks or natural disasters, Blitzer’s CNN program, The Situation Room, abandoned its routine political and international affairs reporting in favor of Breaking News on Anna-Nicole. On The Situation Room set, an enormous wall of multi-tiered video screens traditionally used for remote shots of places like Baghdad or the White House and for correspondence with people like Christiane Amanpour or Henry Kissinger was now showing file footage of Anna-Nicole Smith in a hot tub.
Then there was Anna-Nicole in her infamous “Like my body?” Trim-Spa ads, followed by incoherent award show appearances, reality show clips, a cameo in "Naked Gun 33 1/3," and various modeling photos. The images shuffled and flipped on the video wall behind Blitzer, the author of Between Washington and Jerusalem: A Reporter's Notebook, like a deck of dirty playing cards, alternately sexy then sad, sexy, sad.
But Blitzer didn’t waiver, tossing to reporters on the scene at the Hard Rock Hotel in Florida, consulting with medical experts on how Anna-Nicole might have died, and, less than an hour after her death, calling in legal experts for analysis on the fate of her questionable fortune.
Things were even more frantic on Fox News’ Your World with Neil Cavuto. Cavuto, a more portly, quieter version of Bill O’Reilly, had been about to start an interview with Clint Eastwood when the news of Anna-Nicole’s death broke. Rather than keep Mr. Eastwood waiting, Fox cut away from a police press conference outside the Hard Rock to proceed with the interview. Of course, Cavuto’s first question was in regards to Anna-Nicole.
“Anna-Nicole Smith has died […] and she was sort of a whimsical character in the eyes of the press; a here-again, gone-again celebrity…” he prefaced, before asking the bewildered Eastwood, “How do you feel?”
An obviously uninterested Eastwood replied as only he could: “I feel fine.” Then he added, “I’m sorry that life ended tragically for this lady.”
Lady?
Whimsical?
But it wasn’t the death of Anna-Nicole Smith that was so shocking. What struck me (and undoubtedly anyone else with a passing interest in things like dignity or relevance) was that people like Wolf Blitzer and Clint Eastwood were talking about the death of Anna-Nicole Smith. What about Iraq? Darfur, anyone? Lingering effects of Katrina? At the very least, could somebody please give me an update on that crazy astronaut in a diaper?
Over the course of the afternoon, I displayed my outrage over the lack of real news by channel surfing from CNN to MSNBC to Fox, and by checking the front page of Yahoo! news, the celebrity gossip blogs, and Drudge, but it was all Anna, all the time. I put some popcorn in the microwave (I had finished the tuna sandwich), poured myself a Diet Coke, propped up some pillows on the couch (might as well get comfortable), and settled in. I wasn’t prepared to leave my post in front of the television and my laptop until there was some sort of substantive report on Global Warming or Hillary Clinton or…Sugar-Pie, Anna-Nicole’s dog?
Something was happening to me. I needed answers. I needed a sign that responsible journalism was alive and well. Most importantly, I needed to know how Anna-Nicole died and whether or not she had a will. What?! Four to six weeks for a toxicology report? Come on! I wouldn’t be surprised if Howard K. Stern had something to do with this…he’s always rubbed me the wrong way.
And so somewhere between the tuna and Larry King Live a metamorphosis occurred in me, in everyone maybe, that allowed for all of this. This cultural tendency towards all that is sensational and naughty and significantly meaningless. It rears its seductive head ever so coyly so that we might gawk, most of us never admitting that we enjoy the gawking, until we finally succumb. Accepting the coverage of Anna-Nicole’s death was the right thing to do, in part, because it was the only thing we could do.
By all means, the nonstop, endless, knockdown, drag-out reporting on Anna-Nicole was not only appropriate—it was a public service. It was simple supply and demand. If you build it, they will come. Trickle-down Anna-Nomics. If an Anna-Nicole falls in the forest with no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? Who cares? My name is Zach and I’m an Anna-Holic.
