Christmas Mourning
It's been a tough week and a tough year. And we still need to believe.
This week has been a shockingly violent one, and the fact that it comes in the middle of the holiday season makes it all the more traumatic.
As I’m sure you know by now, last Saturday, a former student decided to grab a gun and start shooting people at Brown University in Providence, RI, killing two and wounding eight, because that’s the American way. The shooter wound up taking his own life a couple of days later.
The next step in the process, of course, will be to try to find a “reason” for this atrocity, a motive for the shooting.
But what possible reason could there be? Had they captured the guy before he killed himself, would he have explained it to our satisfaction? Would it have all made sense once he specified the origin of his rage?
No. It wouldn’t have. And it won’t after this country’s future mass shootings, either, the ones that we all know are coming as sure as the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening.
The guns are waiting, and they don’t care about a motive.
The next day, on Sunday, a father and son approached a gathering of over one thousand Hanukkah celebrants on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, and opened fire with automatic weapons, killing fifteen people, including a 10-year-old girl and an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor. Forty other people were wounded.
One of the shooters, the father, is now dead, but the son has apparently said they were inspired to murder by ISIS ideology...which has as much to do with actual Islam as anti-Semitic idiocy has to do with Jewishness.
These two morons didn’t get a show of hands from the world’s 2.2 billion Muslims before doing what they did. Just like the guy in Providence, they chose to pull the trigger themselves.
Then, later that night while the world was still reeling from two days of sickening public bloodshed, word got out that the beloved filmmaker, actor, and political activist Rob Reiner and his wife of thirty-eight years, Michele, had been brutally stabbed to death in their Brentwood mansion.
It now appears that their emotionally disturbed, drug-addicted son, Nick, is the killer.
Reiner’s murder is no more significant than any of the others in this gruesome litany. Each and every one of them is an unspeakable tragedy. But the unexpected death of a famous person always hits you differently.
Millions of people, myself included, felt like they knew Rob Reiner. And his open honesty about himself and his country suggests that we understood him far more than we do most mass-marketed celebrities.
I’ve been entertained by Reiner for over fifty years. If all he ever did was appear on Norman Lear’s groundbreaking TV comedy series, All in the Family, which my family looked forward to watching every week for the first half of the 1970s, he would have carved out a significant place in popular culture.
All in the Family was a uniquely daring show that didn’t shy away from the hard political, religious, and racial realities of American life in a divided decade, the battles of which still reverberate through our society. It took real commitment and more than a little bit of guts to be a part of it, especially in the early going.
This wasn’t just any TV show. People had never seen anything like All in the Family, and in many ways they haven’t seen anything like it again. No network or streaming service would ever risk producing it today, both for fear of public outcry and of the so-called “United States government” trying to shut it down.
It was truly brilliant, landmark television, and Rob Reiner played a major role in it. He even co-wrote several of its episodes.
Reiner was, of course, the son of comedy legend Carl Reiner, who, among many other accomplishments, created The Dick Van Dyke Show and directed Steve Martin in The Jerk, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, and The Man with Two Brains. So the transition to filmmaking only seemed logical to Rob.
Reiner’s work as a film director was considerably less hard-hitting than All in the Family, but, during his mega-commercial hot streak from roughly 1984 to 1992, his pictures still contained warmth and accepting humor that connected with a broad audience without being saccharine or embarrassing, and that’s no small accomplishment.
He reached millions, but he didn’t pander, and he was capable of shifting between comedy and drama with ease.
I think Reiner’s biggest strength as a director was that he knew memorable dialogue when he heard it. He trusted the script. Again, he was never in line to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. He wasn’t that kind of filmmaker, and in the latter part of his career, he lost quite a bit of steam. But think how many immediately recognizable lines there are in his movies: “You can’t handle the truth!,” “Inconceivable!,” “I’ll have what she’s having,” and...
“These go to eleven.”
If I were to have a beer with a group of famous people, I could do far worse than to hit a bar with Reiner and his buddies Albert Brooks (who met Rob at Hollywood High in 1964), Billy Crystal, and Larry David. I’m sure I could find a place in the loony rhythm of that particular table and laugh myself silly in the process.
Each of those guys is hilarious, and in TV interviews, they seem genuinely grounded and likable. They may be rich and famous, but the showbiz rot does not seem to have set in to any large degree.
There’s something to be said for that. It doesn’t always work that way when people kiss your ass twenty-four hours a day.
In his later years, Reiner rolled his compassion into political action that always put people first, which these days made him a dangerous, thoroughly outrageous Liberal. He wasn’t just passing the hat to raise money for disease research. He really put himself out there, and, in the Trump era, took his shots and shook them off like he was Jake LaMotta making a point.
Try as they might, they never got him down.
Reiner was one of the key public figures who campaigned for the legalization of gay marriage in California. He fought tirelessly for California’s early-childhood development program, First 5, which is funded by a tax on tobacco products. In the late 1990s, he was part of a group that stopped building developers from destroying a 3,000 acre nature preserve, and he was an advocate for green energy.
And he was vehemently, and very vocally, anti-Donald Trump.
Reiner knew. He recognized the game that’s being played and he took a public stand against it, in ways that the vast majority of Hollywood power players haven’t even approached while they keep an eye on their Lamborghinis and stock portfolios.
Trump didn’t like Rob Reiner, just as he doesn’t like anybody who calls him on his sociopathic, totalitarian horse shit, and his response to this caring man’s cold-blooded murder led to perhaps the most classless, utterly despicable response to a tragedy ever seen from a sitting American president. It’s easy enough to find online, so I won’t be posting it here. Just know that it’s jaw-dropping in its self-serving inhumanity and vulgarity.
Just when you think Trump can’t get any lower, he digs down further. And, God knows, he’s not done yet.
So, in the spirit of the season, where can we find the hope here? Is there any hope in all this heartbreak?
There is.
Rob Reiner did the right thing, and he did the brave thing. He viewed other people, regardless of who they are, as fellow human beings who suffer the same foibles that we do and deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. He recognized the power in even a flawed democracy and fought to maintain our ability to pursue the betterment of all our lives.
He fought to maintain that democracy.
He actually did this, and not in a grandstanding, self-regarding way. He was a funny guy, and he made some charming movies. But that’s what he left behind. That’s what we can learn from Rob Reiner’s life.
As for the horror in Australia.
Boris and Sofia Gurman were the first people to try to disarm the shooters when they saw them exiting a vehicle with assault weapons. They struggled with one of them and were shot dead. They had been a couple for thirty-five years, and they died together.
And this man, Ahmed al-Ahmed, a Muslim who was born in Syria and immigrated to Australia in 2006, was heading to lunch with a friend when he saw the killers open fire. Al-Ahmed ran to one of the gunmen, wrestled with him, and disarmed him. He was shot twice before it was all over but is going to survive.
He is now being heralded as the hero he is in Australia and around the world.
These people put their lives on the line to protect others, and two of them died in the process. They could have run for cover, and no one would have blamed them for it in the least.
But they didn’t. They took action.
Give some thought to their selflessness. If they can do what they did, the very least you and I can do is to raise our voices when fellow human beings are being victimized by violence and systematic political terror. We all have one life to live, and there’s no better way to live it than to simply care about the safety and well-being of other people, every single day, even in the smallest of ways.
If that’s not the meaning of Christmas, I don’t know what is. For lack of any better options, I’d even say it’s the meaning of life itself.
Thank you so much for your ability to see reality and your honesty in discussing it.
Beautifully expressed. Thanks!