The rest of us have neither the megaphones nor megalomania of Trump and Madonna, but we have some of the same impulses when weighing in on famous people’s deaths. We find the one point where we intersected with them. We wedge in our own biographies. We flaunt our own résumés.
We assert our character through our grief — or our lack of it. (No shortage of cranks on Twitter deemed this past weekend an appropriate occasion to revel in their distaste for McCain.) It’s classic virtue signaling, gauchely timed and in need of a more specific phrase. Virtue grieving? Obituary opportunism?
To wade through reactions to the losses of McCain, Franklin and other public figures who have died this year is to wallow in anecdotes, information and statements of principle that are obliquely or clumsily attached to the sadness at hand.
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