***
Obsession with Anna-Nicole permeated all forms of media because there were endless developments and angles from which to report, and no single media outlet was more tuned in to our addiction than Entertainment Tonight. For weeks after she died, ET devoted the majority, if not all, of its 30-minute nightly programming to Anna-Nicole. Highlights included video of Howard K. Stern’s tearful reunion with his alleged daughter Dannielynn in the Bahamas, “unseen” archive interviews with Anna-Nicole, courtroom recaps of the trial determining the fate of Anna-Nicole’s body, and a chilling re-enactment of Anna-Nicole’s private nurse discovering her body (Anna’s actual nurse participated in the re-enactment while an ET staffer stood in for Anna’s body).
Striving for authenticity, ET used a Hard Rock hotel room with a floor plan matching Anna-Nicole’s old room, and the nurse got a chance to show off some acting ability. Accompanied by a sweeping and mournful piano soundtrack, the nurse approached “Anna-Nicole’s” bed and recited her name as if questioning a lint brush.
“Anna?” she said. With the same inflection: “Anna. Wake up.” She limply pulled on the ET staffer’s pretend limp wrist and broke character to tell the camera, “I could tell something was wrong when she didn’t answer me and her hand just sort of plopped down on the bed,” before plopping said hand down on the bed and shrugging her shoulders with a sort of “are we done yet?” ennui. Ok, it wasn’t exactly Hamlet but what do you want from a private nurse?
In a similar vein, the National Enquirer magazine published photos of Anna-Nicole’s decomposing body. The photos weren’t real, of course, but were an artist’s rendering of what her body might have looked like three weeks after rotting in a morgue and awaiting burial. But creating the blue-lipped and green-skinned corpse took more than just Photoshop wizardry; the pictures were based on “eyewitness accounts,” according to the accompanying story.
"If you had our images side-by-side with the actual photos,” Enquirer editor in chief David Perel said, “I don't know if you'd be able to tell them apart."
The images quickly penetrated the internet, blogs and message boards, which hyperventilated with their usual mix of speculation, hate speech, and, of course, “OMG.” User comments on the photos that were posted to the gossip blog dlisted.com included, “She looks better here than while alive!” and, my favorite, “That is sick and tacky and disgusting! I love it!”
Web traffic on the blogs exploded in the days after the death of Anna-Nicole Smith, rivaling the audiences of traditional media and ensconcing the online medium as a valid source for news. “ANS,” an acronym bloggers had adopted in undoubted exhaustion over having to type her full name so many times, had drawn a record 5.5 million “unique hits” to websites like perezhilton.com, which clearly provided an outlet for working people to commiserate in the privacy of their cubicles.
After clocking out, these same people, along with millions of others, went home and watched television, catapulting Entertainment Tonight to its highest ratings period since the week after Janet Jackson exposed her nipple during the Super Bowl. On the Thursday, February 8th telecast alone (the first day of coverage), ET ratings were up 33% from the previous Thursday (an unbelievable feat for a syndicated show), and hadn’t been that high since the day after the Academy Awards in 2004. In fact all of the media, including newspapers and local news broadcasts, had benefited from the Anna-Nicole Smith or ANS story because it had multiple layers from which all types of media could pick and choose and then cobble into the kind of story they would ordinarily report on anyway: legal, financial, human interest, tabloid, or medical. The pegs, and the entertainment, were perpetual.
Granted, it’s not revelatory to admit that it doesn’t take much to entertain people in a culture dominated by amateur singing competitions, shrill political punditry, and the televised entrapment of pedophiles. And the successes enjoyed by ET et al. will only serve to fuel the notion that it provides what we want regardless of whether or not anyone asked for it in the first place (the media have no use for “chicken/egg” type musings—their best indicator has always been their profit margin). But the fact that shoddy re-enactments and phony pictures delivered record ratings and increased revenues does reveal something about our thirst for insider access (e.g. The Insider, Access Hollywood) to the lives (or deaths) of famous people and, perhaps more acutely, it reveals our striving for basic knowledge and connection during tragedy.
It wasn’t enough to merely know that Anna-Nicole had died in a hotel room or that her body lay unburied, there was something of greater and more immediate value in actually watching it happen for real, even though re-enactments are by definition “unreal,” with our own eyes. That, or re-enactments are just entertaining in general, no matter the subject. A bevy of re-enactment laden 9/11 and Amy Fisher TV movies have proven that.
