On the Life of a Playboy-Bunny,
I recall an evening in the early summer of August 1997, when I was strolling towards a movie theatre in Santa Monica, California to take in some of Hollywood’s cinematographic delights. A friend of mine, who was, at the time, residing in Paris, rang in with the terrible news that 36-year old Princess Diana had died. As I entered the theatre, with news that had yet to break in most of America, I could not help but wonder how the people who were watching the movie with me would be affected by this death once they found out. While I was uncertain how people would react, I was somehow quite certain that most would likely have some form of reaction, be it grief, surprise, chock, or sadness.
This was not the case when I heard of the death of 39-year old Anna Nicole Smith (Thursday 02/09/07). In fact, I only just furrowed my brows a bit, turned off the news channel, and thought: ”Oh well…who cares”?! It was not until this morning I started pondering why I could possibly care so little about another human being.
This woman was after all a human, a being of flesh and blood, a real person lost. This was the death not only of a woman, but also a mother, daughter, lover, and a friend. Much like Princess Diana, Anna Nicole Smith was famous to the point of obscurity. She had suffered, gained, and lost. So why could it be that I cared so little about the state of her life and eventually the end of it, when I recall having strong feelings about the death of Diana?
Perhaps, I thought, my carelessness would be founded in my feelings about Ms. Smith as a human being, about her leading (or not leading) a virtuous life, and perhaps even her importance to human-kind. It could be that I did not really care, because to me, in the grand scheme of things, I was not so sure that Ms. Smith really mattered much at all.
Was I right about that, though? Did Ms Anna Nicole Smith not matter? And how would I ever know? Well, to me, being a ‘student of thinking’ (as my children so aptly calls it) there would be only one way to find out: Turn to philosophy!
It seemed evident that my opinion on the matter was greatly biased by my personal feelings. Descartes, however, has taught me that those cannot be trusted. To gain knowledge one must take certain steps. One of those steps is to rid oneself of things that are not based on a solid foundation of knowledge, namely those things that we cannot see “clearly and distinctly”. Descartes says that absolutely those things that we are able to perceive clearly and distinctly evidently must be true. But, did I really perceive my ‘feeling-opinion’ of Ms Smith clearly and distinctly? It seemed to me that I did. I strongly felt that she had some faults as a human being. On occasion, when my eye caught her in the news, I would be ashamed by watching her wallow in the muck of her own digression. I thought, felt, and perceived that she was sort of embarrassing to me. But alas, did I think, feel and perceive that clearly? I had to admit that I did not. There was no way for me to be absolutely sure that I perceived my feelings about her clearly. Therefore I had no choice but to dismiss my feelings and perceptions about her. Another route would be necessary if I was to ever know whether Ms. Smith had any value, and if her life ever really mattered.
Well, somehow it seemed to me that ‘to matter’ would also be closely related to ‘value’. Value is something that we tend to place on things in general. The more important things are, the higher we tend value them. Did Ms Smith have ‘value’?
In respect to value of a human life, I think there are several factors that we have to take into consideration. A human can have value to society, to family, and to self. In order to have what I would call ‘true value’, I think a person would have to be successful in all three areas as well as have a well-functioning sense of right and wrong.
Aristotle made note (and Plato agreed) that moral virtue is about the exercise of control over natural feelings, and that good values is indicated through the use of good judgment in finding an effective balance between extremes. Aristotle thus had a personal value of moderation.
(http://changingminds.org/explanations/values/aristotle_ethics.htm)
Could that be it? That value had to do with virtue? Aristotle seemed to think so. In fact, he believed in the concept of ‘eudaimonia’ (happiness/flourishing). Aristotle taught that the proper goal of a human life was to reach eudaimonia. This state of happiness could be reached by practicing what Aristotle called ‘the virtues’, namely those things for which you were intended within the realm of your human community. Needless to say this would require that one had a sense of what one’s purpose would be and in order to do that, one would necessarily have to understand virtues.
