Carrion

I'm a sarcastic, cynical bastard, no doubt. All you need do to confirm this is read the first two sentences of any entry on here. But even I was surprised at the acerbic vitriol directed toward the high profile flameouts of two public women last week: Anna Nicole Smith and Lisa Nowak.

In Anna Nicole's case, if you're like me, and you are constantly web-surfing during the course of a workday -- I call these frequent interludes "workbreaks" -- you found out nearly instantaneously that she was found unconscious in a Florida hotel room and then died when her bodyguard could not revive her. (This is the same bodyguard who saved her life when she was found face down in her swimming pool last year).

The Web is instant news, on demand, every second of the day, and the facts or pseudo-facts fly quickly, they do. How far we've come from the smoke signal and carrier pigeon.

Before her lifeless body was even cold, the journalists, bloggers, commenters, and pundit know-it-alls came out of their holes to pick at the dead woman's bones. Gawker, a blog to which I link, was particularly cruel in its caustic, sarcastic evaluation of Anna Nicole's high profile, soap opera, rollercoaster of a life and her solitary, unceremonious death. Each updated entry was more nauseating than the last and the Gawker commenters -- who apparently have nothing better to do than one-up each other with ever more witty (whhhhittty) jibberjabber -- were even worse. I normally rustle up a chuckle or two from them but the other day, they acted like hungry vultures and it was kind of nauseating.

The mainstream media was little better. More scavengers, dropping salacious tidbits about how she was found and the possible cause of her death. Either that or they built her up to be something more than she was, a 21st Century Marilyn Monroe. Ugh. It was like listening to a slightly-too-eager witness relate the facts of a really bad car accident.

I felt sorry for this woman. Sure, she wasn't exactly A-list or English royalty, and she was definitely responsible for her own public image and the notoriety that resulted from picking up an 89 year-old billionaire at a strip club, marrying him, and nearly taking the vast majority of his fortune in a very public, very acrimonious probate squabble that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. She was no intellectual giant either, a point that needs no elaboration. Anna Nicole made her fortune the old-fashioned way, by using her assets and taking advantage of the means at her disposal.

I remember back in '93 or '94, at the height of her fame, after an appearance in Playboy, she was doing one of those meet-and-greets at Bloomingdale's (or was it Macy's?) and store patrons were lining up to have their picture taken with her. I think it may have been around Christmas, because for some reason, my law school roomies, J. and A. and I had schlepped into Manhattan from our Queens environs to go shopping. To be clear, we did not venture in for the sole purpose of being photographed with Ms. Smith. However, when we spotted the hubbub, roomie J., who had (and still has) a penchant for blondes with big boobs and just so happened to have a copy of the Playboy with Ms. Smith's pictorial back at the homestead, decided we should take advantage of our good fortune and have our picture taken. I refused. I guess I thought the whole thing was tacky and "beneath" me. (I'm an arrogant prick sometimes. Ask anyone who knows me.) J. ignored my protests and had his picture taken anyway. Somewhere there is a time-faded Polaroid picture of J. smiling broadly next to a game Anna Nicole. Even though it was probably picture No. 498 of the 500 she took with customers that day, she was still smiling and posing as if it were picture No. 1. I have to say, she was approachable and down-to-earth, and she treated the three wankers from Queens very nicely.

Like many young girls from small podunk towns, Ms. Smith wanted to be famous, and she got her wish. It was a fast ride. Her final years were marked by legal conflict, the painful loss of her son to drugs, and a not well-hidden drug addiction of her own. Television repeatedly caught her laughing for no apparent reason, slurring her speech, and generally making a fool of herself. Watching her was viewing the slow, tortuous, public deterioration of a human being. It was sad how life just used her up. And now watching and listening to people mock her death because of the way she lived her life just hits me wrong.

Ms. Nowak is a different story, though her shabby, mocking treatment by the media and pretty much everyone else -- including the vapid, moronic twenty-somethings seated immediately to my left in the Roebling Tea Room as I write this -- is very similar. This is an incredibly bright, talented woman who achieved the greatest heights possible in her profession. Graduate and post graduate degrees in aeronautical and astronautical engineering. A Navy captain with 1500 logged flight hours on 30 different aircraft. A NASA astronaut who worked on the International Space Station. An incredibly accomplished woman, who somehow found the time to have a family and raise three kids along the way.

But she is also a human being, and human beings sometimes break down. Following her arrest after driving the well-documented hundreds of miles from Houston to Orlando, apparently to murder or harm a romantic rival, we saw her bedraggled, broken, tearful mugshot on every website, every newspaper, every magazine in the Western Hemisphere. With lightning speed, the media machine kicked in and she has now become the butt of every joke. "Man, did you hear about the diaper? She wore a fucking diaper and drove cross-country! A diaper, man!"

Instantly, every single thing this woman has ever done, ever accomplished doesn't matter. She is now a cartoon caricature of her former self. A loony stalker with malice aforethought who, wearing a diaper, trenchcoat, and wig, tried to pepper spray another astronaut through a car window. Oh, the hilarity. The jokes write themselves, don't they?

Did you know that after the Columbia Space Shuttle exploded in 2003, Lisa Nowak stepped in and gave emotional support to the son of Laurel Clark, one of the astronauts who was killed in the explosion? Did you know that she is a mother of three kids who is currently going through a separation from her husband? Do you know how many Navy medals and awards she has received? Many.

You didn't know all of this? I'm not surprised. Talking about the diaper is probably more entertaining than viewing this woman as a human being. Before you go judging and mocking her, try to remember that she's actually a three-dimensional person. She did something terrible, something deplorable, and thankfully she did not succeed. For whatever reason, her life hit a nadir and she became irrationally obsessed with a man she admired and most likely has idealized beyond reality. Her family is in the middle of being sliced and diced and before this happened, she probably was not feeling too good about herself.

Who among us has not felt low, low, low at some point in life and turned our attention's laser beam to another to try and help us deal with the pain? In the process, maybe we idealized someone a little too much, or pursued them a little too ardently. Got fixated. Stuck. You haven't experienced that? You haven't fucking lived then. You haven't lived until you've stretched your emotions beyond what seems rational and put yourself out there, on the edge. Risked pain. Felt pain. Made a fucking ass of yourself.

Once rebuffed, most of us lick our wounds and move on. Ms. Nowak wasn't able to do that. We don't know exactly why she broke because we haven't heard all the facts or walked in her shoes. But her situation merits a little understanding and compassion, not public ridicule. Her fall from the pinnacle of the mountain has been long and far, and she is going to pay a heavy price for what she did and for what she tried to do. At the very least, let's back the fuck off the poor woman and leave her alone to deal with her problems.

There are plenty of other public figures who fully merit our contempt, including the self-interested, incompetent brain trust that started a bullshit oil war that has killed thousands of people. Let's focus on them and stop picking at the bones of two birds with broken wings.