Death On The Timeline
by Boobie
One of the strangest things about being a denizen of social media are the frequent bursts of strong emotion that are relatively quickly forgotten because of the sheer volume of Things happening in the world. For example, a couple times, a week I get mad at some conservative idiot with an upsettingly large platform over some horrible dehumanizing tweet or video, only to forget they exist due to whatever else catches the website’s collective attention, at least until that particular idiot pops up with another dehumanizing tweet or video. Or rather, I forget they exist if I’m lucky; some, like Laura Loomer or Britt McHenry or Charlie Kirk, are prominent enough that I devote brain space that would in the past have been devoted to remembering directions or phone numbers to a litany of their terrible beliefs.
It’s not just incredulous anger though, although given the state of discourse and my own choices of what to care about that’s an unhealthily but unavoidably common emotion. There’s fun (mostly a weird version), too, like the person who said that they didn’t feel bad about a kid getting eaten by an alligator because of white male privilege, or anything in this this thread, or any old tweet from @dril, absurdities that I enjoy and then forget about until someone brings them up a year later and I can laugh again with the benefit of distance and hindsight.
The oddest of all these bursts of emotion is profound sadness, though. Anthony Bourdain’s passing of suicide was the most recent and, it feels at the moment, the most affecting. Anthony Bourdain isn’t someone I ever really cared about one way or another. I guess my opinion of him was that he seemed cool; I hadn’t heard anything bad about him in a time where seemingly all idols are finally and rightfully falling from grace, so he must be a good dude, and I love to see a drug recovery success story. I’m just not really a Food Network guy. But when he passed, Twitter did one of its most beautiful things: it came together Irish wake-style in joyous mourning, bringing the best of a great man to forefront and celebrating the things that make his passing so devastating.
Bourdain’s love for the diversity and beauty of humanity as a species, and disdain for those who ignore them, are the thing that stands out the most, it seems, and it’s hard to think of a more admirable duel defining qualities. There are stories everywhere about Bourdain treating foods and, by extension, culture outside his own with the casual love and respect that western imperialism has made the exception rather than the rule when it comes to foreign culture. He celebrated otherness without attempting to corrupt it in the way that capitalism often does in favor of efficiency and mass-appeal; he did not Mackle much, if at all. This is all beautiful, and I barely knew and certainly never appreciated any of it until now.
In the aftermath of Bourdain’s death, I started to watch some episodes of his show Parts Unknown, which was supposed to be taken off Netflix on June 16th but was kept up due to the tragic circumstances. Watching through the lens of other peoples’ view of him makes it seem impossible that this show was never brought to my attention before — nothing I read seems to have been an exaggeration. This sort of postmortem appreciation is one I’ve found all too often, from Bourdain to Prince to Lil Peep, blindspots that I never addressed in time because either their greatness was so long established that it was just a constant hum in the background of pop culture or because the hum had not yet broached my cultural bubble in any significant way.
There is always a performative aspect of social media mourning, but people’s deep affection for Bourdain appeared, even to a cynic, to be genuine. That sorrow made me wonder, though, about the way the world would react to the deaths of other “great” men. How will the world react, for example, when his great enemy Henry Kissinger finally dies? The left-leaning people I know — which is the majority — will celebrate, but for the most part prominent figures in both of America’s major political parties will extol his genius and savvy and probably his sense of humor and, with a wink and a nudge, varied and voracious appetites the same way that the world did for Bourdain. This for a man responsible for genocide and destruction in Cambodia. Disgusting.
More recently, I didn’t have to wonder anymore how the world would react to the death of a famous monster. Rapper XXXtentacion was robbed and shot to death on June 18th. He was very popular among younger rap fans, and has been for some time, but I was never aware of his existence without also being aware that he has been jailed for beating his pregnant girlfriend nearly to death. I later learned that while in prison he had also beaten a man he thought was gay for being gay. Because of that fact, I never actually listened to his music, but it seems that many of those who did overlooked the horrid abuse that was central to his story because they connected with it.
This wasn’t a case of Chris Brown or Ike Turner or John Lennon or (the list goes on forever) becoming famous through their music and people then overlooking their behavior because of the joy that music had brought them; this is a case of people prioritizing a new artist’s potential over victims of abuse, in real time, with no nostalgia to complicate their feelings.
The people I follow reacted as I would expect them to, with a spectrum running from happiness at the death of an abuser to uneasiness with the happiness at the death of an abuser, but no actual sorrow. No one anyone had the right to kill XXX, besides his victims perhaps, but the world is pretty objectively better off without him. However, other communities reacted similarly to the way most people did following Bourdain’s death. Seemingly every prominent rapper expressed sadness. Aping anti-choice talking points, R&B singer Jidenna countered the morbid happiness of those celebrating the death of an unrepentant rapist by comparing XXX to Malcolm X; a fan made the same comparison and upped the ante by also likening his crimes to those of Maya Angelou (being a sex worker and a single mother are apparently on par). Many bemoaned this generation’s lack of empathy, betraying their own towards XXX’s victims.
The two opposing sides reminded me that, though I dismissed and ignored it, there was some backlash to the outpouring that followed Bourdain’s death. There was, of course, the usual stuff about the selfishness of suicide, an understandable misunderstanding of mental health that is nonetheless screams self-righteousness and lack of desire to actually understand the subject. There was also a strange corner of leftists decrying him as nothing more than an exploitative capitalist whose death was meaningless if not a positive, but then, there’s always a strange corner of leftists saying weird stuff like that. There are probably people who just thought his show sucked, but I didn’t see any of them.
It’s pretty clear where I stand on both of these men. You may disagree completely; if so, trust that I’ve seen your side of the argument and have little interest in it. People value so many different qualities in such drastically different ways that, on the timeline, as in real life, death is the great equalizer, even for those with an drastically different impacts as Anthony Bourdain and XXXtentacion. I guess the best you can do is try your best to take joy from the right things so you can do your part in making sure those actually deserving of a great legacy have one, and those who deserve to be forgotten or abhorred always will be.