Aristotle explained that the Grand-Daddy of all virtues was what he called magnanimity; meaning to be great of heart and soul. Inspired by Plato, he believed in the ‘Four Cardinal Virtues’: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance (Referred to in Plato’s Symposium), the sum of which would equate to magnanimity (http://www.philosophypages.com). So to be of virtue, one would have do much more that just want to strive for magnanimity; one would have to actually reach it!
From what information is available from various media, Ms. Smith seems to have most certainly failed to obtain this goal. While she appeared to be a believer of justice, she had, after all, been involved in some form of litigation for over 10 years, and could arguably be considered both prudent and fortituous, she most certainly could not be accused of practicing temperance. There was nothing about Anna Nicole Smith’s life that was done in moderation. She lived a life that allowed excess in everything she did and maintained, including her body, her wallet, and the scandals she engaged in .The misery that she expressed, the homes that she owned, the children she had and the dysfunction of her family appeared bigger and grosser in her life than others’ and it seemed as if there was neither aim or direction in her doings. It would appear that she was truly without virtue in the Plato-Aristotelian sense (incl. Socrates?). The Greeks would have further charged that because she had no virtue, she never had any value.
Would this be the information that I was looking for? Could I trust the Greeks or was I obligated to press on in my quest? It seemed harsh to me to say that someone, just departed, had no value. I wondered what the modern philosophers had to say.
In the realm of the ‘modern’ philosophers and views on morals, one cannot avoid considering Immanuel Kant. Kant, I have learned, believed in deontological ethics. These are ethics that focuses on action rather than consequences. This is opposed to utilitarianism which take a much more consequensialistic approach. For Kant, ethics had to encompass everyone that would be affected by them. This means that the ethical framework that will hold for one, would necessarily also have to hold for all others. So ethics would have to be universal, impartial, unexceptionable, absolute, unconditional, and duty-bound (from Sports Ethics lecture, UNF Spring 2007). It is easy to spot a few problematic areas in Kant’s theories. One can take issue with his idea that ethics are absolute. Lying, for example, would always be unethical. Say you are hiding a person in your house, however, and a murderer comes to your door asking for that very person: Would you lie to save a life, or would you do as Kant would want…and tell the truth, knowing that you would be sending someone into a certain death? Problematic as Kant’s ethics are, they also do not do much in the way of solving the mystery of Ms Smith’s value. While she most certainly did not adhere to the stringent rules of ethical behavior that Kant liked, his theory seems so flawed that one cannot comfortable use this to evaluate Ms. Smith. Furthermore none of his work was intended to regard women, as they were considered innately morally corrupt.
So, all I knew so far was that neither ‘the ancient’, nor ‘the modern’, would have seen any value in Anna Nicole Smith. It seemed so sad to me that philosophy had been able to rationalize itself to the conclusion that someone was worthless. I felt I needed to try and view this woman with more feeling and empathy. What I needed was compassion and I had an obvious next area of investigation: Philosophy of Religion. With time Aristotle and Plato’s ideas spilled into Christian morals and ultimately Western contemporary society. The Christian Bible addresses the topic of virtue and value, in particular when it comes to women. In Proverbs 31:10-31, the virtue of women, is addressed. I immediately thought to myself upon reading this section of the Bible that perhaps Ms. Smith had just found some saving grace.
It is said in the Proverbs that a virtuous woman is priced far above rubies. “Her husband trusts her explicitly.” We know that this is true of her late husband. In fact, he trusted her so much so that he never even wrote a will (hence the decade long litigation Ms Smith had with her husband’s offspring). For the same reason I am sure that we can argue that she must have “done him good and not evil all the days of her [married] life.”
A virtuous woman also “does not shy away from work and bring[s] food from afar.” The hardworking Guess-model would certainly fit that category. For those who had the distinct displeasure of watching her TV-show “The Anna Nicole Show”, the statement that “a virtuous woman rises, while is still night and feeds her household (including her servants) because her candle does not go out by night”, would also seem true.
