Jan Berenstain and Revisiting the Obit Hit Piece
FEBRUARY 29, 2012 TAGS:
Writers at Slate.com seem to have a whole lot to say about a family of fictional cartoon bears. Not the bears necessarily, but one of their creators. Jan Berenstain. The co-author of the long series of children's books The Berenstain Bears died on Friday at the age of 88, and as Hanna Rosin posted Monday, "Good Riddance to her Books."
What many readers and other commenters took offense at was the writerly chop-licking that Rosin's headline seemed to take. Having beef with the retro-grade "Mama Bear" character in the books (that she never the leaves the bears' tree house and only wears a 50s-era moo moo-esque housedress) is one thing, but damning the sweet 88 year-old bespectacled children's author before her body was cold, is entirely different.
Yesterday, author and journalist Katie Roiphe lamented the quick trigger responses of "good riddance" to widely beloved children's book author or at least called for a bit of a decorous repose after a death. She wrote:
Just as one tries not to wear fuchsia to a funeral, it seems that one might fruitfully reserve one’s more pointed critiques for another occasion. There is, however, an increasing fashion for these negative obituaries, this sharp summing up of dead people’s achievements in which they are found falling short, these personal attacks timed as the dead person’s possessions are still being retrieved in plastic bags by their relatives from the hospital.
To this critique and others Rosin penned an update to her original Berenstain bashing:
I have been roundly (and deservedly) chastised in e-mails and elsewhere by Slate readers for my use of “good riddance” in connection with this kind woman’s death. I admit, I was not really thinking of her as a person with actual feelings and a family, just an abstraction who happened to write these books. Apologies. Next time I will be more humane. --Hanna
Roiphe, who teaches journalism at NYU, uses reactions to Christopher Hitchens' death as her best evidence as the "increasing fashion for negative obituaries." What a terrible example, given that Hitchens himself was as likely to pen a scathing life-review minutes after a death hit the newswire as anyone.
I would say there's a meta-contrarian trend to Roiphe's cry for civility. Much in the same way an "O-Bitch-uary" tries to zig when others zag in the elegiac hues of recent deaths, Roiphe, quite sincerely, tries to buck a trend that her very publication has innovated over the years.
Obit-Mag.com's Michael Schaffer wrote in 2009 that Slate's media critic Jack Shafer was probably the media's most successful obituary slammer. Shafer's words here: “If they deserve it, there’s nothing wrong with making a playpen out of their bones while the bones are still fresh.”
Oh boy. But Shafer and Rosin have an august predecessor. Again from Michael Schaffer's 2009 essay "The Obit Hit Piece,"
The most famous nasty obit in American history was probably H.L. Mencken’s 1925 assault on William Jennings Bryan. “There was something peculiarly fitting in the fact that his last days were spent in a one-horse Tennessee village,” Mencken wrote, noting that Bryan died soon after arguing the Scopes monkey trial. “He liked people who sweated freely, and were not debauched by the refinements of the toilet.” In contrast to the “simian gabble” of the populist leader’s fans, “Bryan lived too long, and descended too deeply into the mud, to be taken seriously hereafter by fully literate men.”
There's a fuzzy line between hard news obits and appreciations/evaluations these days. Add the so-called British Style of obituary to the mix and the poise of a mid-century McG obituary seems like a thing of the past, no longer needed in the dialogue between life-story teller and audience. So to Roiphe's call for a grace period between a death and an opinion on someones life, we'll point to a recent paid death notice that slammed not the deceased but the survivors. Death is an occasion to sound off. Civility be damned.
What many readers and other commenters took offense at was the writerly chop-licking that Rosin's headline seemed to take. Having beef with the retro-grade "Mama Bear" character in the books (that she never the leaves the bears' tree house and only wears a 50s-era moo moo-esque housedress) is one thing, but damning the sweet 88 year-old bespectacled children's author before her body was cold, is entirely different.Yesterday, author and journalist Katie Roiphe lamented the quick trigger responses of "good riddance" to widely beloved children's book author or at least called for a bit of a decorous repose after a death. She wrote:
Just as one tries not to wear fuchsia to a funeral, it seems that one might fruitfully reserve one’s more pointed critiques for another occasion. There is, however, an increasing fashion for these negative obituaries, this sharp summing up of dead people’s achievements in which they are found falling short, these personal attacks timed as the dead person’s possessions are still being retrieved in plastic bags by their relatives from the hospital.
To this critique and others Rosin penned an update to her original Berenstain bashing:
I have been roundly (and deservedly) chastised in e-mails and elsewhere by Slate readers for my use of “good riddance” in connection with this kind woman’s death. I admit, I was not really thinking of her as a person with actual feelings and a family, just an abstraction who happened to write these books. Apologies. Next time I will be more humane. --Hanna
Roiphe, who teaches journalism at NYU, uses reactions to Christopher Hitchens' death as her best evidence as the "increasing fashion for negative obituaries." What a terrible example, given that Hitchens himself was as likely to pen a scathing life-review minutes after a death hit the newswire as anyone.
I would say there's a meta-contrarian trend to Roiphe's cry for civility. Much in the same way an "O-Bitch-uary" tries to zig when others zag in the elegiac hues of recent deaths, Roiphe, quite sincerely, tries to buck a trend that her very publication has innovated over the years.
Obit-Mag.com's Michael Schaffer wrote in 2009 that Slate's media critic Jack Shafer was probably the media's most successful obituary slammer. Shafer's words here: “If they deserve it, there’s nothing wrong with making a playpen out of their bones while the bones are still fresh.”
Oh boy. But Shafer and Rosin have an august predecessor. Again from Michael Schaffer's 2009 essay "The Obit Hit Piece,"
The most famous nasty obit in American history was probably H.L. Mencken’s 1925 assault on William Jennings Bryan. “There was something peculiarly fitting in the fact that his last days were spent in a one-horse Tennessee village,” Mencken wrote, noting that Bryan died soon after arguing the Scopes monkey trial. “He liked people who sweated freely, and were not debauched by the refinements of the toilet.” In contrast to the “simian gabble” of the populist leader’s fans, “Bryan lived too long, and descended too deeply into the mud, to be taken seriously hereafter by fully literate men.”
There's a fuzzy line between hard news obits and appreciations/evaluations these days. Add the so-called British Style of obituary to the mix and the poise of a mid-century McG obituary seems like a thing of the past, no longer needed in the dialogue between life-story teller and audience. So to Roiphe's call for a grace period between a death and an opinion on someones life, we'll point to a recent paid death notice that slammed not the deceased but the survivors. Death is an occasion to sound off. Civility be damned.
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