Such an attractive faux reality also helps to explicate the appeal of the pre-dead Anna-Nicole. Because when she was breathing, stripping, posing, marrying, divorcing, stuttering, and gallivanting from one unbelievable scenario to the next, she was just absurd enough to seem unreal, and yet just fallible enough, just human enough to be thought of as somewhat accessible; the kind of girl who’d share her lip gloss with you. And what could possibly be more unreal and alluring than this buxom chimera, this embodiment of the American Dream, platinum blonde and out of reach, out of her mind even, who was savvy enough to have gone from being a honky-tonk Texas waitress to dying on the cusp of becoming a millionaire four hundred times over. Anna-Nicole, whether we believed it because the media had obscured the chasm between the celebrity and the civilian, or because it fulfilled our innate need to be close to the fabulous, was just like us.
This is not to say that Anna-Nicole shared our values or had lived life as commonly as someone like me (fascinating and charismatic as I may be), nor is it suggesting that we were only interested in her because she was a train wreck. We related to her because her pursuit of happiness in the face of so many failures was a commonality among us. Hers was that great American narrative wherein the heroine, pitted against insurmountable odds, achieves the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. She was like a classic fiction character (some have been reminded of Dickens, or at least Jackie Collins) whose story had all the trappings of grand and romantic literature: a childhood in semi-poverty, a youth of quasi-prostitution, a wedding to an elderly millionaire, the death of her beloved son, and her declining reputation in the public sphere. She even dies in the end.
To be less literary about it, and to point to its explicitly American details, there was, in no particular order, her marriage to the oil tycoon she met while working as a stripper, her fluctuating weight, a tumultuous relationship with drugs and alcohol, a Supreme Court inheritance battle, the overdose of her adult son three days after the birth of her daughter, the paternity of her daughter, her dropping out of high school at 17 to marry a man she met while working at Jim’s Krispy Fried Chicken (she had also worked at a Red Lobster), the Playboy spread, the reality show, and, most importantly, the obsession with her very own heroine, that other great American narrative called Marilyn Monroe.
Anna-Nicole had always, even at the peak of her success, dreamed of being something other than what she was. And for every friend, spokesperson, groupie, lawyer, personal stylist, or Bahamian ice cream truck driver who told us she was Larger Than Life, there were equal voices that referred to her as having lived The American Dream. How could we not root for her when she was alive? How could we not grieve for her after her death?
***
Many in the media were quick to mock Anna-Nicole and to take issue with the coverage surrounding her. On The Situation Room, the cantankerous Jack Cafferty, who reads viewer e-mails to Blitzer at the end of each hour, rhetorically asked in the midst of the coverage on the day she died, “Anna-Nicole still dead, Wolf?” Later, on Anderson Cooper’s self-important Anderson Cooper 360, Anderson Cooper announced he would not be reporting on the Anna-Nicole story because, he said, “There’s a war on. There’s a war on. There’s a war on.” (He would later end up reporting on the court proceedings regarding her burial.) And Judge Judy Sheindlin, appearing on Larry King Live, had this to say:
Regular people had harsh words for the media too. I overheard a woman at my Aunt's birthday party say, “You know, all this [Anna-Nicole] crap is just a trick that the Republicans pulled to distract us from what’s really going on, and [the media] are letting them get away with it!” She may have had a few glasses of wine, but insinuating that the GOP had assassinated Anna-Nicole seemed a bit much. Or, she could have been trying to suggest that the Republican Party controlled the media, but this wasn’t exactly a cutting-edge observation. Even if her allegations were true, it’s nothing new.
The media don’t need to be controlled by the Republicans in order to behave irresponsibly. This is, after all, the same media that allowed for claims of WMD in Iraq to go unchecked and unverified. Surely, the media that couldn’t investigate a flimsy and easily discredited excuse for war couldn’t be expected to ever tell us what was “really going on,” not that they or my Aunt's friend ever knew what was “really going on” from one minute to the next anyway. But blaming and ridiculing a dead woman for attracting our full attention—that was easy.