After her long battle with overweight, she conquered her demon, signed with “Trimspa” and lost all excess body-fat. There is no question for those who saw her ‘post-fatness’ that “she girdeth her loins with strength and strentheneth her arms.” Ms Smith did “perceive that her merchandise [was] good” and she even “stretched her arms out to the needy” (she had several charitable foundations). As it turns out, Ms Smith does well with her virtue according to the Bible up until chapter 26 (“She opened her mouth with wisdom”). That may be a little sketchy. In her last years she seemed unable to form whole words and complete sentences. She had a speech impediment that may have been an indication of drugs-use rather than an inherited disposition. We may never know if this woman was actually a genius, but there is good reason to think (from media reports) that she may not have been all-together ‘there’. Chapter 28 (“her children rise up and called her blessed”) may also be a bit problematic for her virtue. One child, a son, by all account loved her, yet he was so miserable with his life that he killed himself with his drug use. Had he ever had a chance to recover from his addiction it is unlikely that he wouldn’t have had a few harsh words for his mother. Her other child, a 5 month old baby-girl is still too young to talk. When she get older she can, on her part, rightfully be upset by a mother whose apparent drug use caused her death. Because a father has yet to be determined for the baby, the child is left orphan for the time being. This is not an optimal situation for any child and certainly does not indicate a responsive and responsible mother of children who would have called her ‘blessed’.
While many would judge her for her failure as a mother and her lack of worldly knowledge (education and perhaps even wisdom) the God in the Christian Bible does not. Instead a person is, after all of one’s life is counted and calculated, judged on his or her faith. Chapter 30 therefore tells us that ‘a women that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised [at the gates to Heaven].” So according to the scripture here, the overriding question in determining virtue and therefore value, would not be the totality of a life, but the totality of one’s faith. If one fears God, then one is virtuous.
So was Anna Nicole Smith a God fearing woman? I don’t really know. I could guess that she perhaps was raised in a Christian environment, as she was from a small town where this religion was prominent. This unfortunately does not tell me whether she subscribed to the faith and the God that it holds as true. In a way I sort of hope that perhaps she did because, assuming that what God promises in the Bible is true, then we can all at least look at this dysfunctional woman and say: “What a loss”, “what a fine woman”, and “there goes a great one”. The only other alternative I seem to have uncovered is that Anna Nicole Smith, considered from a strictly philosophical perspective has no human value at all.
So I ask my colleagues:
- Are there other options for her (virtue/value) that I have failed to see?
- Does the very fact that I even took this time to consider her life afford her some value?
- Does that fact that she is leaving behind viable offspring make a difference?Was that her fulfilling her duty to society?
- What does it mean that she will make it to the cover of People Magazine next week (which I am certain she will), while President Ford’s passing was barely mentioned?
- What was the human interest in her?
- Was she just a personification of our obsession with beauty and chaos?
- Was she a traffic accident that we rubber-necked?
- What was it about this bunny that caused the most distinguished news-channels in the country to full their programming with updates on her last hours?
- Why does it all matter so much, if she did not matter much at all?
With the very best regards,
Linda Harris
Hi Linda,
It seems to me there’s an awful of things to inspect here and I do not take myself as considering them all in this post. Nor do I claim to give you the best jewels of my mind—I’m a little tired. I don’t really know much about Anna Nicole Smith (I don’t watch much TV).
I wonder, though. Can’t we consider someone not necessarily admirable and also think of that person as essentially valuable?
And.
Shouldn’t we be a little wary of certain (especially strong) admonishing reactions towards people who elicit certain reactions from us? In some of the talk I’ve heard, there seems to be disgust-emotions directed towards Anna Nicole Smith and a focus on things such as her body weight and excessiveness. I am cautious about these reactions because sometimes (perhaps) these responses come from a fear of our own humanity. And maybe it’s quite comfortable to have people who hold a certain burden—people we look at as not quite people—so we are insulated from our own humanness and the pure luck that’s involved in being a good person.
I guess I am suggesting, then, a different way of looking at the problem you pose. Instead of showing how Ms Smith could have possibly been valuable (I take it as a given that she was), maybe we should examine the inclination to see her as not valuable.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Jennifer
As I’m sure you’ve figured out through the other board, I’m always ready to jump in on a topic once the Bible is mentioned, but I think I’ll actually not focus on that here.
