The bizarre perversity of celebrating death
Some thoughts on the past few days
Took a quick break from my book to write this. They’ve called Sam Kriss the best essayist of our generation. Thought it’d be best to throw my hat in the ring.
When Osama died everyone cheered in the streets and Obama swag-walked up to the podium to announce the big news. People went crazy, like we were all told we’d be given hundreds of thousands of dollars and student debt would disappear forever and if we wanted to date Shakira or Beyonce it’d be possible for real. But no, it was just some news that we’d popped an ideological criminal mastermind right in the head while he slept in a large, gated compound in the center of Abbottabad. It meant a lot for the United States. Did we get the kids too? Yeah. One of the sons. The wife, I think the wife, right? All right. Well, she’s complicit because she fucked him and sucked him and reproduced him, and such. Behind every man… so she was gone. Or no, upon checking, not gone, but physically wounded, a bullet to the leg. And everyone got the news at the same time and within an instance put on the murder hats and murder shirts (not using murder as a pejorative nor positive, just the definition) that resembled a Super Bowl win and together as a nation a celebration took place. Death to the west? Take that, bitch! All right. This cool? I don’t know. What do you think? I was in second grade when 9/11 happened, living, to boot, in lower-Manhattan. That was some pretty harrowing stuff. On May 2nd, 2011 I was seventeen years old, (which makes me 28 years younger than Sam Kriss) and my Dad knew it before they announced it because he had feel for these kinds of things. I think it’s that they killed Obama. What? Osama. Oh, you really think so? Mmm. How do you know? Mmm. He wouldn’t announce that the Queen died, would he… 11:30pm on a Sunday. You could be right… and Obama walked off into the distance and the party began and my father and I, alone in the apartment together for just a few days, watched along on screen for the next several days as outside observers. Bit weird, he said. What’s that, Dad? Oh, you know. The celebration of death.
Over twenty years later, a TikTok trend emerged praising Bin Laden, a kamikaze attempt from Western youth, maybe or maybe not funded by Saudi royals, to justify Bin Laden's beliefs and mark ourselves as perpetrators. This was just as weird, perverse, if not even more misguided.
To all the delectable reactionist pricks; let’s not get things confused. Charlie Kirk wasn’t Osama Bin Laden, nothing near it, and there’s no parallel to be drawn between the two men. I’m just thinking a little bit about the tendency people have to obtain joy or self-righteousness from death. Parent died and you’ve inherited a decent house, nice car, couple hundred grand? Well… silver lining. Key-witness in a trial where you’ve been doomed from the start? Well… how convenient. Frustrating political pundit who made some questionably violent points that made you feel icky? Well… he had it coming. Osama Bin Laden… Well, go on YouTube and judge for yourself what his sentence should've been. Adolf Hitler? Well…well, well, well. Who deserves to die? And who deserves to tell us what our reactions should be? Why does the celebration of death, any death whatsoever (my grandparents survived Auschwitz), rub me the wrong way?
To celebrate death, in some sense, is to celebrate one’s life. So you get news one day that Bin Laden or Hitler or your evil boss has died, or that a man who’s been torturing adopted dogs has driven himself, by accident, off the side of the road. What’s your first reaction? I can imagine, because I’m human and would probably, to a certain degree, have it too. But they’re gone forever. Right? So you can’t do anything to them. Everyone, even the worst of the worst serial killers and Maroon 5 fans, has loved ones. OK. But maybe you desire perhaps to make it harder on their loved ones to grieve in peace. That’s something you can do. But other than a smutty feeling of that aforementioned self-righteousness, what do all the celebrations and they had it comings truly provide? Is it a sense of universal justice? Are we, individually, ordained to be arbiters of such a large concept like universal justice? Something deep inside tells me, no. We’re not obliged or supposed to be cheering on something so powerful, death, the only thing everyone alive will definitely never understand.
To celebrate death, in some sense, is to celebrate one’s life. Hitler dies. Initial reaction: internal. Yeah, good riddance. But there’s a line, right? Not a line of what we’re supposed or allowed to feel. But a line that makes us human, that the line between thought and action, between the internal and external. If we collectively celebrated our darkest, most visceral, internal reactions then we’d be as barbaric as a society who gets together to celebrate dea… oh wait. Again, they’re already dead. You are alive and they are dead. To me that’s always been enough, no matter the villain or crime, to make me pay respect to all things I know I can’t control or understand, and move on with my day. To mourn one’s death is to pay respect to their life. Mourning is somber, more introspective, and evenhanded, than the drunk imbalance of ideological celebration. Whether you like someone or not, why not mourn? Wouldn’t that provide a sense of solace, or perhaps a greater respect toward the general capacity of life, or the power of life, of all things that can be done on a micro and macro scale, all things good and bad and violent and beautiful? Hitler had a life that he turned into one of the most destructive, murderous, and devastating events in history. And I’m sorry if this is sentimental, but it’s always important to remember how that very life could be used, could’ve been used, to create something equally as powerful in another, perhaps more positive direction. You can do a lot with life. There’s no meaning to be contrived from celebrating the death of anyone or anything. It’s the most nihilistic act one can perform.
But many people on Thursday took to their media accounts and began to expose the various hypocrisies involved in Charlie Kirk’s death. Many people, people I know and then unfollowed and became kind of nauseous by, noted that Charlie Kirk once said guns are OK and innocent bystanders are worth it in order to have our guns… so… you know… And then attacked the media and the New York Yankees for covering and paying tribute to political causes unfairly…unevenly… because, of course, everything in life is fair, and there’s no such thing as a nursery parable called Prodigal Son that might teach us otherwise. And again, this all in a way supposedly makes Kirk’s death, while not something to celebrate, something to make us reconsider our morality and the way we conduct ourselves and all we talk about and pay attention to, whatever the fuck that means.
Our obsession with morality, the constant policing of the actions and points of view of everyone and everything in our community, our workplace and feeds, has led to the nihilistic end where people no longer debate whether it’s OK to celebrate the death of Hitler or Bin Laden, but of an outspoken media personality. Nihilism has no end, and we should be more careful of it. I’m not here to add more to this morality policing. Do and feel whatever you want so as long as it doesn’t physically harm others. All I ask is that you think for a moment or two about the obscene perversity of celebrating death, and then for a moment or two more about the respect life should be granted given the fact that we all, too, will one day die, and no longer be here to weep or mourn or cheer or celebrate. The place we’ll be? No one knows. Isn’t it kind of amazing that there’s a thing, one certainty, that all of us—no matter what—will never know? Now there’s a commonality that deserves some reverence.
I’m thinking a bit more. I just said Do whatever you want so as long as it doesn’t physically harm others. I guess, though, stress can end up physically harming someone else. Stress can give people cancer. I don’t really know what to say about this. But also something to consider further. The truth is, I know nothing at all. And neither do you.
