Bruni: Death in the age of narcissism

Just before and after John McCain's death Saturday, I read many tweets, Facebook posts and essays that beautifully captured his importance.

I read many that were equally concerned with the importance of their authors:

Here's how much time I spent around McCain. I'm also close to his daughter Meghan. This is the compliment he once gave me. This is what I said back. I voted for him this many times. I agreed with him on these issues but not those. It's difficult to describe how pained I am. Here's a photo of me looking mournful.

Were these hymns to McCain or arias of self-congratulation? The line blurred as the focus swerved from the celebrated to the celebrator.

A measure of this is inevitable and even right. One of the best ways to convey someone's impact on the world is to demonstrate and universalize his or her effect on us, and our own stories and memories are our inimitable additions to the conversation.

But a little of the first-person singular goes a long way.

Did you hear Donald Trump on the day Aretha Franklin died? In the first sentence out of his mouth, he defined her as “a person I knew well.” In the second, he alluded to a few of her performances in hotels that he owned by saying, “She worked for me.” The remark was classic Trump in its offensiveness. But it also reflected a more widespread conflation of eulogy and personal PR.

Did you see Madonna at MTV's Video Music Awards? She stepped up to the microphone, began to memorialize Franklin and mused at great length about the raw ambition, relentless rise and gritty resilience of … Madonna! “So you are probably all wondering why I am telling you this story,” she finally added, stirring from her solipsistic stupor.

No, we weren't “wondering why.” We were “appalled that.” As Stuart Heritage of the Guardian wrote, “Madonna took Franklin's legacy and forced it through a prism so utterly self-regarding that even the jazzed-up kids in the audience looked like they were losing the will to live.” But while her indulgence was extreme, it was also emblematic.

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.

I blame social media, which can make some kind of immediate response seem almost compulsory, like a homework assignment. It's a midwife to bad judgment and a narcissism multiplier, with its promise of likes and shares.

I also blame journalism, which is in a phase that encourages its practitioners to treat big developments as branding opportunities, carve our own niches in others' narratives and become characters as well as guides. Doing that without preening is tricky business, and so many of us bungle it that I'm not going to single out anyone in this column. For similar reasons, I'm not going to point fingers at the politicians and aides who pivoted so awkwardly from McCain to their own navels.

I first noticed a surfeit of oddly boastful eulogies when Nora Ephron died six years ago. It seemed that everyone in Hollywood, New York and Washington knew her. Maybe everyone did: She had tremendous energy and a talent for connection. I made my own connection to her much too clear in something that I wrote then. I look back at it and cringe.

Many of us don't fully appreciate what we're doing, and that's a damned good reason, among plenty of others, to pay closer attention to it. It undermines what should be our goal, which is to put someone else in the spotlight. We can't do that if we're crowding the stage.

Speaking of stages, a screen behind one on which the band Journey recently performed showed pictures, in memoriam, of Franklin. A music critic made positive note of that in his review. He was then contacted by Journey's guitarist, Neal Schon, and his publicist, who wanted the review corrected to specify, in the publicist's words, that the tribute was not arranged by the whole band but “was done solo by Neal himself.”

That's now clear. So is the real object of his infatuation.

Frank Bruni is a columnist for the New York Times.

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