There’s a joke that goes around saying, “I think the purpose of my life is to be a bad example.” This certainly seems to justify any immoral behavior on the part of who claims this, but that person knows it is a joke, so the claim is not real justification. It seems more to me to say that that person will live however they please, and whenever that lifestyle is called into question, the question is deflected with this sort of humor. By making a joke out of one’s behavior, one doesn’t really have to confront it.
So I suppose it isn’t sufficient to say that the value of Ms. Smith’s life lies in her exemplification of what not to do. I could probably find a neighbor that can provide that same example for me. The only problem would be that the bad example down the street would not serve as a bad example to a Californian.
This is where I find the importance, or at least significance, of her life lay. The fact that she was known all over the world in the media. If the value of her life was to provide a bad example, which would be very poor of me to make such an assessment, she would serve as such an example to a great many people.
So whatever the value of her life, whether virtuous or not, she is well known. But more than that, because Gerald Ford was certainly well-known, was the relationship we had with her from the media. Media studies speak about this curious effect of how viewers buildrelationships with characters in the media. The weatherman is somehow a part of our lives, and even I was teary-eyed when RADAR shipped home on M*A*S*H. So many of us had some sort of relationship with her by way of her presence in our lives through the media.
The fact that she was a media celebrity, as opposed to a political celebrity as was Ford, appears to be instrumental in the fact that her death is paraded across the media. I’d imagine Ford’s death was much more prominent in political circles, but the media naturally focus on someone prominent within that sphere of influence.
Ms. Smith was in one way or another a part of many people’s lives. A role model perhaps to some, a picture of a self-indulgant society to others, an object of scorn to still others, and a dream of the good life to more yet. She represented something for most of us, as someone out of whom the society around us was constructed. So perhaps we lost someone who served a certain place in our understanding of the world.
A pragmatic, not so much philosophical answer I suspect this has been, being more novice to this than I’d desire. Perhaps someone could give nice technical terms to what I say, or (I dread) use big technical terms to prove how silly an argument I’ver made.
The most philosphical I can probably get here is to say that contemporaries would acknowledge the fact that there is a cultural construct outside of ourselves that we take in, and which molds in some way our view of the world. Personally, while she was alive, Ms. Smith’s life had the value to me of seeing what such riotous living could be- a prime example of the extravagance and fulfilling of desires that I see across our society with such great sorrow. In her death, she proves to me that “we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.” (I Timothy 6:7)
What interests me greatly about this thread is that it is its own meta-story– a story about the story. And it’s not the first time this meta-story has reared its head, at least for me. It came up at a dinner with friends last Saturday and then again on CBS’s Sunday Morning news program and again in a class discussion. Not her death, per se, but a discussion of what it means that it is a story at all.
To address the initial issue of virtue/value, I’m hard pressed to use that as a yardstick for much. Newborns have no real virtue to speak of and yet we consider them of value. The same could be said for the dead. And not just dead cultive personalities. We have all kinds of honorary rules of respect and awe, of handling and propriety for the newly born and the newly deceased and in both cases virtue is a non-issue.
I’m not sold on duty to society either. I’m not sure there are any steadfast rules of “contribution”, duty or obligation and in any event that would require defining her “community” and that is a debate that could take us into, well, the grave.
What makes her valuable at a most basic level is that she was simply a person or, and I love this term, an agent. Personally, I like being an agent. It makes me seem like I have cause to act or something a lot more glamorous than just being a being. A being. Drab. An agent with agency! That’s sexy. I kid but there’s some truth in that. There’s appeal in the notion that we are unique individuals with one-of-a-kind qualities and unmistakably one-person fingerprints, etc. We are us and no one is exactly like we are. Sure you can look at the cosmos and realize you’re smaller than a grain of sand by comparison but hey, no fractal math could show you to be just some weird mathematical equation away from being a boring pattern.
