Priorities

A couple of famous people died. One was famous for his brilliant mind, who challenged accepted wisdom and changed the interpretation of texts, be they literature, art or thought. The other was famous for dressing up in tights.
Now don't get me wrong, its horribly sad when someone dies, especially someone who has a family, like Christopher Reeve. But the media are wetting themselves over his death, it was on the front page of the newspaper today, and it appears that the poor chap was famous for falling off his horse and becoming paralysed. They talk about courage, and strength of spirit, all of which I'm sure he possessed in piles, but they ignore the other stuff he also possessed in piles. Money.
You can bet that a painter who falls off his ladder and becomes similarly paralysed, but without the financial benefits of being Superman would take issue with the media wank about Reeve's courage in the face of adversity. I'm sure that with the ability to pay for round-the-clock nursing, to fix up your home for wheelchairs, to buy the best technology available for the physically impaired, and never having to worry about how your wife and kids are going to be fed certainly affects one's ability to remain strong and brave in the face of difficult circumstances.
I don't have a problem with the man himself, never did. I think its very sad what happened to him, and sad that he should die relatively young, especially given that he had a family.
The problem I have is with the media getting its pink frillies in a big knot and painting him as some sort of hero, when the guy had some serious resources at this disposal, while ignoring the real heroes.
Jacques Derrida is dead, and that barely gets a mention. Superman dies, and its on the front page of a newspaper across the other side of the world.
When Allen Ginsberg died a few years ago, it got a brief writeup in the international section of the same paper. Maybe about ten lines. Ginsberg was without a doubt one of the most important poets of the 20th century, for fucks sake, this is the man who wrote "Howl".

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix

He wrote "America"

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.

OK, so now I'm having a "Ginsberg was The Man" moment, but I'm hoping you see my point.
We're far more interested in the death of a famous-ish actor, who leaves behind some comic-book movies, than in the death of a philosopher who challenged the way we think and read, by inventing deconstructionism, without which we would not have half the films/books/architecture/poetry/philosophy we have now.
Rest in peace, Professor Derrida.

And Ginsberg was so The Man.

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after nightwith dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo

Read it out loud. No, do, its supposed to be heard, theres all sorts of alliteration and consonance and assonance that you miss when reading.
How very deconstructionist!