Shudder, Shudder

Losing Rob Reiner

Well, howl. I didn’t want to write about Rob Reiner and I was trying to wait out the sense that I should. But here I am. What can I say but that we’re in a Greek tragedy. These things, that happen in the news, but in our lives, happen to our psyches, and we suffer the sad ones. So often the big story is about what happened to a blond girl, but this hits differently. Rob Reiner was someone we felt we knew. We watched him grow up from young adulthood, and we grew up with him. He seemed to be entirely himself when a camera was on him so your brain slightly registers him as a guy you know.

He was always youngish in my imagination; not so young as Meathead, but Spinal Tap Rob Reiner, director of his string of magical movies age Rob Reiner. But to be killed by one’s son makes one forever a father figure. And to see a father figure destroyed hurts.

A nation with a tyrant in charge is going to feel a loss like this one.

Both symbolically and really, this sucks: Symbolically Archie Bunker’s in charge and really, we have to take in that dear Meathead met with a violent end.

Just like what happened to America, it came from inside the house. Unbearable. The instinct is always to think danger comes from outside, from the stranger at the gate, but it’s not so.

That Reiner was such a phenomenal fighter for progressive issues also makes this all hit to the gut. It’s another way we’ve lost a protector.

There’s the mother killed too. I can barely bear to think about it. The anguish of the other two siblings.

The images of a mansion and now we know what chaos it contained. Chaos unrestrained.

It’s not nothing that history has put into our imaginations a bloody scene of horrible proportions.

What’s the point in me talking this through? In a sense it’s just a way of sitting with this pain with you. Because it’s a Greek tragedy, but the gods aren’t coming.