I’m certainly not denying there are other issues at play here. There are questions about why the media covers Anna Nicole but not the body count that day in Iraq. They’re embedded in why it blanketed the news and likely says more about us than we care to admit. Personally, I’m often struck by how unwilling we are to want to admit who we are (we in the Queen’s “we” sense). The simple answer to the question of why it was covered is answered in advertising dollars and it was answered by Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry” ditty. Why do we love dirty laundry? There’s the gun with bang. The short answer is we are competitive and hierarchical critters. Anna Nicole’s popularity is just a more techno infused version of the social royalty that has always existed in modern culture. Plus she had all the trappings of our repetitive cultural icons. Pygmalion. The Scarlet Letter. The poor, small town girl who makes it big. The tortured object of media scorn. The alluring trollop. The Aryan ideal. The good girl gone bad. The intimidated, bullied protagonist. The fierce heroine. The loser cum winner. The fat girl who got thin and made all the boys who pulled her hair and called her “fatty” so, so, so sorry.
Anna Nicole Smith’s death is sad. It’s sad because it has highlighted for us all how utterly voyeuristic our culture is. It’s sad because moms and dads and sisters and brothers and husbands and wives and kids are sitting home waiting for their own loved ones to come home in body bags draped in our flag but we won’t even look. It’s sad because her death was just another domino falling in a long chain of women caught in the spotlight of the world’s stage whose money, sex appeal, lifestyle and drugs were never enough to fill up what was so broken that her fridge contained Slimfast and methadone. Apparently you can be too thin and too rich.
That woman was a media Frankenstein. Created and pieced together and held up then deemed a monster. But she was a mom who just had a baby and days later her son is dead. If that’s not a woman in crisis, I don’t know who is. And I’m pretty sure the reason it bothers us that it’s first a story then a meta-story is what Mary Shelley knew all along. The creature wasn’t the monster. The maker was. And to paraphrase Wordsworth, everything we see we half create.
Peace,
Cathleen
*Please excuse some repetition, I, like John Locke, am not a very good proof-reader**
I find that this post displays a very important and eye opening issue about the different values that are put on people’s lives and the sensationalism of the modern day news media.
The constant news footage of Anna Nicole Smith’s gets more attention in the news—with constant footage of her trial, her life, and even her “death fridge” being shown on Fox—than the massacres, which according to the U.N. are just short of genocide, going on in Darfur. What happened to the value of those people’s lives? Just because they have no money nor did they pose for Playboy back in the day, does not give them any less of a right to live and be helped, yet they get hardly any attention in the news. It is, after all, all about ratings. Most people would rather follow the story of a Hollywood (semi-)sex symbol’s murder; show what was in her fridge and her veins on the night that she died rather than find out about real world massacres that are going on as we speak.
I further find it strange, that a week ago, the media portrayed Anna Nicole Smith as basically worthless. She had a show that chronicled her daily life, pointing out her weight, her lack of wits, and her misadventures around Hollywood. Talk show hosts would constantly crack jokes about the same things. Now, that she has died, I saw one news station (Wolf Blitzer, I believe) describe her as a “Marilyn Monroe type”, he explained her amateur paintings, and her illustrious career as a model and symbol. How things change after someone dies…The whole thing is obviously a race for ratings when the news, just putting on the tube what people want to hear and watch.
Now to answer your questions: There probably are virtues of Anna Nicole Smith that everyone in the world, who did not know her personally, failed to see. All anyone gets to see is how she’s portrayed by the television stations and the people on them. Who knows what she was like at home and to the people she loved. This is a very important point that most people don’t look at when watching any actor or “tabloid star” on television—just as you look at your friends someone else looks upon that “star” as theirs. It may sound trite and overused, but it is definitely something to think about. Of course, now that you bring her up in a post, it does afford her some value as a person, although it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, when looking at it objectively, why we do. People are dying everyone, from natural causes or murder; we don’t look at them any differently, even though they are just as much of a person as Mrs. Smith was, when they could have been doing greater and more helpful things for their community.
What does it mean that she will make it to the cover of People Magazine when Mr. Ford, hardly got a shout out? It means that people have really got their priorities mixed up. It means that, like the news, the magazines are just looking to make profit on what people want to read. Further, it means that the average person in America cares more about the death of a former Playboy bunny than they do of a man who led the United States for several years. The human interest in her pre-mortem was, as stated above, her crazy life and lack of intelligence, and she was basically looked upon as a big joke.
