The RIP Masters

Rest in peace, Andy Williams.

Michael Clarke Duncan, we’ll miss you.

RIP, guy who voiced the Count from Sesame Street. You rocked, man.

Goodbye, Morgan Freeman (how many times has he died, by the way?).

What drives people to want to be RIP Masters on Facebook and Twitter?

They want to be the very first to say RIP.

Do they hope that their status update goes viral?

Were they “those kids” in elementary school that just always had to be first at everything?

Why do they compete to find the coolest picture with the coolest quote of the dead person? Are they trying to get a higher Facebook Edgerank?

Do they even really care about the person who they’re RIPing?

I don’t understand this phenomenon.

I mean, I get it when it’s somebody really big that everybody knows. Can you imagine if social networks were around when Elvis died? I remember the news that day. I was about 9 years old. It was a constant stream of nothing but Elvis retrospectives – and they continued for more than a week. My mother wept.

If Facebook and Twitter had existed, it would have been crazytown.

Of course, there can be no salt without pepper.

And with every RIP Master, comes The Naysayer.

The naysayer needs to come over the top of any RIP Master and try to steal their thunder, minimizing and questioning the overall lifetime contributions that the deceased person had made while alive.

Remember when Whitney Houston died?

So, there were like 287 of the same damn updates in my feed saying:

RIP Whitney.

A beautiful voice, lost.

Gone too soon.

Listening to you was like hearing angels.

My wedding song was “I Will Always Love  You” – thank you for making my wedding day perfect.

With a bunch of pictures of Whitney, like her famous I Wanna Dance With Somebody look, and of course, her cape-slash-hoodie look from The Bodyguard.

On about every third RIP Whitney status update, a naysayer would get into the fray.

“REALLY? Do we really need to spend our time mourning a drug addict?”

“Whitney was nowhere near the singer that Diana Ross, Etta James or Aretha Franklin are.”

“Let’s not celebrate the life of someone who was dumb enough to marry Bobby Brown.”

“HELL to the NO, I do not understand the fuss over Whitney Houston’s death.”

Of course, this would then spark a heated debate over Whitney. Angry words would be exchanged. People defriending one another over Whitney Houston.

For reals.

So, the battle resumes every time another celeb passes from this life into the next.

I just wonder: who’s going to RIP the RIP masters when they die?

There’s an app for that. So the RIP Masters can RIP themselves until they’re safely settled in the afterworld.

They can even leave a pre-emptive nastygram for their naysayers, I suppose.

We’re nothing if we’re not posthumously narcissistic.

 

 

Tagged as: Just for Yuks