Hello. In honor of the Michael Jackson memorial, which occurs this afternoon, I am posting an essay written a handful of summers ago but since left unpublished. It’s about Ronald Reagan’s death and funeral. The ongoing ecstatic whirlwind of MJ coverage reminded me of it. (On the New York Times site, they are live-blogging the memorial, which feels both morally and linguistically weird.) The essay is a bit dated, and I’m not sure if I still agree with myself–so cranky!–but nevertheless, here goes.

Mourning in America

I was recently watching simulated cunnilingus on stage one afternoon when I began to think of the audience as a type of drama. It was a Sunday matinee performance of Apt. 3-A, a romantic comedy by Jeff Daniels (Dumb & Dumber). The sexual simulation in question occurred at the beginning of the second act. The play is your basic love triangle (with a twist), and at the end of Act I, our heroine, Annie, has embraced nice-guy Eliot, aka the Man She Should Be With. Act II picks up post-coitus and functions, dramaturgically speaking, as the escalation of conflict, the point where their happy union is ripped apart for the next hour or so of the play.

I should also say that this matinee showing was about 98 percent blue-haired ladies who barely tolerated the first act with its cursing and sexual tension, and when Eliot hoisted Annie up on a table and stuffed his head under her dress and began growling like a polar bear over her crotch, you could hear the dentures rattle. These ladies were uncomfortable. Two in particular caught my attention. They sat a row in front of me just to my right, so that I could see their faces in profile, reflected in the excess stage light. They formed a little side stage that played alongside the main stage. They clucked and twittered and shifted in their seats and grumbled and shriek-whispered “This is just awful, just plain awful,” throughout the play, so much so that I didn’t know whether to lean forward and tell them to quit yapping or to sit back and watch them stew in their own aversion to what was transpiring–more bear-growling, another orgasm–on stage.

And, let’s be honest, the oral sex was shocking, momentarily. The actual sex of Annie the Heroine and Eliot the Nice Guy had been conveniently skipped by the “white space” between Acts I and II. At the beginning of Act II, Annie comes out on stage in a man’s dress shirt, the typical pre-70s, post-coital outfit. (And what a weird bit of cinematic symbolism there, this wearing of the male’s clothing. It always made me think that through the unseen sex, the woman had done away with the man altogether [killed him?] and now there she was, in the kitchen, in his shirt [never any pants], stirring a pot of grits or whatever, and that she’d somehow become him.) But our heroine must go back to work, so she steps off stage to change, and returns in a new shirt and a long skirt, which Eliot soon goes under. When he did go under, I was surprised. But the shock lasted less than two minutes. Perhaps this is a generational thing, but since there was no nudity and no real effort towards a realistic representation of the oral sex–it was theatrically obscured and played for laughs–it didn’t distract me from the actual drama of the scene. Yes, they were simulating oral sex before our eyes, but the oral sex was merely the surface activity to what was really going on, i.e. the subtext, which was Annie calling Eliot by another man’s name while he performed the act, bringing to the surface the play’s tension which had been hidden up to that point. So, in brief, without giving you a long-winded review of the show, the act was thematically relevant.

Its relevance aside, my elderly neighbors would have none of it. But, instead of getting up and leaving the theater–which would have sent a clear message to the play’s director, who was sitting two rows behind us–the ladies stayed and clucked their disapproval for the rest of the show, and they only got louder after the lights came up. Why didn’t they leave? I think part of it is because they weren’t merely disgusted; they wanted others to witness their disgust. If they’d left, who would notice them? Their disgust was precious in part because it heightened the theatricality of the entire afternoon. It highlighted the inherent quality of theater, the fact that you are sitting in the dark, watching a show together. And your approval or disapproval of the show immediately registers with the players on stage. A cinematic experience can be altered by the crowd, but a theatrical experience practically depends on it. When you yell “bravo” at a show, you’re not only communicating your opinion to the stage, you’re communicating it to your fellow humans in the stands. (Who hasn’t felt the pressure to join everyone else for a standing ovation? Whether the show has deserved it or not, you’ve got to get up on those feet, because you don’t want to look like a jerk, do you?) The ladies were both bothersome and entertaining in the way they preened in their offended morality. I didn’t care so much that they were disgusted–everyone has a right to disgust–but that they acted on it on the way they did, that they made a show of it. They were performing their disgust.

But this observation–that humans perform their reactions, perform the feeling of particular emotions–isn’t that groundbreaking, certainly nothing to get all excited about, certainly not something to write a whole essay about . . .

But then, Reagan dies, and we as a country become audience to and player in a great, temporary performance of grief. It became–for one solid week–the media event on television and garnered constant commentary and footage. Its main competition–broadcast-journalism-wise–was J. Lo’s purported marriage to Marc Antony. It was basically everywhere. Of course, part of this was justified. He was a president, so commemorations were in order. I’m not so much concerned here with whether Reagan was a good president or not (so many others have jumped on either side of that fence), but what I am concerned about is the amount of spectacle his death engendered. I think it was way out of proportion to his position in our national consciousness, whether you think he was a conservative saint like Republicans or a bumbling actor like Democrats. A visionary or an embarrassment, his passing did not warrant such fanfare, and the amount of fanfare was in fact offensive to his actual memory.