It really is insane, not only make the news these days, but stay on it for so long. If tomorrow, another starlet showed up dead, Anna Nicole Smith would be pushed off the stations, to make room for the new big thing. The news these days, in my opinion, has run astray from what it once stood for, making Hollywood Icons the “talk of the town” while other major stories get minor press….maybe that should be another post?
It seems to me that everyone has some worth to their life. In discussing Ms. Anna Nicole, for the last several months all we have heard is either about her deceased son, new baby, marriage, or trying to get her hands on her late, old husband money. By now most people have a negative opinion about her. But this still does not alter the fact that she is worth something to some one only if it is in the realm of finances. At one point in life Anna Nicole probably was a good girl(and I use this word loosely). Every day in the media the talk is about “who will get the body?” God created all of us equal, but he also gave us the choice to live life according to His Word or to go out and make our GOD something else(money and fame-Golden Idol). Anna Nicole in my opinion choose to live her life in the eyes of the public seeking money in what ever fashion however it could be acquired. Her worth in the value of money maybe very good , but ultimately in the eyes of the public it is bad to some. The path that she chose to follow caused her a lot of pain and suffering, and eventually death. The bible tells us not to “Judge that we may not be Judged”, but in her case I don’t think this is happening. Frankly, I am so tired of all this mess, she does deserve to have a decent burial without the media and her family making a circus of her death. If she could look back and see what is happening to her legacy, I am sure she would say that this is due to the way she lived her life here on earth. Just because Anna Nicole had a lot of money, did not give her life any true value. Because you have to wonder- “Are all these people fighting over her body due to the fact that they-Loved Her, Want the Best for her and the baby or Is it all due to who will inherit the millions that she left behind?” But back to the question at hand was her life of any value? To me the answer to that question would be YES, no matter what the reason may be to others, God created her, she had children and she was her mother’s daughter.
Anna Nicole Smiths death saddened many people, but some simply do not care to watch it 24/7. Why does our society spend so much time over discussing things that are really not anybody’s business? I could understand if the news covered the story in general, but all of the stations have put just too much time into this story. I care that another person died, but I do not care about the father of her baby, and the dramatic coverage that this case got, because it is nothing but a way for the media to make more money.
I think some people were not concerned about her death for a couple of reasons. The woman that she represented was not exactly the most in control, intelligent woman. Our society as much as we have excepted the playboy life style, there is something about it that is intolerable. It’s not the nudity, every adult has the right to make their own decisions and choose their lifestyle. It is when their lifestyle involves drugs, and alcohol.Those things lead to certain actions that are looked down upon by many people. Most people are not attracted to a human being that is out of control all the time, and makes bad decisions that embarrass her and her family. Every time I saw something about Anna Nicole I was embarrased for her and her family.
For the people who like to better themselves, there seems to be a trend of attraction to people who can be an inspiration. The reason that most people were so touched by Lady Diana’s death was because she represented that woman that a lot of people want to be. She was a humanitarian and represented a strong, intelligent woman, who made a difference in the world.
The fact is that I don’t know what and how Lady Diana lived her life, neither do I really know how Anna Nicole lead her life. The media has this affect on us, where opinions are formed simply by being told something over and over and over again. Anna Nicole was portrayed as the trashy woman that married an older man for his money, and lacks common sense as well as morals and values. That combination turns a lot of people off and it makes it easier to not feel bad for saying things that might not be so nice. To be honest I felt the same way about Anna Nicole’s death, I remember thinking “She chose a certain life for herself”. She did choose a certain life for herself, she also surrounded herself with people that didn’t look out for her best interest. I guess when we ask ourselves why are good decisions “good”. This is why it is important to make good decisions. Every action has a consequence and her death is a consequence of the dicisions that she made. It’s unfortunate that she died and I wish her baby and her family the best, but that is as far as my concern goes. I don’t want to be bombarded with Anna Nicole’s case, nor do I want to be bombarded with every other case that is out there. The media has a responsibility to inform people of news, not make news.
