Culture Vultures: Dubroff Debris

...But, undeterred, her dad decided to fake her into the history books anyway—or, at any rate, into a TV movie (he was frying to sell the rights...

...A child of the sixties, he nevertheless had no desire to join the glorious pantheon: Buddy Holly, Lynyrd Skynyrd, William Jefferson Airplane Clin46 June 1996 • The American Spectator ton...

...But flying isn't floating, and that basic confusion tells you all you need to know about the kid's understanding of what she was doing...

...Or "Careless" by Glenn Miller...

...Reggie Cleveland drooled at a service in Cheyenne...

...Or maybe it takes a phony to smell a phony, an emperor with no clothes to spot that there's nothing holding up the plane...

...But the "American Dream" used to be something realized by very down-to-earth methods...

...While the president was carrying on like a distraught mom over Ron Brown, it was left to the real mom to come across like a chilly, distant chief executive, refusing to play along with the grief junkies...

...Nowadays you can forget it: practice was for the steam age...

...We'll never know how serious little Jessica was...

...Maybe she is a famous first, the first program-your-own "virtual celebrity," a projection of everyone else's fantasies: To her mom, she was a New Age earth-child living "in a state of being...

...perhaps, if you were related to the plane's hapless supporting players, it wasn't offensive at all...

...And to all her seven-year old chums, she was...

...Somewhere, underneath the twisted metal, underneath the memorial mound of teddy bears (which Jess had never been allowed), underneath the networks' candy-coating and her dad's showbiz huckstering and her mom's experiments in self-expression, there must have been a real Jessica Dubroff...

...As things turned out, her can't-do ending made a much better story, at least for everyone except li'l Jess: when her single-engine Cessna splattered the drab asphalt of a suburban driveway—or, as her mom put it, "their beautiful bodies touched the beautiful earth" — all kinds of stock figures from American life, from New Age earth mothers to old-time stage mothers, seemed to fuse and mutate into one almighty mother of a story...

...Every age finds its symbols...

...from making a ceremonial fly-by, but the mourners (if that's the word) enjoyed a fine rendition of "I'll Fly Away...

...and rushed to greet the fantasists of the week...

...As much as any other celebrity— like supermodel Naomi Campbell's "novel" and superwoman Hillary Clinton's treatise on child-rearing—Jess needed a ghost-writer...

...The report of my death," Mark Twain famously wrote to the New York Journal, "was an exaggeration...

...Instead, clergymen who should have been modestly ushering her into the Lord's Temple were instead abasing themselves before the Shirley Temple, conspiring in the myth that Jessica had soared above the vulgar flight of common souls...

...But in our search to find meaning in her death, few of us want to accept that its only meaning is its exquisite meaninglessness: for almost every word applied to this pathetic story— "achievement," "community"— in this context is utterly meaningless...

...girl to dream," the Rev...

...Or "But You Love Me, Daddy" by Jim Reeves...

...And, in her cool, calm voice, there's an eerie echo of the old surgeon's line: the operation was a complete success, even though the patient died...

...There is, after all, a more recognizable grain of the real Ron Brown in Grant's jibe—he was a wily political survivor—than in, say, Ted Kennedy's eulogizing of him as a "Will Rogers in reverse: everyone who met Ron Brown liked him...

...David Rockwood gushed at her funeral in Pescadero, California...

...We all know the old joke about the tourist and the New York cabbie: "How do you get to Carnegie Hall...

...Practice...

...They said she didn't know the meaning of the word fear...

...To the citizens of Cheyenne — people who never knew her except from TV and radio, but who piled on the blacktop a mound of polyester teddy bears and garish balloons with cheery slogans intended for school graduations ("We'll Miss You") — she was, most implausibly, an all-American moppet...

...Death has become the final round in the beauty contest, the ultimate celebrity streamlining: almost any of the chief execs on Ron Brown's ill-fated flight over Croatia was doing a more useful job than the secretary or his entire Commerce Department...

...CULTURE VULTURES by Mark Steyn Dubroff Debris Today's lesson is taken from Airplane!, for as pilot Peter Graves and doctor Leslie Nielsen so memorably put it: "Surely you can't be serious...

...Li'l Jess wasn't a violin prodigy...

...It must have been a tough call for the old photo-opportunist, but, if he ever read the letter, he was shrewd enough, unlike the rest of America, not to inhale...

...But, in real tightly-knit communities, it would not have taken Jessica's death to bring to the town's attention that the Dubroff kids were not enrolled at school or in any "home schooling" program...

...I am serious—and don't call me Shirley...

...It's the voice of Daddy telling her what to do...

...It is, to be sure, the perfect emblem for an age that demands instant gratification: it gets you there quicker...

...But that's more to do with the deficiencies of her mom's ad hoc "home schooling" program: she didn't know the meaning of the word aardvark, either...

...That's just a mawkish all-purpose Hallmark greeting card: Insert name of deceased here...

...she couldn't sing and dance like Shirley Temple...

...Even in her moment in the limelight, even as she stared out at us from every front page, she was curiously invisible...

...The American Spectator • June 19 9 6 47...

...To the big-haired, big-shot female interviewers, a feminist comrade-in-arms (the "Women Fly" cap was a nice touch on her dad's part...

...Jessica bounced the Unabomber from the top of the evening news, and made him look sane by comparison...

...Bad weather prevented her nineyear-old brother (or was it the three-year-old sister...

...ah, but li'l Jess doesn't seem to have known any other seven-year old girls...

...yet even if they'd made "Today," we'd all have forgotten her tomorrow...