This is, after all, the same media that chose to investigate why Britney Spears shaved her head, but couldn’t quite explain what Scooter Libby had been found guilty of. This is laissez-faire journalism, with occasional crybabies like Cafferty and Cooper who feign stirring the pot either by being crass (of course she was “still dead”), or patronizing (there’s a “war on”), respectively, but fail to realize that their paychecks are dependent upon the very stories that they are so loathe to report. And this is still the same media that spent years covering JonBenet Ramsey and Laci Peterson but never had a harsh word to say about them (apparently those two weren’t sexy or outrageous enough to be demonized).
Even if those who criticized the Anna-Nicole coverage were justified (they weren’t), at what point did it become ok to attack Anna-Nicole herself? You can’t shoot the messenger if she’s already dead.
But it continued. Judge Judy’s tirade on Larry King was perhaps the most vitriolic, and yet as sad as her words were (Anna-Nicole’s daughter would one day be aware of everything that everyone was saying), there was an irony in them that finally revealed the truth behind why Anna-Nicole, and all the coverage, mattered. Judge Judy said:
It took me a few hours on the afternoon that she died to realize that Anna-Nicole had mattered for precisely the reasons that Judge Judy had listed. That someone who had not achieved anything Important was garnering such attention meant that the meaning of his or her life was fleeting and subjective, that meaning itself was meaningless. It meant that Anna-Nicole was just as meaningless, based on the amount of coverage, as someone like Gerald Ford, and that means something. The never elected president who had died shortly before Anna-Nicole was praised because he had once been the president, but what else did we know about him? He had fourteen funerals and Anna-Nicole could barely get one, but the girl who didn’t “do anything” will be remembered far more affectionately than he.
I’d much rather care about those who lived and died without seeming to matter because it means we’re all on an even keel. Who better to emulate than someone who made nothing out of nothing but still made it look like something? Anna-Nicole is an inspiration to so many of us who will die having achieved nothing; so many us of who will not or can not see her death as any sort of result of having lived a “get rich quick,” “lose weight fast,” “Like My Body?” “Who’s Your Daddy?” life—when that’s just what it was, a tragic and fitting denouement.
Because we are of a culture that doesn’t care for context or consequence, it’s easier for us to assert that the only reason Anna-Nicole died was because it was “her time” instead of getting "real" and admitting that she was doomed from the start. We like to gloss. Romanticize. Whimsicalize. Anna-Nicole is, if nothing else, an inspiration to so many of us who like dreams, particularly those of the American persuasion. And especially those we can watch, from beginning to end, on TV.
The Meaning of Anna-Nicole
By Zachary Sire
I can still remember that surreal Thursday afternoon, standing dumbstruck in my living room with a tuna fish sandwich in one hand and the TV remote in the other, when Wolf Blitzer announced that Anna-Nicole Smith had died. I’ll never forget it. At home for what was supposed to be a quick lunch break, I was compelled to forego the rest of my day’s plans and sit in front of the television.
In a move usually reserved for terrorist attacks or natural disasters, Blitzer’s CNN program, The Situation Room, abandoned its routine political and international affairs reporting in favor of Breaking News on Anna-Nicole. On The Situation Room set, an enormous wall of multi-tiered video screens traditionally used for remote shots of places like Baghdad or the White House and for correspondence with people like Christiane Amanpour or Henry Kissinger was now showing file footage of Anna-Nicole Smith in a hot tub.
Then there was Anna-Nicole in her infamous “Like my body?” Trim-Spa ads, followed by incoherent award show appearances, reality show clips, a cameo in "Naked Gun 33 1/3," and various modeling photos. The images shuffled and flipped on the video wall behind Blitzer, the author of Between Washington and Jerusalem: A Reporter's Notebook, like a deck of dirty playing cards, alternately sexy then sad, sexy, sad.
But Blitzer didn’t waiver, tossing to reporters on the scene at the Hard Rock Hotel in Florida, consulting with medical experts on how Anna-Nicole might have died, and, less than an hour after her death, calling in legal experts for analysis on the fate of her questionable fortune.
Things were even more frantic on Fox News’ Your World with Neil Cavuto. Cavuto, a more portly, quieter version of Bill O’Reilly, had been about to start an interview with Clint Eastwood when the news of Anna-Nicole’s death broke. Rather than keep Mr. Eastwood waiting, Fox cut away from a police press conference outside the Hard Rock to proceed with the interview. Of course, Cavuto’s first question was in regards to Anna-Nicole.
