"If it'd been the sacrifice of Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber, that we are invited to anticipate daily..."

"... we could delight in the Faustian justice of the righteous dispatch of a fast-living, sequin-spattered denizen of eMpTyV. We are tacitly instructed to await their demise with necrophilic sanctimony. When the end comes, they screech on Fox and TMZ, it will be deserved. The Mail provokes indignation, luridly baiting us with the sidebar that scrolls from the headline down to hell."

So goes the roiling prose of Russell Brand, who's feeling no sense of narrative completion from the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman. Brand, himself a recovering drug addict, wants to leverage the occasion of the Hoffman death into an argument for changing the drug laws.


But let's talk about the notion that the media are "tacitly instruct[ing]" us to wait for the death of Miley Cyrus/Justin Bieber "with necrophilic sanctimony." Is Fox screeching that if they die they deserve it? Is tacit screeching even possible? I see there are 4 completely different movies that have been titled "Silent Scream," so there must be some resonance in this paradoxical notion. And yet there's no film called "Tacit Screech." Perhaps Russell Brand could consider writing a script for one.

Include plenty of "necrophilic sanctimony" — which must be some combination of fascination with death/dead bodies and phony attitude of holiness. Do you get the feeling the media are telling you — without really telling you — that you should feel pretentiously saintly and simultaneously salivate over the soon-to-be-dead bodies of Cyrus and Bieber?