A Letter to Anna Nicole Smith

Dear Anna,

You died on a Thursday afternoon in your hotel room in Hollywood, Florida. The news of your death smothered the media. Until that Thursday I never knew that you meant so much to Americans. People paid tribute to you with emails to news networks, blogs, stories, photos, and videos on YouTube. I watched the news for a little bit from my couch that Thursday. No news in the rest of the world was more important to the media than your death that day.

It has almost been two weeks since your death and I still read headlines about it in the papers and see the talking heads gaggle on about you for hours like you were an ex-president or the UN Secretary General. To my knowledge you really didn't do much in your life that warrants all the press. You were a high school dropout and married a cook at Jim's Krispy Fried Chicken when you were a teenager. You worked at Wal-Mart. You showed yourself to the world through the pages of Playboy. The world liked you for that. You met and married an oil baron 60 years your senior. He died. You went to court for some of the inheritance and won some money. Along the way you had a couple of kids and participated in a false advertisement campaign for TrimSpa.

What did you do with all the time in between? Why does America care so much? I liked the way The Daily Show covered your death. They called their segment on you "Death of a Person". That is what your death was to many of us.

There were certainly people who died on February 8, 2007, that did much more worth celebrating and paying tribute to, than you did. I suppose this isn't your fault at all. You knew where the gaze of American media was and you threw yourself into it. Perhaps you knew exactly what America is about, more than any of us because we gobbled you up and fell in love with the show without asking ourselves what you had done to deserve all the attention. I can't blame you for wanting to be famous; it is what you did, to become that way,which disgusts me.

Sincerely,

Bryce