At least I am consistent. The phenomenon of public figures and celebrities immediately having their influence and perceived importance and value elevated by a sudden death that they had no control over has always bewildered me. I got my first taste of hostility for bucking conventional wisdom when I wrote an editorial for my junior high school newspaper questioning the fairness of the rush to rename airports, highways and buildings after President Kennedy in the aftermath of his assassination. “Honor Him…Quietly” was my title, and I questioned whether it was responsible to strip names honoring other worthy Americans from various landmarks because Lee Harvey Oswald happened to have access to a warehouse window in Dallas. Since I was living in a Boston suburb at the time and Kennedys were considered just short of deities, this was not a popular point of view.
When his rival and frequent adversary Truman Capote drank and drugged himself to death at 59, Gore Vidal famously said, “Good career move!” Nasty as that assessment was (and was intended to be), whether at the the hand of another or the public figures themselves, early death is almost always a good career move.
Sometimes this makes sense: lives and careers usually have declines, and they can be ugly. As the most recent aspect of a famous person’s life, the often tragic or anti-climactic last act may have more staying power in the public’s memory than the glory days. Those who die suddenly, violently or too soon avoid that problem.
Sometimes the sudden death has the effect of freezing a life in a hallowed state that was never deserved in the first place: when I finally took the time to watch all of James Dean’s movies, I was shocked to discover that the movie icon was a scenery-chewing, self-indulgent hack, worshiped before the novelty of extreme method acting wore off. Maybe he would have improved with age, but there is no question that his tragic death in an auto accident made him a bigger star in the dead actors firmament than his demonstrated talent deserved.
The same holds for political figures. JFK was an extreme example, but Abraham Lincoln, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had the advantage of dying at their career peaks as well. Lincoln’s martyrdom was especially propitious: he may well have fared almost as badly as his successor, Andrew Johnson, as he tried to manage Reconstruction with the strongest voices in his party crying for revenge. What would George W. Bush’s public image be today if he were shot dead shortly after his inspiring words at the site of the Twin Towers? The fact is that a sudden death or assassination should have no effect on the historical assessment of any public figure, negative or positive.
The urge to exploit the sudden deaths of public figures is apparently an unavoidable part of human nature. That doesn’t make it right, and ideally, the knowledge that an untimely death naturally causes people to overstate the loss while overvaluing the lost should temper the instinct. I see no signs of that happening. The sanctification of George Floyd comes close to being an all-time low. But martyrs are useful and always have been. That’s not going to change, so it isn’t worth much effort to complain about it.
Never mind.
Ethics Alarms 
The word martyr comes from the Greek word meaning “witness”. There is a certain sense of triumph in dying while witnessing to something. Historically we typically hear of Christian martyrs, those who died professing their faith rather than sacrifice to the Roman gods. This act of witness is meant to strengthen those who follow: it really is possible to give everything for that particular cause. The martyrs gave up their lives for it.
In this sense, Martin Luther King Jr. and Charlie Kirk are martyrs, for they were slain while witnessing to their respective causes, and slain because of those causes. It is despicable that George Floyd was elevated to the rank of martyr, for what did he give witness to? Drug abuse and resisting arrest? What noble causes. And then there have been a slew of actors, musicians, and other artists that have died early, often due to drug abuse, accident, or suicide. Should these be venerated? Perhaps tragic accident while pursuing one’s career is passable, such as “the Day the Music Died,” when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and JP Richardson died in a plane crash en route to further performances. But what should we make of artists who die from drug use or suicide? I believe their art should be appreciated for what it is, but I have a hard time believing we should elevate the artists for their lives, much less their deaths.
And yet we do. I have to wonder if there is a certain thirst for secular immortality that drives this, or if there is a deeper mourning for what could have been. I also wonder if there is such a dearth of healthy role models that these often-broken celebrities are so idolized, and their deaths glorified because of the idol status?
what the living do with their memories of the dead is on the living. What is unethical about wanting to carry on someone’s words and actions? In regards to an influential figure being assassinated, that is the ultimate hecklers veto. That folks refuse to let that stand sure seems ethical to me. Whether the message is ethical is another discussion.
why does it bother you that TPUSA arranged an event in a week that 300,000 attended and at least 100 Million watched.
It doesn’t “bother me.” But if an individual is worthy of that kind of mass honor while alive, it should happen while he’s alive. Getting murdered isn’t an accomplishment….why should it advance an individuals beliefs, projects, reputation or agenda? Kant says the human beings should not be used as a means to an end. Does that ethical principle change once the individual is dead?