“Anna-Nicole Smith has died […] and she was sort of a whimsical character in the eyes of the press; a here-again, gone-again celebrity…” he prefaced, before asking the bewildered Eastwood, “How do you feel?”
An obviously uninterested Eastwood replied as only he could: “I feel fine.” Then he added, “I’m sorry that life ended tragically for this lady.”
Lady?
Whimsical?
But it wasn’t the death of Anna-Nicole Smith that was so shocking. What struck me (and undoubtedly anyone else with a passing interest in things like dignity or relevance) was that people like Wolf Blitzer and Clint Eastwood were talking about the death of Anna-Nicole Smith. What about Iraq? Darfur, anyone? Lingering effects of Katrina? At the very least, could somebody please give me an update on that crazy astronaut in a diaper?
Over the course of the afternoon, I displayed my outrage over the lack of real news by channel surfing from CNN to MSNBC to Fox, and by checking the front page of Yahoo! news, the celebrity gossip blogs, and Drudge, but it was all Anna, all the time. I put some popcorn in the microwave (I had finished the tuna sandwich), poured myself a Diet Coke, propped up some pillows on the couch (might as well get comfortable), and settled in. I wasn’t prepared to leave my post in front of the television and my laptop until there was some sort of substantive report on Global Warming or Hillary Clinton or…Sugar-Pie, Anna-Nicole’s dog?
Something was happening to me. I needed answers. I needed a sign that responsible journalism was alive and well. Most importantly, I needed to know how Anna-Nicole died and whether or not she had a will. What?! Four to six weeks for a toxicology report? Come on! I wouldn’t be surprised if Howard K. Stern had something to do with this…he’s always rubbed me the wrong way.
And so somewhere between the tuna and Larry King Live a metamorphosis occurred in me, in everyone maybe, that allowed for all of this. This cultural tendency towards all that is sensational and naughty and significantly meaningless. It rears its seductive head ever so coyly so that we might gawk, most of us never admitting that we enjoy the gawking, until we finally succumb. Accepting the coverage of Anna-Nicole’s death was the right thing to do, in part, because it was the only thing we could do.
By all means, the nonstop, endless, knockdown, drag-out reporting on Anna-Nicole was not only appropriate—it was a public service. It was simple supply and demand. If you build it, they will come. Trickle-down Anna-Nomics. If an Anna-Nicole falls in the forest with no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? Who cares? My name is Zach and I’m an Anna-Holic.
***
Obsession with Anna-Nicole permeated all forms of media because there were endless developments and angles from which to report, and no single media outlet was more tuned in to our addiction than Entertainment Tonight. For weeks after she died, ET devoted the majority, if not all, of its 30-minute nightly programming to Anna-Nicole. Highlights included video of Howard K. Stern’s tearful reunion with his alleged daughter Dannielynn in the Bahamas, “unseen” archive interviews with Anna-Nicole, courtroom recaps of the trial determining the fate of Anna-Nicole’s body, and a chilling re-enactment of Anna-Nicole’s private nurse discovering her body (Anna’s actual nurse participated in the re-enactment while an ET staffer stood in for Anna’s body).
Striving for authenticity, ET used a Hard Rock hotel room with a floor plan matching Anna-Nicole’s old room, and the nurse got a chance to show off some acting ability. Accompanied by a sweeping and mournful piano soundtrack, the nurse approached “Anna-Nicole’s” bed and recited her name as if questioning a lint brush.
“Anna?” she said. With the same inflection: “Anna. Wake up.” She limply pulled on the ET staffer’s pretend limp wrist and broke character to tell the camera, “I could tell something was wrong when she didn’t answer me and her hand just sort of plopped down on the bed,” before plopping said hand down on the bed and shrugging her shoulders with a sort of “are we done yet?” ennui. Ok, it wasn’t exactly Hamlet but what do you want from a private nurse?
In a similar vein, the National Enquirer magazine published photos of Anna-Nicole’s decomposing body. The photos weren’t real, of course, but were an artist’s rendering of what her body might have looked like three weeks after rotting in a morgue and awaiting burial. But creating the blue-lipped and green-skinned corpse took more than just Photoshop wizardry; the pictures were based on “eyewitness accounts,” according to the accompanying story.
