I still remember the day Ronald Reagan got shot. I don’t remember anything about school that day – aside from the customary wrestling with long division, I don’t think anything notable happened in Mrs. Arrouet’s third-grade class – but I sensed something amiss as soon as the carpool dropped me off at the bottom of our driveway. For one thing, I could see my mother waiting for me on the front porch, which she never did; I always let myself in and met Ma in the kitchen for a snack. For another thing, when I got to the top of the front steps, she picked me up, another thing she never did anymore because I’d gotten too big. Then she whispered into my ear that a man had shot the President, and she put me back down, and we went into the den and watched the news together, and I stayed in front of the television that whole night because I didn’t want to miss any late-breaking bulletins about the President’s surgery or John Hinckley’s arrest. At that age, of course, I didn’t understand any of the context: that it must have reminded my parents and millions of other grown-ups of the murder of John F. Kennedy not quite twenty years before; that Hinckley suffered from a serious mental illness; that the shooting would turn Reagan – whose famously porous memory and heartless social policies would lead me to despise him by the time his term in office ended – into an automatic hero simply because he survived the attempt on his life. An eight-year-old doesn’t grasp the fine points. An eight-year-old sits on the floor in front of the television while the tape of the shooting rolled again and again, and she tries to get her head around the fact that the President of the United States could get shot – that the President of the United States, only flesh and blood like the rest of us, could die.

The coverage went on all night, and I kept my vigil with Walter Cronkite until my parents insisted that I go to bed. By the time I went upstairs to brush my teeth, I had probably seen the shooting footage – Reagan going down under a pile-on, James Brady crumpling forward, the terrified Secret Service agents screaming like women – a hundred times. My parents, college students at the time of Kennedy’s murder, probably saw the Zapruder film just as many times in the days after November 22, 1963. From what I’ve heard and read about that day, most Americans spent it huddled around television sets and radios, and in 1981, I felt as though I shared my watch with the rest of the country. It seemed perfectly natural, perfectly appropriate, for the entire nation to stop in its tracks and follow the story, and it must have seemed even more so in 1963.

Last weekend, when the entire nation held its breath and waited to see what had become of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane, it seemed neither natural nor appropriate. It seemed, at best, gratuitous and morbid. After all, the entire nation didn’t really hold its breath, but rather looked on as the media held its breath, and as the hours passed and the Coast Guard found only the most fragmentary evidence of what had befallen John-John’s plane, John-John himself metamorphosed from the son of a slain President into a saint in his own right. On the basis of a handful of magazine covers that dubbed him “the hunkiest man alive,” a string of associations with various temperamental blondes, and a struggling Vogue-meets-C-Span political rag, JFK Jr. received the reverential treatment due a respected head of state or revered cultural figure – and, during his lifetime, he qualified as neither. The man never existed apart from his famous name. His parentage, not his actions, accorded him his renown, and he did little to distinguish himself otherwise, but that didn’t stop the press from issuing a fully-footnoted hagiography before the authorities had even located his remains.

I could have tolerated the mock-somber blathering of the talking heads if they had stuck to the “John-John as American icon” script. We’ve all seen the reel of the little boy saluting his father’s coffin, and knowing that Jackie carefully scripted the moment doesn’t detract from its poignancy. And John-John might not have had the most impressive rÈsumÈ, but on the other hand, he might have died before he really hit his stride, and now we’ll never know. But the media couldn’t leave it at that, choosing instead to keen and wail, in the most disingenuous and cynical manner possible, over a man they’d previously mocked for Rollerblading on the day of his mother’s funeral and failing the New York bar three times. The American public hasn’t witnessed such a disgusting display of crocodile tears since Princess Diana perished in a car accident two years ago, and the media cynically attempted to tie the two tragedies together in our minds by calling the Kennedy family “American royalty.” Other strategies used to legitimize the lavish coverage of the search-and-rescue mission included interviewing graduates of Brown who may have run into John-John at a campus pub once or twice; analyzing the body language of John-John and his wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy in photos taken while they walked their dog; and questioning history professors on the validity of the so-called Kennedy curse. Of all the saccharine-sprinkled trash-digging that characterized the reportage of JFK Jr.’s disappearance, nothing made me want to hurl one of my size nines at the television more than the Kennedy-curse angle. Forgive my callousness, but flying with a broken foot, in bad weather, at night, when you don’t know how the damn instrument panel works, hardly constitutes evidence of a curse upon your family – particularly when the other members of the family who have perished before their times have done so because of their connections to unsavory figures, or their roles as controversial leaders, or their insistence on playing touch football with skis on. The only curse the Kennedys suffer, it seems to me, is that of believing that rules do not apply to them.

I had nothing against John-John, or against either of the Bessettes, and I certainly didn’t greet their death with a giggle of glee by any means. Nor did it sadden me, which I can admit freely because, since I do not belong to a mainstream media organization, I do not feel obligated to simulate sorrow over the passing of a man I never met and didn’t care much about one way or the other. I do, however, feel that the fraudulent histrionics which greet celebrity deaths have got to stop. Nobody wants to come right out and call John-John a dilettante, and I don’t demand that type of brutal honesty, but nor do we need to act as though his good looks and easygoing personality somehow make his death more of a tragedy. Plain people, and curmudgeonly people, and people who didn’t used to date Daryl Hannah die every day, and on behalf of those people, I resent the implication that the death of the beautiful and famous is sadder or more significant for us as a country. Of course JFK Jr.’s untimely death is a tragedy – no more so than to the whores at People who now must dig up actual stories to fill the two covers a year they once devoted to his bare chest.

Peter Jennings, from whom I for some reason expect better, droned on at one point about looking for meaning in the premature deaths of JFK Jr. and the Bessette sisters. Well, Pete, you might begin by looking at yourself. American society has divided itself into two tiers – the pantheon of the famous, and the rest of us. The press has perpetuated the belief that the famous, no matter how marginal or ill-gotten their fame, are better than the rest of us, and more important and more desirable and so on. And apparently we’ve bought into it; how else do we account for the success of rubbish like InStyle? How else do we explain why we still know Joey Buttafuoco’s name? How else do we justify the proliferation of talentless celebrity progeny, the Bijou Phillipses and Sofia Coppolas of the world? If we didn’t truly believe in our hearts that the famous have something we don’t have – something we want – and that even the famous-by-association-with-someone-else-famous have that something, would Shoshanna Lonstein have a career? What about Pamela Des Barres? The famous don’t have anything that the rest of us lack, except their fame, and fame might have helped Ronald Reagan get elected President, but it didn’t bulletproof him. To the media’s evident surprise, fame doesn’t tend to keep planes aloft, either.

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