I am disgusted by our media and the intentions behind the coverage of cases like Anna Nicole’s. The death of Anna Nicole does not concern the media for any other reason besides more attention and more money for them. I am not saying that there should be no coverage of these cases but they should be kept to a minimum. As soon as a person dies, everyone wants to jump to the story and play detective. The case can and should be covered, but not 24/7 because no one cares that much really. It dissapoints me that society pays more attention to useless talk about what could’ve happened to Anna Nicole, but no one really cares this much when it comes to important decisions our country makes everyday in regard to the war in Iraq. Clearly there is a glitch in our society. We are addicted to being entertained by the lives of celebrities. I am not sure that will ever change, but I hope that it comes to an end.
Interesting analogy…”old friend”
The mass media. It all started from the primates making their way to the ground if you think about it. Social animals guided by a leader, much like a pack of wolves, lions, even elephants. I am sure we did not venture down to the grounds where our ancestors were more liable to predation, right? I imagine a push, or social pressure from the pack leader, or following a few rebels would be a more reasonable explanation. We are curious creatures, so much as that we put our selves in danger, or harms way, to seek truth/adventure. Guess the ordinary gets boring after a while, and thanks to our nature, eventually we yearn for more. Anna Nichole did chose a path, a path of destruction. It shows she had very little family upbringing and being a pretty girl she took advantage at opportunity when arrived. You see, whoever controls the mass media, controls the people. Specially those who live and act from fear. It is a force to racking with, or be recognized. Often we over look fear and begin to look elsewhere for answers, like the media. The folks at NBC, CBS, ABC knew long before their existence, about the money and power the mass media can generate. A little push from the tree…can make or break a presidential poll. It can ruin or make someones future. Reveling the truth does not always make things for the better, or the worse. It all boils down to controlling fear, take that on and watching a few ridiculous stories about fallen bimbos, or modern world princess’ speeding down the highway with their lovers is just another story told of ordinary people living life. So why does our attention gear more toward celebrities who we don’t even know or met? The same reason why we question God, religion, human history, Adam and Eve, and the tree we landed from. We like to be entertained and day dream of the life and things we may never encounter. It’s our nature, we live through others and others live through us. Over come fear, and you will no longer be a human being. You will no longer need to turn your TV on to feed off what the media knows you want to see. Perhaps the government could regulate the mass media? Or that would be more of a communist thing to do? An excuse? Or another fear factor? So you see my “old friend”, there is a lot to learn, not just from the media, others, but from our selves. I myself hurt others knowing it will hurt myself. I myself altered reality to plug into emotion…to feel alive again. To feel fear! Because in the presence of fear….you discover the true meaning of love.
No one really cares that much? I don’t know. We’re devoting a thread to it. We can all agree the media is a money-making operation. If these stories did not pull in eyeballs attached to people who might be exposed to advertising then all this would be moot. In other words, on some level we (the Queen’s “we”) do care.
I watched the documentary Supersize Me some time ago. Morgan Spurlock emphasized that his downing of daily Big Macs made him sick at first but as his body acclimated, he became addicted/dependent on getting high fats and carbs daily. Even when he was ready to quit he had cravings.
So, I wonder…could what we are feeding ourselves be creating an insatiable craving for more…even when we know we need to cut it off?
Peace,
Cathleen
Here’s an answer or two for you…
Would President Ford actually have wanted to be put on the cover of people magazine?
and,
We obviously wouldn’t mourn Anna like we did Diana because Diana cared about society, she cared about the people and the building up of the world.
That’s quite obvious actually.
Caterina
I think that the cult like fascination of society with novelty,sensationalism and the spectacular, along with the self destructive lives of the rich and famous, such as Anna Nichole, O.J. and Elvis, are both together, suffering from the same root cause. I believe it is best expressed in the 1961 novel by Walker Percy ” The Moviegoer.” One day Binx, the main character in the story, who is suffering under the existential restraints and distortions of alienation, anxiety and boredom as he searches for the truth of his own life, suddenly has the following revelation. “What is the nature of the search, you ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island. And what does such a castaway do? Why, he pokes around the neighborhood and he doesn’t miss a trick. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” There are also several movies that reflect this existential condition of Man, “Fight Club” and “Garden State.”