"If you had our images side-by-side with the actual photos,” Enquirer editor in chief David Perel said, “I don't know if you'd be able to tell them apart."
The images quickly penetrated the internet, blogs and message boards, which hyperventilated with their usual mix of speculation, hate speech, and, of course, “OMG.” User comments on the photos that were posted to the gossip blog dlisted.com included, “She looks better here than while alive!” and, my favorite, “That is sick and tacky and disgusting! I love it!”
Web traffic on the blogs exploded in the days after the death of Anna-Nicole Smith, rivaling the audiences of traditional media and ensconcing the online medium as a valid source for news. “ANS,” an acronym bloggers had adopted in undoubted exhaustion over having to type her full name so many times, had drawn a record 5.5 million “unique hits” to websites like perezhilton.com, which clearly provided an outlet for working people to commiserate in the privacy of their cubicles.
After clocking out, these same people, along with millions of others, went home and watched television, catapulting Entertainment Tonight to its highest ratings period since the week after Janet Jackson exposed her nipple during the Super Bowl. On the Thursday, February 8th telecast alone (the first day of coverage), ET ratings were up 33% from the previous Thursday (an unbelievable feat for a syndicated show), and hadn’t been that high since the day after the Academy Awards in 2004. In fact all of the media, including newspapers and local news broadcasts, had benefited from the Anna-Nicole Smith or ANS story because it had multiple layers from which all types of media could pick and choose and then cobble into the kind of story they would ordinarily report on anyway: legal, financial, human interest, tabloid, or medical. The pegs, and the entertainment, were perpetual.
Granted, it’s not revelatory to admit that it doesn’t take much to entertain people in a culture dominated by amateur singing competitions, shrill political punditry, and the televised entrapment of pedophiles. And the successes enjoyed by ET et al. will only serve to fuel the notion that it provides what we want regardless of whether or not anyone asked for it in the first place (the media have no use for “chicken/egg” type musings—their best indicator has always been their profit margin). But the fact that shoddy re-enactments and phony pictures delivered record ratings and increased revenues does reveal something about our thirst for insider access (e.g. The Insider, Access Hollywood) to the lives (or deaths) of famous people and, perhaps more acutely, it reveals our striving for basic knowledge and connection during tragedy.
It wasn’t enough to merely know that Anna-Nicole had died in a hotel room or that her body lay unburied, there was something of greater and more immediate value in actually watching it happen for real, even though re-enactments are by definition “unreal,” with our own eyes. That, or re-enactments are just entertaining in general, no matter the subject. A bevy of re-enactment laden 9/11 and Amy Fisher TV movies have proven that.
Such an attractive faux reality also helps to explicate the appeal of the pre-dead Anna-Nicole. Because when she was breathing, stripping, posing, marrying, divorcing, stuttering, and gallivanting from one unbelievable scenario to the next, she was just absurd enough to seem unreal, and yet just fallible enough, just human enough to be thought of as somewhat accessible; the kind of girl who’d share her lip gloss with you. And what could possibly be more unreal and alluring than this buxom chimera, this embodiment of the American Dream, platinum blonde and out of reach, out of her mind even, who was savvy enough to have gone from being a honky-tonk Texas waitress to dying on the cusp of becoming a millionaire four hundred times over. Anna-Nicole, whether we believed it because the media had obscured the chasm between the celebrity and the civilian, or because it fulfilled our innate need to be close to the fabulous, was just like us.
This is not to say that Anna-Nicole shared our values or had lived life as commonly as someone like me (fascinating and charismatic as I may be), nor is it suggesting that we were only interested in her because she was a train wreck. We related to her because her pursuit of happiness in the face of so many failures was a commonality among us. Hers was that great American narrative wherein the heroine, pitted against insurmountable odds, achieves the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. She was like a classic fiction character (some have been reminded of Dickens, or at least Jackie Collins) whose story had all the trappings of grand and romantic literature: a childhood in semi-poverty, a youth of quasi-prostitution, a wedding to an elderly millionaire, the death of her beloved son, and her declining reputation in the public sphere. She even dies in the end.
