Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Tits.
r.i.p. George Carlin, 1937-2008.
Entries Tagged as 'r.i.p.'
r.i.p. George Carlin
June 23rd, 2008 · No Comments
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Tags: r.i.p.
r.i.p. Tim Russert
June 17th, 2008 · No Comments
I’ve been trying to figure out why I cried at the news of Tim Russert’s death.
After the weekend’s wall-to-wall coverage, I’ve inevitably grown tired of hearing about him. But when I first heard the news, it had a surprisingly strong impact.
I’ve never been a die-hard fanboy of Meet the Press. I watch it when I remember to, or find video of it when I hear a given interview was particularly worthwhile. For more than half of my life, and for all of my politically aware life, Russert was the moderator, someone I never gave a lot of thought to, to be honest, but a constant, consistent presence on MTP and on MSNBC and NBC News.
I have occasionally been annoyed by him: his questions at Presidential debates, for example, demonstrated his trademark focus on specific comments and facts and dates, but often seemed to miss the larger context and the bigger questions. As impressive as he was at remembering the changes in individual trees, he sometimes failed to see the pattern in the forest as a whole.
Russert is responsible, in part, for the odd tone of political coverage in the U.S. today: the obsession with the horse-race as opposed to the issues, the electoral impact of policy positions as opposed to the impact of those decisions on the nation and the world. Chilled by the notion that Saddam Hussein might acquire nuclear weapons, he went too easy on the Bush administration as they geared-up for war. These complaints, and others, are familiar to those who watch and criticize our mainstream media.
Other Russert moments, many of which have been played repeatedly on MSNBC this past weekend, are more impressive. As his praises have been so often sung in recent days, I will refrain from repeating them here but, clearly, the guy was good at his job.
The many references to his committment to his son and his family more generally have been touching, but I didn’t know about all that before, and I had paid little attention when his Big Russ and Me spent forever-and-a-day on the bestseller lists.
I suppose it might have struck me that my father, who died last September, had also been 58. Or it might just been an almost random moment that brought to the surface various emotions I’d been tamping down for a while.
Certainly it was powerful to watch Tom Brokaw and Keith Olbermann struggle through those first hours of Russert-tribute with tears in their eyes and lumps in their voices.
I think mostly what got me, though, was just that Tim Russert obviously loved his life. He loved his job. He loved the company he kept. He believed his work was important but rarely exuded an arrogance that might suggest that he thought he himself was important.
He believed in, excelled at, and enjoyed, what he was doing with his life. We should all be so lucky.
Tags: journalism · navel-gazing · politics · r.i.p.
r.i.p. Simmie Williams, 17 years old
March 1st, 2008 · 5 Comments
Searching for further information on Lawrence King, about whom I posted earlier, I came across the story of Simmie Williams, another openly gay teen who was shot to death in recent days.
The Williams story hasn’t garnered as much attention as the King story; some suggest that this is because Williams was black but I suspect it has to do with the slightly less “sympathetic” details: He was dressed as a woman, on a street-corner, at night. Police have insinuated that he might have been there with prostitutes, but there is no supporting evidence that I am aware of.
From the Sun Sentinel story:
I gave him $2 for the bus and he never came back,” said Denise King, who lived with her son west of Fort Lauderdale. “He was a quiet person, kept to himself. He had a lot of friends. He wasn’t a troubled child. He was a happy person.”
At the same time, being black, gay and dressing in women’s clothing made Williams “a minority within a minority within a minority,” said Grant Lynn Ford, dean of Sunshine Cathedral in Fort Lauderdale, a church that ministers to gays, lesbians and their families.
Sometimes people picked on Williams, but he knew how to brush it off, his mother said.
Williams had signed up Wednesday for Job Corps, a federal government program designed to teach students vocational skills. He planned to get his GED and then go to culinary school, his mother said.
“That’s what he really wanted to do. That’s all he talked about,” said King. “He spent the whole day with me yesterday, played with his nephew and cooked dinner.”
Then he left the house Thursday night to go to Sistrunk, where the family lived at one point, she said. A few hours later, he was dead.
Simmie Williams, Jr.
Lawrence King
Tags: identity · r.i.p. · why i drink
r.i.p. Lawrence King, 15 years old
March 1st, 2008 · 2 Comments
A number of years ago, my mother asked me how she should respond to the giggling rumormongering of adolescent houseguests who were talking about a friend of theirs who might be “gay.” The typical middle-school “ewww”s followed, and then more giggles. They weren’t mean-spirited kids (and, inevitably enough, the best friend of one of them would soon begin to display signs that made us all suspect he’d come rushing out of the closet as soon as he got to college.) They were just behaving as they’d been socialized to behave.
I suggested that she could point out to them that, statistically, at least one of their friends was likely to be gay, or to at least be thinking about the possibility that he might be. Hearing the derision of classmates, that kid might keep to himself, never tell anyone, feel afraid to talk to his own friends. Some kids try to kill themselves because of that kind of loneliness. And some of them succeed.
I never thought to tell her that some kids might learn to be so embarassed by the very idea of “gayness” that they would grant themselves agency to murder each other.
Eighth-grader Lawrence King was killed on February 12th by a classmate. Lawrence had said he was gay. And had asked the other boy to be his valentine.
From the New York Times story:
“They teased him because he was different,” said Marissa Moreno, 13, also in the eighth grade. “But he wasn’t afraid to show himself.”
Lawrence wore his favorite high-heeled boots most days, riding the bus to school from Casa Pacifica, a center for abused and neglected children in the foster care system, where he began living last fall. Officials would not say anything about his family background other than that his parents, Greg and Dawn King, were living and that he had four siblings. Lawrence started attending E. O. Green last winter, said Steven Elson, the center’s chief executive. “He had made connections here,” Dr. Elson said. “It’s just a huge trauma here. It’s emotionally very charged.”
[...]
“He had a character that was bubbly,” Marissa said. “We would just laugh together. He would smile, then I would smile and then we couldn’t stop.”
On the morning of Feb. 12, Lawrence was in the school’s computer lab with 24 other students, said Mr. Keith, the police spokesman. Brandon walked into the room with a gun and shot Lawrence in the head, the police said, then ran from the building. Police officers caught him a few blocks away.
Unconscious when he arrived at the hospital, Lawrence was declared brain dead the next day but kept on a ventilator to preserve his organs for donation, said the Ventura County medical examiner, Armando Chavez. He was taken off life support on Feb. 14
[...]
At a vigil for Lawrence last week in Ventura, 200 people carried glow sticks and candles in paper cups as they walked down a boardwalk at the beach and stood under the stars. Melissa Castillo, 13, recalled the last time she had seen Lawrence. “He was walking through the lunch room, wearing these awesome boots,” she said. “I ran over to him and said, ‘Your boots are so cute!’ He was like, ‘Yeah, I know.’ ”
She raised her chin and arched an eyebrow in imitation. “ ‘If you want cute boots,’ ” Lawrence had told her, “ ‘you have to buy the expensive kind.’ ” His boots had cost $30.
Full story here.
I don’t have much to say about this story that hasn’t already been said. I continue to believe, though, that we are all responsible for the well-being of those around us. We, as a nation, killed Lawrence King just as surely as we have killed untold thousands of Iraqis in recent years. We killed him in a Junior High classroom.
Ellen DeGeneres talked about it on her show recently. Preaching to the choir, I suspect, but we have to start somewhere:
Here’s an interview from MTV News in which one of the girls mentioned in the Times story talks about Larry.
MTVRest in peace, kid. I’m so sorry.