One of the interesting pieces of fallout from Whitney Houston's death was the Internet reaction.
This death struck me as different, somehow. Maybe it's that Houston is one of the biggest tragedies in recent memory -- a relatively young, talented woman who at one time was at the top of the world, yet acted out a precipitous fall in the public eye, ultimately resulting in death. (Tiger Woods' name keeps coming up as a dramatic fall. How about Whitney Houston?)
But the social media responses went from the uninformed to the ridiculous. Some people somehow concluded Houston had been stung to death by wasps. And Houston apparently had been out of the news so long that some people thought she was Oprah Winfrey.
A Facebook acquaintance of mine posted about how much she loved dancing to and singing "Let's Hear It For the Boy" when she was a youngster. The only problem? "Let's Hear It For the Boy" was Deniece Williams, on the "Footloose" soundtrack, a year before Houston's debut.
More interesting to me, though, were those blindly willing to convict Houston based on her history, or those determined to exonerate the woman from her past just because they loved her so dearly.
People, of course, are going to have whatever kind of reaction they're going to have. The reaction probably says more about them than about Houston. But what I found most amusing was the thought that none of these people -- pro or con -- had probably had a thought about Houston -- pro or con -- in the last five years. Yet now was exactly the time to trot out their opinions about Houston, her talents, her marriage, her drug abuse and whether her life was thrown away or came to a tragic conclusion.
Life is never a declarative sound bite, but that doesn't stop us from trying to make it into one.