To be less literary about it, and to point to its explicitly American details, there was, in no particular order, her marriage to the oil tycoon she met while working as a stripper, her fluctuating weight, a tumultuous relationship with drugs and alcohol, a Supreme Court inheritance battle, the overdose of her adult son three days after the birth of her daughter, the paternity of her daughter, her dropping out of high school at 17 to marry a man she met while working at Jim’s Krispy Fried Chicken (she had also worked at a Red Lobster), the Playboy spread, the reality show, and, most importantly, the obsession with her very own heroine, that other great American narrative called Marilyn Monroe.
Anna-Nicole had always, even at the peak of her success, dreamed of being something other than what she was. And for every friend, spokesperson, groupie, lawyer, personal stylist, or Bahamian ice cream truck driver who told us she was Larger Than Life, there were equal voices that referred to her as having lived The American Dream. How could we not root for her when she was alive? How could we not grieve for her after her death?
***
Many in the media were quick to mock Anna-Nicole and to take issue with the coverage surrounding her. On The Situation Room, the cantankerous Jack Cafferty, who reads viewer e-mails to Blitzer at the end of each hour, rhetorically asked in the midst of the coverage on the day she died, “Anna-Nicole still dead, Wolf?” Later, on Anderson Cooper’s self-important Anderson Cooper 360, Anderson Cooper announced he would not be reporting on the Anna-Nicole story because, he said, “There’s a war on. There’s a war on. There’s a war on.” (He would later end up reporting on the court proceedings regarding her burial.) And Judge Judy Sheindlin, appearing on Larry King Live, had this to say:
The entertainment industry […] seems to be devoting an inordinate time to this nonsense, and you and I both know that in the scheme of the world where we are today, this is really irrelevant. I mean, we are about to embark upon a great election where we might elect the first African-American president, the first woman president of the United States. And every time you turn on the television, all you see are pictures of Anna-Nicole Smith.This, from the woman who made a career out of awarding damages to people who got bad perms.
Regular people had harsh words for the media too. I overheard a woman at my Aunt's birthday party say, “You know, all this [Anna-Nicole] crap is just a trick that the Republicans pulled to distract us from what’s really going on, and [the media] are letting them get away with it!” She may have had a few glasses of wine, but insinuating that the GOP had assassinated Anna-Nicole seemed a bit much. Or, she could have been trying to suggest that the Republican Party controlled the media, but this wasn’t exactly a cutting-edge observation. Even if her allegations were true, it’s nothing new.
The media don’t need to be controlled by the Republicans in order to behave irresponsibly. This is, after all, the same media that allowed for claims of WMD in Iraq to go unchecked and unverified. Surely, the media that couldn’t investigate a flimsy and easily discredited excuse for war couldn’t be expected to ever tell us what was “really going on,” not that they or my Aunt's friend ever knew what was “really going on” from one minute to the next anyway. But blaming and ridiculing a dead woman for attracting our full attention—that was easy.
This is, after all, the same media that chose to investigate why Britney Spears shaved her head, but couldn’t quite explain what Scooter Libby had been found guilty of. This is laissez-faire journalism, with occasional crybabies like Cafferty and Cooper who feign stirring the pot either by being crass (of course she was “still dead”), or patronizing (there’s a “war on”), respectively, but fail to realize that their paychecks are dependent upon the very stories that they are so loathe to report. And this is still the same media that spent years covering JonBenet Ramsey and Laci Peterson but never had a harsh word to say about them (apparently those two weren’t sexy or outrageous enough to be demonized).
Even if those who criticized the Anna-Nicole coverage were justified (they weren’t), at what point did it become ok to attack Anna-Nicole herself? You can’t shoot the messenger if she’s already dead.
But it continued. Judge Judy’s tirade on Larry King was perhaps the most vitriolic, and yet as sad as her words were (Anna-Nicole’s daughter would one day be aware of everything that everyone was saying), there was an irony in them that finally revealed the truth behind why Anna-Nicole, and all the coverage, mattered. Judge Judy said:
I don't know one thing she did. Can you tell me what she did? I mean, was she—did she write anything that I should know about? Or did she paint anything…that I should know about? Did she create anything? Did she act in a wonderful movie? Did she—what did she do? She married an old guy and he died and then there was a lawsuit.
