It appears to me that the overwhelming majority of the comment threads attached to the veritable tsunami of Russert diaries of the past 48 hours are dedicated not to the death of a prominent journalist and his legacy, but to the policing of the reactions to - and the reactions to the policing of - said comments.
It would seem that we, an anthropologically unprecedented type of human community, are in the process of wrestling with the compatibility of old rules and new social constructs to determine exactly how and when and what one is allowed to say about the dead - in this case, about dead celebrities.
IMHO, it's not going too well.
We all know perfectly well that the death by whatever cause of a prominent public figure is no more or less important than the death by starvation or cancer or flooding or roadside bomb or old age of a nameless individual. Yet we behave as if it is, as if there's some specific code of etiquette that should govern our response to celebrity death.
As the wave of diaries and comments about Russert's demise prove, there is no such code, not yet, and by extension there is certainly no reason that anyone should claim the moral authority to dictate their version of how others should or shouldn't react. Suggestions are welcome of course, but reprimands and morality lessons, a bit less.
Personally, I am more inclined to exercise my empathy muscles by making the extra effort required to imagine what it must be like for the loved ones of a nameless victim I've never seen on TV than to split hairs about how and when we should feel free to say what we really think about a dead celebrity, especially one whose comportment in his role as such was so questionable.
Sure, we should demand a degree of tact in discussing anyone's death. But I find the preponderance of maudlin celebrations of Russert's integrity and the facile deployment of the 'tragedy' tropes we use to speak of victims of real injustice in order to evoke his family's suffering - often by people who wouldn't have hesitated to cite Russert as one of the figureheads of the reviled "MSM" while he was alive - to be far more offensive to the spirit of truth that Russert is all of a sudden supposed to have embodied than what are, for the most part, a relatively few breaches of good manners.
The guy was a public figure, and he influenced the course of history for the worse. Nothing is off-limits. It's part of the deal Russert made by becoming a public figure. I for one will not forgive his cowardly complicity with Scooter Libby's role in the Plame affair - the only opportunity we've had in 7 1/2 interminable years to hold this criminal administration accountable - which, had it come out at the time that Libby was lying about Russert being his source, would most certainly have influenced the 2004 election and thereby possibly have altered the fate of the entire world for the incalculable better.
If anything, we should be able to speak our minds about Russert precisely because he was an influential public figure. The only justifiable censorship of anyone's views of how he conducted himself are those that address claims that are untrue, not those that are simply impolite.
I for one will NOT be told by anyone that Russert's death and his family's grief demand more 'etiquette' than that of every individual and every family - be they American soldiers or Iraqi civilians or grandfathers who fall down in the shower - who have experienced the same excruciating process, invariably without anything resembling the public declarations of solidarity and esteem by Russert's fellow celebrities that make his family's burden, hopefully, a little easier to bear.
This is not to say that anyone here intended to place Russert's avoidable death from an unhealthy lifestyle above the unforgivably pointless death of, say, an Iraqi school kid from an undetonated cluster bomblet that might not have been dropped if Russert had stepped up in 2003 and revealed that Libby was lying on orders from the White House.
This is just to say: don't presume to tell me how, when and with what tone I'm 'allowed' to react to the death of someone who, by embracing both the extraordinary benefits and burdens of celebrity and influence, put his actions and moral choices on the table for public scrutiny.