The deaths of Prince and Carrie Fisher: what lessons can these icons teach us?
How about “Don’t do drugs”?
Okay, the only thing tackier than maudlin tributes to dead celebrities is dead celebrity jokes, but we geezers have a special reason to crack wise. I was 31—31!—when the original Star Wars came out, so, no, I haven’t been crushing on Carrie1 for the past 40 years. And, since I stopped listening to rock and roll in 1970, after Abbey Road came out—for what more was there to say?—I never gave a damn about Prince either.
I have a special beef about immortalizing the celebrity dead thanks to the grotesque (to say the least) hullabaloo over the demise of “Princess Diana”, an orgy of nonsense that made me basically ashamed to be a human being. Rational species, my ass!2
Despite all my harrumphing/snickering, Carrie Fisher was in fact admirable for publicly discussing her emotional problems (see here) and most particularly for daring to stand up for, and intelligently discuss, electroconvulsive therapy, beloved by screenwriters the world over as the ultimate tool of the colonialist patriarchy. Princess Leia I never really cared for, but Carrie Fisher had some real guts.
Afterwords
More thoughts on fame, Star Wars, and the devouring tooth of time (and Hopalong Cassidy) here.
- Not that Carrie. See my near-fan boy take on Sex and the City. ↩︎
- Charles Krauthammer, one of le plus noire of my many bêtes noires, forever endeared himself to me—well, for a day or two—by referring to the “princess” (who in literal fact was not a princess when she bought the farm) as “Diane Spencer”, which was in fact her name. ↩︎