Yes, he deserved something. He even deserved national recognition of his passing. But he did not deserve the rhapsodic, hushed, golf-tones of broadcasters as they narrated his casket’s every move: driving from the funeral home to the Presidential Library in Simi Valley for a day’s worth of viewing–like watching people file through a lunch line–and then to the airport and across the country to Andrews Air Force Base and then processing to the Capitol–stopping at 16^th and Constitution to switch from the lowly hearse to the stately horse-drawn caisson–where there was an in-state ceremony, followed by another day of visitation, then followed by another drive to the National Cathedral for the official memorial service and then back to Andrews for another departure service for another cross-country flight back to California where we get more shots of Nancy Reagan having to walk slowly behind the casket, an old lady being pushed through this triathlon of grief, and then finally, finally, the family gets their private burial service at approximately 6:15 p.m. (ET) Friday evening–he died seven days earlier–just as the sun is setting in Simi Valley, and it was a beautiful service, and Ron Jr. spoke so well, and Nancy, finally withering under the emotion, bent down and wept, and if you don’t believe me just go on the Internet and click through the slide-show.

He didn’t deserve this spectacle because he was undeserving of sympathy but because the spectacle–the progressions of which took up the daytime soap opera time slot–made a mockery of his death, and by extension all our deaths, our very mortality.

The burial and bereavement over the death of former president and actor Ronald Reagan was a media spectacle–no surprises there. But it was also a performance of grief. First of all, I should say that I’m not against TV as a medium. I do not think it is inherently evil or the sole culprit in the diminishment of Western Civilization. I do think its inherent mode of reception is passive watching. (Again, no news here. This has all been discussed at length by people more informed than me.) However, in the way that the funeral services were captured in a constant televised coverage, with a play-by-play commentary; in the way that they interrupted and were really a replacement for the day’s “regularly scheduled programming”; in the way that the “story” was stretched and twisted like a gob of state-fair taffy, the funeral service was altered from a public ritual of burial and grief into a performance of grief. It was “Grief: The Miniseries.”

The burial of a dead person is its own type of performance. It is a public acknowledgment that someone has died. In Ireland, they hold a wake; in the South, they bring a ham and work the phones. There is a communal aspect to it. Then, everyone goes to the [insert religious establishment of your choice], they bury the guy, visit a little while, and then everyone goes home. And this is when the grief resumes its private nature, and the survivors have to–silently, by themselves, either wearing black or not, going on with their lives or not–deal with it.

But with the Reagan burial, the communal remembrance–the nation-wide visitation, if you will–was stretched abnormally long and lacked real resonance, and here is why. When people come visit a corpse and offer condolences to a family, they are in some provisional way connected to the deceased or the survivors. By showing up they acknowledge this connection. Their attendance is important in and of itself. But we as a country–this vast roiling flux of individuals and attitudes–do not know Reagan, did not know him, not in a way significant enough to attend his funeral. Our connection to him is mostly televisual. We do not know what he looked like, unshaven and without make-up, what he smelled like, how he tied his shoes (did he kneel? Did he prop his foot?). All we know is his simulacrum–his screen presence–and any connection we have to it is really a connection between our imaginations and the screen. In one way, the fact that Reagan’s death was televised is a perfect ending to his career and our relationship with him, always via the screen. But it makes a mockery of the death, of the dead’s family, and of those who have a legitimate claim to attend the funeral. We should not have been invited.

It’s because our connection to Reagan is artificial, a media creation, that our appreciation of him–our grief at his death–is artificial. You can’t grieve for someone you don’t really know. But what, then, was all the fuss about? What were all those people doing watching the burial?

I submit that we were not grieving in earnest but merely performing our grief.

“Well, Mr. Gripe,” one might say, “why would we do such a thing?”

I have no idea. I wish I could puzzle this out because it seems to be the profoundest of mysteries–why we perform some emotions, why we act out a response. Is our “nation-wide grief” an attempt to prove to our neighbors our capacity to be moved? (Look, fellow Americans, I too can feel. I am part of the group. I also am bereaved at the passing of this person.) Monuments offer the same opportunity. Here is a statue/wall/exhibit designed specifically to commemorate the dead and offer a public opportunity for a person to grieve for them. But what about the person who attends the Vietnam Memorial, the newly constructed WWII Memorial, the soon-to-be constructed 9/11 Memorial and doesn’t feel anything? Are they insane? Of course they feel something. They better feel something–everyone else at the show is experiencing something. But public memorials–again, like TV and not inherently evil, just metaphysically peculiar–are like friends telling you to Cheer Up. “You know, you should just Cheer Up.” But you can’t Cheer Up on demand. Emotions are nebulous states, invisible interior waves we spend our whole lives trying to deal with and control and just simply adapt to-we can’t just Cheer Up. We spend our whole lives trying to reconcile the outside instability with the inside instability, trying to wager some kind of treaty over the dividing line of our skin. “Cheer Up.” “Don’t Be Scared.” “Laugh A Little.” “Feel Grief For Our Fallen Heroes.” If we could command the emotions–feel a certain way at a certain time–we would have started a long time ago and serotonin reuptake inhibitors wouldn’t exist.