It took me a few hours on the afternoon that she died to realize that Anna-Nicole had mattered for precisely the reasons that Judge Judy had listed. That someone who had not achieved anything Important was garnering such attention meant that the meaning of his or her life was fleeting and subjective, that meaning itself was meaningless. It meant that Anna-Nicole was just as meaningless, based on the amount of coverage, as someone like Gerald Ford, and that means something. The never elected president who had died shortly before Anna-Nicole was praised because he had once been the president, but what else did we know about him? He had fourteen funerals and Anna-Nicole could barely get one, but the girl who didn’t “do anything” will be remembered far more affectionately than he.
I’d much rather care about those who lived and died without seeming to matter because it means we’re all on an even keel. Who better to emulate than someone who made nothing out of nothing but still made it look like something? Anna-Nicole is an inspiration to so many of us who will die having achieved nothing; so many us of who will not or can not see her death as any sort of result of having lived a “get rich quick,” “lose weight fast,” “Like My Body?” “Who’s Your Daddy?” life—when that’s just what it was, a tragic and fitting denouement.
Because we are of a culture that doesn’t care for context or consequence, it’s easier for us to assert that the only reason Anna-Nicole died was because it was “her time” instead of getting "real" and admitting that she was doomed from the start. We like to gloss. Romanticize. Whimsicalize. Anna-Nicole is, if nothing else, an inspiration to so many of us who like dreams, particularly those of the American persuasion. And especially those we can watch, from beginning to end, on TV.
November 16, 2021
The Housesitter
The Housesitter, By Zachary Paul Sire
Impotent potted plants
empty jettisoned jacuzzis
canine fingernails on hardwood floors
fucking jumbo jets
A sort of metronome
Mozambique, New York City, Peru
go
You hear the air planes take off from LAX but you don’t see them if you’re on a condominium balcony in an apartment complex in Playa Del Ray. There are marshlands and long highways and fences that make them (the fucking jumbo jets) seem like monsters that hide in the sky but are strong enough to scream themselves into your night.
Maybe Lincoln, Bangkok, Amsterdam.
Pretty unimportant. Scavenger sex, cigarettes, entitlement booze,
Balcony perched, watchin the planes take off
You know stuff around you, dogs playing tug-of-war inside, the neighbors awake like you with tv’s glaring and glowing up their bedrooms that say “Life! life in here!”
Las Vegas, Jakarta, Bangladesh.
And it goes vroooom, shuuuuush, reeeeeee
With majesty, permeates
Swallows and burns and incinerates air behind its impression
You press little buttons
You have crushes
You attempt permanence
Juneau, Madrid, Baghdad
Scuffed socks and in need
Of a haircut
You’ve got the whole world to take on,
Tomorrow
Or the next day
Maybe
Fucking jumbo jets
Impotent potted plants
empty jettisoned jacuzzis
canine fingernails on hardwood floors
fucking jumbo jets
A sort of metronome
Mozambique, New York City, Peru
go
You hear the air planes take off from LAX but you don’t see them if you’re on a condominium balcony in an apartment complex in Playa Del Ray. There are marshlands and long highways and fences that make them (the fucking jumbo jets) seem like monsters that hide in the sky but are strong enough to scream themselves into your night.
Maybe Lincoln, Bangkok, Amsterdam.
Pretty unimportant. Scavenger sex, cigarettes, entitlement booze,
Balcony perched, watchin the planes take off
You know stuff around you, dogs playing tug-of-war inside, the neighbors awake like you with tv’s glaring and glowing up their bedrooms that say “Life! life in here!”
Las Vegas, Jakarta, Bangladesh.
And it goes vroooom, shuuuuush, reeeeeee
With majesty, permeates
Swallows and burns and incinerates air behind its impression
You press little buttons
You have crushes
You attempt permanence
Juneau, Madrid, Baghdad
Scuffed socks and in need
Of a haircut
You’ve got the whole world to take on,
Tomorrow
Or the next day
Maybe
Fucking jumbo jets
July 2, 2020
September 11, 2011
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