I would like to elaborate a little more on my above comment. Man, regardless of what he believes, is suffering under the yoke of Ignorance. There are basically two types of Ignorance.
The first is concerned with the truth of what is extrinsic to our Being. The second is concerned with the truth of what is intrinsic to our Being. Socrates whole philosophical life orbited around the Ignorance of the Self as surely as the Earth orbits around the Sun. The true understanding of Socrates resolution to the Oracle’s pronouncement that He was the wisest of all the men in Athens is based on both types of Ignorance. Socrates says “I am called wise, for my hearers always imagine that I myself possess the wisdom which I find wanting in others: but the truth is, O men of Athens that God only is wise; and in this oracle he means to say that the wisdom of men is little or nothing; he is not speaking of Socrates, he is only using my name as an illustration, as if he said, He, O men, is the wisest who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing. And so I go my way, obedient to the god, and make inquisition into the wisdom of any one, whether citizen or stranger, who appears to be wise; and if he is not wise, then in vindication of the oracle I show him that he is not wise; and this occupation quite absorbs me, and I have no time to give either to any public matter of interest or to any concern of my own, but I am in utter poverty by reason of my devotion to the god.
It’s not that the objective truth of reality has no value, but only that the subjective truth of the Self trumps the former. Man is not born into the Truth of the Self. The TRUE SELF is born only through MAN’S FREEDOM.
I believe that every Human Being has not only value but the greatest of all intrinsic value of any reality that has come into being. The intrinsic value of Being is not dependent on the proposition that the value must be recognized,actualized or even appreciated. Every man has to decide for himself, of his own freewill whether or not he is going to live according to the Truth of his Being.
A hammer has intrinsic value even if a man uses it to commit the greatest evil. It is not the case that the hammer somehow forfeits it’s value but only that it’s value has been frustrated.
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Since I commented on Man’s Freedom above I thought that someone might enjoy this podcast as it’s topic is “What is Freedom?”
Is Freedom the capacity to make a choice ?
Anselm Lecture sponsored by the Anselm Institute at Saint Anselm College
April 19, 2007
Siobahn Nash-Marshall
University of Saint Thomas
Free Will, Evil, and St. Anselm
Information about using these podcasts with your ITunes can be found here:
http://www.anselm.edu/nhiop/podcasts/about.htm
This is a correction of the url in the above comment.
http://www.anselmphilosophy.com/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=79re
Log in as guest if asked.
Out of profound appreciation for the life and times of one of the most beautiful women of the late 20th century (Vickie Lynn Hogan a/k/a Anna Nicole Smith) I offer this thought:
“Why is there anything rather than nothing? That is the question….we must avoid singling out any special, particular thing, including man. For what indeed is man? Consider the earth within the endless darkness of space in the universe. By way of comparison it is a tiny grain of sand; between it and the next grain of its own size there extends a mile or more of emptiness; on the surface of this grain of sand there lives a crawling, bewildered swarm of supposedly intelligent animals, who for a moment have discovered knowledge. And what is the temporal extension of a human life amid all the millions of years? Scarcely a move of the second hand, a breath. Within everything as a whole there is no legitimate ground for singling out this thing which is called mankind and to which we ourselves happen to belong.”
–Martin Heidegger “Introduction to Metaphysics”
That said, I would offer an argument (as a staunch sex-positive feminist) that Anna Nicole has substantial “negative value” (in the instrumental sense of course) as a human because her clearly degenerative emotional/physical/intellectual condition (well documented on her television show among other things) created the perfect poster-child for the sex-negative community to batter endlessly (similar to Lindsey Lohan’s battering by the substance-negative community). Contra Kant, every human is a means to something and rarely (if ever) an end in itself. (That was a descriptive and not a normative statement).
The entire universe is worthlessness itself as depicted @
She had value because she was a human created in God’s image. This whole argument makes me think of those who oppose abortion but uphold the death penalty. As if we have the right to decide whose life is worthwhile. If you are truly a believer, all life is sacred. To torture your thinking into another view is almost as funny as those who think that all things are always and absolutely relative. How could anything possibly be absolutely relative?
I am also a Linda Harris, but obviously not a/the philosophy major. Just presenting a theological view.