These public memorials are the inverse of Cheer Up. They are the invitation–the command?–to feel grief about subject X. Sometimes this works very well. There have been a lot of people who have experienced a private catharsis at a public memorial. But when we televise the death of a politician/celebrity, we raise the monument’s demand to feel to a panoptic level. The memorial becomes everywhere and nowhere, like salt in the sea. We must split ourselves: we must watch and feel. We must be entertained and saddened at the same time. But all of it is fake because it’s a disaster flick, a train wreck, an explosion rendered hushed and somnolent in the quiet stroll of a funeral procession. It is the quiet, Doppelgänger to disaster footage, a public display of collective visual fascination playing itself as a collective display of sympathy. It’s because this sympathy becomes so quickly widespread, so instantaneous, so immediate, so shared by everybody that it quickly dissolves actual sympathy, which is again private, hopelessly personal and should not be coerced by its popularity, and like feeling good or not being scared, it’s equally victim to whimsy.

Here’s an anecdote that hopefully proves my point that the Reagan coverage was an inadequate expression of grief. I submit it to you lest I become some aphoristic blowhard, spewing out the thoughts that have been circulating in my head for the past few months. I work in a television broadcast newsroom. We have a bank of televisions mounted on a crossbeam near the ceiling. Each TV is on a different network, and so I saw the different stations offer basically the same canned coverage of the various stages of the former president’s funeral. I was working the evening they unloaded the casket from the plane to drive it back to Simi Valley for the family’s private burial service. (I live two time zones away from California, so early evening here was late afternoon there.) A few nighttime producers were working nearby, and the formal procedures of deplaning the casket and family went on over our heads. The honor guard that carried the 700-pound casket was made up of a sample from each branch of the service. Interestingly, the guard was also made up of a sampling of races, a rigged but equally distributed variety from our “melting pot.” They were all young, muscular, at the peak of physical fitness, and showing a refined, professional strain under the weight.

And while they were carrying the casket from the plane, I looked at their asses.

It was hard not to. They were right there; it was all the camera could see. They were walking in stutter steps, their arms clenched, their butt-cheeks puckered. I was embarrassed for them, the camera catching them from behind, so to speak.

Then, as they jittered across the screen, one of the girls in the newsroom said, “Look at that ass.”

Everyone howled. It was one of those precious comic moments, when a room’s token comedienne tweezes out the humor hidden inside everyone like a splinter. Only that girl was brave enough to say what we were all thinking but not saying.

If it were real grief, I don’t think the girl would have said anything. She might have thought it. We’ve all thought such strange and unspeakable thoughts while approaching a casket, while carrying a baby to the baptismal font, while making out. (”I’m sorry, dear, but kissing you is like sticking my face in a birdbath.”) Humor is a pesky weed. But the girl spoke, in fact, enlightened us all by speaking. If we were actually feeling reverent, we would have kept the joke hidden.

The old ladies’ reaction to the play might have been rude–the way they broadcast their reaction–but it was also humorous, the show within the show. Spread across the society as a whole, where a dead celebrity rings the bell of forced sympathy–let us all bow our heads in remembrance of Princess Di and JFK, jr.–might not our collective reaction injure the prospect of legitimate sympathy? I’m not against grief, and I’m not against performing/acting out emotions, but I am against counterfeiting emotions that should be authentic–that lose legitimacy if spread too thin. Grief might lose its weight if it goes completely public.

Reagan deserved better because Reagan deserved less. In the commemoration of his death, he deserved only his family. We are not related to Reagan; we are merely his countrymen. The president is not some nation-wide father, overseeing his flock, doling out encouragement and punishment where they are due. The metaphor is misleading because citizenship is ultimately a choice. Your family–which I guess I would define as the circumstances of your birth–is not. We, his countrymen, betrayed his actual memory with our voyeurism, with out pretend affection, which was almost willed into something real by the force of our performance. I cannot blame the media because the media exist in a symbiosis with our eyes, and if the history of visual media is any indication, our eyes are incredibly hard to restrain.

But I protest too much. I realize after writing this that perhaps I am like the old ladies, performing my disgust for you, the reader, in this essay. Our similarities make me cringe-so moralistic, so crotchety, so self-serving in my judgment. Like them, I am both appalled and attracted by what I see and can neither look away nor refrain from comment. Like them, I remain in my seat, squirming uncomfortably, sighing suggestively for those nearby, wanting to look away and not ever being able to look away.

Bravo.