Diana Butler Bass: Paying Respects to Anna Nicole Smith

[Sapphire Blue]

Friday, February 09, 2007
Diana Butler Bass: Paying Respects to Anna Nicole Smith



(excerpt)

On most days, it probably would not have occurred to me to think about Anna Nicole’s death theologically. However, as it happened, yesterday was not “most days” in the Bass household. February 8 marks the anniversary of my daughter’s baptism. Nine years ago, we stood at the altar of Calvary Episcopal Church in Memphis, Tennessee, and claimed the promises of grace for our newborn, bathing Emma in the water of God. After the service, dozens of friends came to our house for a party and showered her with small gifts to remember her baptism. Every February 8 since, we have held a “baptism birthday” party for Emma. We light the baptism candle and read the baptism liturgy together.

As we recited the baptism liturgy, I was struck by the final promise. The minister asks, “Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?” The parents (or the candidates in the case of adult baptism) respond, “I will, with God’s help.”

(snip)

Anna Nicole Smith’s life serves as a kind of reverse parable of baptism vows – what happens to a person with little respect or dignity. Indeed, she had become a cultural joke, the stripper turned gold-digger turned reality TV star. Estranged from her family, using her wits and her sexuality to survive, she turned the world’s lack of respect inward – creating a distinctly undignified persona as the pathway to riches and love.

But lack of respect does not create stable identity – as was obvious with Anna Nicole’s problems with illness, depression, and drugs. Both justice and peace proved elusive. In her final interview, she told the reporter that everyone she knew had “stolen a piece” of her. She died alone in a casino hotel, with her final taped conversation a tortured reflection of the confident sexual icon she attempted to be.

As the television blared every detail of Anna Nicole’s life and death, titillating viewers with lurid tales of her paramours and drug use, I could only think of those baptism vows. A woman dies. A mother leaves behind a child. She was not a joke; she was a wounded sister in the human family. Yet even in death, she is offered little respect for her innate dignity, her humanity.

http://www.beliefnet.com/blogs/godspolitics/2007/02/diana-butler-bass-paying-respects-to.html

[Coventina]

1. Interesting. Thanks for posting. n/t

[Joe Chi Minh]

2. One of the most powerful testimonies I've ever read here or anywhere else.

I like to think of a joyful reunion between Anna Nicole and her son in Heaven or its ante-room, with the mutual recognition in both their hearts that theirs was the heroic dignity, the all-conquering honour, in the face of a satanic world and its obscene values, all along; that the values that this world holds so precious were beyond obscene, its turpitude beyond earthly human understanding.

They were in the front line, and since this is a place of trial, the Providential Quartermaster gave them Halliburton-type support in terms of spiritual armaments and protection, jockey's rations for food and contaminated water. God needs his shock troops and that's what they were.

The people who jeered at Christ as he hung on the cross, thought they were judging him, when the reality was that God was judging them. I hope that at least some of them, and some of those who are still mocking Ms Anna Nicole Smith will one day be given the grace to know the truth, in the sense of love and hope, as well as in its narrower sense.

[Benhurst]

3. Thanks. I tried to give you a 2nd recommendation; but it was not

counted. :shrug:

[Suich]

4. Very nice...

Thanks for posting this, Sapphire Blue. I didn't know Jim Wallis had a blog...I'm a big fan of his.

:hi:

[Shakespeare]

5. Blunt, cynical Cintra Wilson on Salon also had a good, thoughtful piece on her today.

I was very pleasantly surprised by how human Cintra is in this piece (she can be delightfully harsh, and generally is, but took a different approach here).

http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2007/02/09/anna_nicole/

"What needs saying -- what it seems nobody has yet said -- is that when she was able to suppress her demons enough to pull herself together and look her best, she was fabulously gorgeous. Numerous red-carpet moments, the footage of which we now run over and over again like a televised rosary in order to understand her death, reveal this. Anna Nicole was a star because she possessed an unusually large amount of beauty. At her best, she didn't evoke Marilyn Monroe so much as Anita Ekberg in "La Dolce Vita" -- the strapless black dress, mounds of white flesh, piles of blond hair. She was indelicate, but an unstable element nonetheless -- not so much a candle in the wind as a bonfire in a hailstorm. But the real similarity between Anna Nicole and Marilyn was their shimmering tension -- an unsettlingly powerful physical beauty, collapsing irresistibly in real time beneath the frailties of its hostess. She was entropy porn at its finest.

Our fascinated gaze was her real addiction -- and the humiliating media tractor pull between our disgust and our attraction for her was, in all likelihood, both her lover and her murderer. Fame, the only chemotherapy available for the desperate toxicity of narcissism, proves once again that it is deadly enough in its own right to be avoided."

[Morgana LaFey]

6. Thank you.

There is much to be learned from a life like hers, which makes her a teacher for us all.

It's always so sad to me when DU reflects and mirrors that very lack of dignity and respect that those baptismal vows speak of -- when I would like it to be a haven and center of respect and dignity for all human beings (well, aside from the fascists among us, of course. :P ).

[Sapphire Blue]

8. You're welcome.

:toast: to striving "for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being".

Every human being.

[roguevalley]

7. thank you for this. sometimes we forget to extend empathy and

humanity to even the most sad amongst us.

[Sapphire Blue]

9. You're welcome, roguevalley.

Sometimes it seems that people prefer to be callous & cruel, doesn't it?

This column by Diana Butler Bass, though, exemplifies empathy, compassion, and humanity. I'm glad that she wrote it... and that I read it.

[Snot Hannity]

10. I find the article to be

very judgemental and condescending.

[WinkyDink]

12. Being judgmental, aren't we there? (See how that works?)

[WinkyDink]

11. ITA with the main point: she was a wounded sister in the human family.

But a "baptism birthday party"? Just no.

[Joe Chi Minh]

13. For some reason, unfathomable to me, our Western media contend that

celebrities from A to Z are happy to be given the publicity they, the media, give them on the way up, and must accept their unconscionably intrusive harassment for the rest of their careers and, doubtless, often in retirement as well.

However, people have been ridiculing and vilifying Anna Nicole, as if she had relied on their wretched services, when she clearly had not. Indeed, they were evidently a curse on her life in all its most important and private aspects, and remain a curse on her very memory. Yet, idiots* everywhere blame, not the monsters who own and run the media, but her and other poor souls like her. It's been said that we get the rulers we deserve. It becomes increasingly easy to believe.

I've read the opinions of a number of people who knew Marilyn Monroe well, to the effect that she wasn't a nice person to know, even, like many of us, a nasty piece of work, on occasions. But I've never read anything to suggest that, through all her vicissitudes and increasing misery, Anna Nicole was anything other than a loving individual, who didn't have a malicious bone in her body. Even if like most of us, it wasn't that hard to locate one, she still had more than enough crosses to bear to warrant our respect.

What's a "blonde"? A woman with fair hair. What's a "gold-digger"? In a woman from a poorish background (and most others), a woman who would like some of the security and "respect" that affluence can buy. Is it rare? No, it's normal.

Would that her wretched detractors, so superior in their dismissals of her, could claim half as much decency as she seemed to have displayed.

* Often right-wingers who are happy support the MSM and swallow their lies and distortions.