To me, it is less about Charlie Kirk’s influence and importance (although the more I learn about everything he had his hands in, the more impressed I am) and more about how and why he died. After seeing some my own friends and family brazenly celebrate his death and ask for more of the same, the phrase “I am Charlie Kirk” hits me very, very hard.
Maybe I have just been inexcusably naive.
As a reaction to being murdered? As a way of showing that the murder was unacceptable and should never prosper? To use the memorial to say the things folks never got to say when he was alive? To take a terrible event and make something good or great out of it?
People aren’t perfect, we often need something to change to realize how good or bad it was before?
In regards to Kant….used this https://daily-philosophy.com/quotes-kant-means-ends/
The “end” of an action is what I want to achieve. Let’s say, I want to get my pen back, which I forgot at a friend’s house yesterday. The “means” are the instruments or tools that I will use to get that pen back. I might walk over to my friend’s house to get my pen back, for example. Then my walking there would be the means towards the end of getting my pen back.
But what if my friend lives far away? I can take a taxi. Assuming my pen is worth 5 dollars, and I pay 50 to the taxi to get the pen back: would this be a rational action? No, in this case, I should just use the money directly to buy another pen (or ten of them) instead of trying to retrieve that one pen that I forgot.
So the means that I use to achieve some end must, if I want to be rational, have less value than the end itself.
If humans have a special, unlimited value, it follows that I can never use them as means towards any end. Because no end can have a value that is higher than a human being’s dignity.
Charlie wanted to bring as many people as possible to his belief. The end is multiple people, his means was “his” life. His widow, friend, and followers are honoring his goal by celebrating him and trying to spread his message, that isn’t disrespecting him that is honoring him.
Charlie is dead, the living are using the gifts that Charlie gave them to share with others, love is not a zero sum game, which is a basic tenet of Kant.
Is using Kant’s philosophy wrong? It was his, he’s dead?
I agree.
If Kirk had died in a car accident or falling from the roof at his house, then most would mourn his loss as unfortunate. Here, though, he was murdered in a public place, in a very public, very horrific manor, for simply speaking and sharing his beliefs. +
We can disagree with his beliefs and argue about them all day long, but he was murdered for sharing ideas. Everyone should take notice of that and reject it completely.
Yet, we have politicians and on-air personalities declaring that his murder was, if not justified, at the very least understandable because of the things he said. That should scare the hell out of everyone because it signifies a dangerous turn in the nation where political assassination and politically movitated violence are justifiable tools to achieve politcal change.
jvb
And if Kirk stood for the highest American ideals and practiced them – being that ideal American, publicly, unapologetically, unreservedly… if he was then assassinated for what made him a public figure, then aren’t all those who are memorializing him also Charlie Kirk? An attack on Charlie Kirk has become an attack on all of us. An attack on a high trust democratic Republic. Memorializing Kirk is less about Kirk and more about defiance without the riots, no?
Honestly, I think it comes down to the Cognitive Dissonance scale. When a person is cut down in his or her prime, they are permanently frozen where they are and will never subsequently do anything that drags them down the scale–and this is something that is so common among the long-lived that it’s almost ubiquitous.
(Naturally, there can be exceptions for things about a person that are kept secret in life but revealed after death, but that’s a different situation.)
I think people kind of innately understand this (though they may not be aware of, or understand, the term Cognitive Dissonance) and, seeing the person through the lens of being in the prime of live (or career, or cause, or whatever) now and forever combined with a cultural near-taboo of speaking ill of the dead (especially the newly-dead) gives the person in question this final bump UP the C.D. scale at the end.
If you liked or admired the recently deceased, you’ll be inclined to want to preserve that memory and continue to speak about him or her positively. If you disliked or disapproved of the recently deceased, then you (hopefully) understand that disparaging this person after death is pointless because he or she will no longer be doing whatever it is you felt the need to oppose.
So death–especially untimely death–only ever serves to push people up the scale and never down, and the dead certainly won’t ever do anything to change their position in the future.
–Dwayne
This falls into the realm of alternate universes where we don’t know for sure what would have happened, but I am not convinced that Robert Kennedy had peaked. RFK had the twin challenges of securing the primary and the general election. Having been assassinated, we don’t know for sure.
Elvis was only 42 when he died in 1977, but the way he looked in the last several years (heavily drugged and with the physique of an old man, in a much-too-tight white jumpsuit) is now a big part of who we remember (this was the version I saw impersonated in the casino in Vegas recently). Had he died in in 1968 or 1969 (age 33 or 34), after his Comeback Special, we would remember his music, his extraordinary talent, and also the iconic image of him on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1969, decked out in sexy black leather. More of a James Dean vibe, but with a lot more talent.