The Wake

Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. Rosa Parks sat resolutely on the bus. Rock Hudson was a fine, gay actor. Cole Dennis changed history with his brilliant writing and chiseled pectorals. Anna Nicole Smith was a national joke.

As you’ve all probably heard — and you’d better have because I would like to think of myself as having an informed readership — Anna Nicole Smith recently died.

Everyone seems to think that this is hi-freaking-larious. I have not gone one day since then without overhearing someone joking and laughing about it.

As I said, Anna Nicole Smith was a national joke. Maybe she deserved to be. She acted ridiculously both leading up to and during her nationally syndicated reality television show, which followed her around, watching how she spent her late husband’s hard-earned fortune. She was a successful model (best known for her Guess campaign — her ass was all over America), a stripper, Playboy centerfold, millionaire’s wife, TV star, movie star, mother, diet supplement spokesperson and yes, one fucking weird nationally popularized character. But she also escaped extreme poverty when she became a model for Guess and Playboy and had two children before her death. Her son, Daniel Smith, predeceased her by five months, dying only a few days after his little sister and Anna’s first daughter was born.

All right, I’m painting a picture of Anna that is quite slanted. If you focus on the tragedy or hardship in someone’s life, it makes it seem like they were heroic or even courageous. And as far as I know, Anna was none of these things. She married an 89-year-old millionaire when she was 26, only four months after divorcing her previous husband, who wasn’t a millionaire, which seems a bit sketchy. She was the spokesperson for a diet pill, something which is helping destroy the health and emotional well-being of people with eating disorders or low self-images around the country. She even showed her boobies to everyone in a magazine full of naked women, something I’m sure our grandparents would be scandalized by.

So Anna Nicole Smith had a hard life, but was also someone of questionable character. What does this mean? Nothing, really. Just that she was a normal person who got many more chances than you or I ever will to make an ass out of herself.

Disregarding it all, because now I hope we can agree that it matters very little, many of the players are dead (Marshall, the millionaire, has passed on as well) or an infant (Anna’s daughter is five months old). So why are we still talking about this? Because it’s interesting. Moreover, for most people, this is all hilarious. People all over the country, be it the douche bags I walk past on Washington Ave. or professional journalists speaking to me through a radio, are mocking the crap out of Anna Nicole Smith.

I don’t care that her life was hard. So is mine; remember that columns don’t just write themselves. I also didn’t give that much thought to her death when I heard about it. I am just about as emotionally invested in Anna Nicole Smith as I am Woody Woodpecker, and I don’t mind telling you that I’ve hated that nut-job bird since he started giving me nightmares when I was four. But you know what I think is so, so sad? That this woman, who couldn’t escape us all making fun of her long enough to take a shit, has to have all of our snide remarks thrown at her even after she’s been swallowed up by the earth.

She’s dead now, and her baby is just a few months old. But we’re too busy chortling over her elderly ex-husband or how she got really fat after she was a model, but before the diet pills, to notice that even though she was ridiculous, even though she was laughable at times in her life, she actually was a person. I don’t care if she killed Santa Claus. When you die, you deserve some sort of peace of character after you’re gone. If you don’t, then I suspect that people will treat my death like Anna Nicole’s, as I might be a national joke someday as well.

I don’t want this to come off as preachy, or for you all to think I’m attacking you, because this is the one time I’m not calling everyone morons (…you morons). I’m just saying that when you pick someone to make fun of, though that person may be an easy target, lay off. It’s really in bad taste to make jokes that fly in the face of someone’s death. Think about what her daughter is going to see when she’s old enough to start asking questions about her mom and sees that instead of everyone mourning her mother, we just pointed and laughed.