...Pescadero, we're told, is a "tightly-knit community" of "mom 'n' pop stores...

...Who needs a TV movie with Jess and Dad played by actors...

...And perhaps, when we weigh the transparent nastiness of Grant against the ever-swelling armies of grief junkies, we might recognize that the former is less harmful to the nation's health than the latter...

...Dream" is one of the most potent words in the American vocabulary, the noun to which the adjective"American" is most particularly applied...

...But as their families, and that of Jessica's flight instructor, were to discover, a plane crash leaves room for only one Buddy Holly...

...That's why those wimpy clergymen's fudging of the issue is so grotesque...

...she hadn't put in the hours...

...And if the real Ron Brown in all his complex individuality was in danger of being smothered by the eulogies-to-go of the nation's Pain-Feeler-in-Chief, then what of the real Jessica Dubroff...

...Or "Baby, I Don't Care" by Buddy Holly...

...This story's so crazy that the only one who behaved with anything approaching normalcy was President Clinton...

...Everyone involved —from Jess and Dad to Katie Couric and Forrest Sawyer—was already acting out his or her role...

...For Lloyd Debris, the plane was supposed to get his daughter to fame quicker: short-cut celebrity...

...In the twentieth, the plane may yet come to symbolize our national disintegration...

...Or maybe, of the many American pop stars who failed to live long enough to cash in their frequent flyer miles, it's Patsy Cline who should have provided the soundtrack to Jessica's funeral: a solo rendition of "I Fall to Pieces...

...In a strange way, the person who emerges with the most integrity is Jessica's Mom, the "spiritual healer": she's so crazy she can't even fit into the media craziness, insisting that "grief is something we invent" and "emotion is unnatural...

...Unattended by doctor or midwife, li'l Jess was born in a birthing tub: her mom wanted her to have a sense of "floating...

...In the nineteenth century, the railroads helped build a country...

...Jess liked flying, she said, because she liked "floating...

...But her father Lloyd Debris — sorry, Dubroff (how quickly the names fade) — was deadly serious, and, if you'd called his daughter Shirley, he wouldn't have minded at all: Jessica was sold to us as a Shirley Temple for the nineties, a plucky, pug-nosed moppet with a can-do spirit...

...Truth is stranger than fiction, and thus too complicated for the sound-bite age...

...At the Clintonian level, it surely is...

...Look at Jessica's letter, written in her own child's hand and reproduced in a Dallas newspaper: clearly, her "clearly" is not the adverbial deployment of a seven-year old...

...As Jessica's famous first turned into a famous last, the media struggled to attach one after another contradictory stereotype to her...

...To her dad, a ticket to deflected fame...

...In the nineties, Jessica's deformed childhood reminds us of how routine social isolation now is, and the travesty of her unearned celebrity confirms only that a "global village" is no substitute for a real one...

...To quote from "When You Wish Upon a Star": If your heart is in your dream No request is too extreme...

...The pomp worked so well that, before long, commentators were criticizing senior Republicans for being insufficiently grief-stricken and maudlin...

...But that's too high-flown for poor Jessica's epitaph...

...In the sixties, Marshall McLuhan foresaw "electronic interdependence" leading to a "global village...

...the rest wind up playing Richie Valens or the Big Bopper...

...No man is an island, said John Donne, but li'l Jess is a "Fantasy Island...

...Maybe they should have opted for "Free Bird" by fellow plane-crash victims Lynyrd Skynyrd instead...

...That's to say, the banal redaction of a celebrity's life to the most convenient stereotype on hand is far more degrading of his humanity...

...Instead, he reacted like a commuter who finds himself sitting opposite the nut on the bus: he declined to acknowledge her...

...Everything about this story was fake: a non-pilot taking a non-flight for a non-record in order to get on the non-news shows...

...God bless the mother, God bless the father, and God bless the flight instructor who taught that MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...

...Jessica fails that test...

...Daddy Debris may have taken the networks for a ride, but not the president...

...Bob Grant was sacked for saying, as news of the crash was still filtering through, that he didn't want to be "a pessimist" but that the rumored sole survivor was bound to be Brown...

...Death is supposed to be the great leveler and, when it has so cruelly exposed the gulf between reality and illusion, we should be humble enough to recognize our folly...

...To visit you at the White House would be wonderful," Jess wrote, and then offered to take him for a spin...

...some of those moms 'n' pops would have noticed earlier...

...Her mom, it should be said, has no regrets about her daughter's brief, experimental life...

...Clearly to pilot an airplane that you would be in would bring me even greater joy...

...Like that show's opening titles, where what's-his-name — the dwarf, the one who later committed suicide—tugs the sleeve of Ricardo Montalban and points up to the sky, Forrest and Katie cried, "Dee plane, dee plane...

...So they took off in April, because May would have been too late: Jess would have turned eight, and the flight would have been merely a flight, not a "historic first" And they flew out of Cheyenne in a blizzard because they had to make Massachusetts in time for the "Today" show...

...By Grant's standards, it was comparatively restrained in its offensiveness...

...Brown's fellow passengers had no celebrity to beat the drum for them as the president did for his friend, in a week of formal mourning and daily eulogies which would have been the envy of a long-reigning monarch...

...An even greater tragedy would be never to dream at all," the Rev...

...She'd dabbled in piano and trumpet and horse-riding, just as she'd dabbled in "flying" for the last four months of her life...

...I came like Water, and like Wind I go," wrote Edward Fitzgerald in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam...

...Today, reports of celebrity deaths are all exaggerations...