This Week's Manufactured Controversy

Trey Smith

It seems like every week these days somebody gets in a snit about something and the complaint goes viral. This week's manufactured controversy concerns New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's decision to order state flags flown at half-staff to honor the late Whitney Houston, a New Jersey native. It turns out that some people think that it's not kosher to commemorate a black woman who, among others things, had a substance abuse problem.

As David Sirota points out, however, not every celebrity substance abuser has generated this level of controversy.

Of course, when singer Frank Sinatra died and New Jersey’s flags were flown at half-staff, this kind of outrage was nowhere to be found — despite the fact that Sinatra himself was a drug abuser (the drug in question being alcohol). Likewise, the outrage was nowhere to be found when Elvis Presley died of a drug overdose in 1977 and flags all over America were flown at half-staff. Indeed, as the Rockford Register Star’s Chuck Sweeney notes, that event prompted an order for “all city flags in Memphis (to be) lowered to half staff”; compelled former President Richard Nixon to “ask Americans to fly their flags at half staff in honor of Elvis”; and got then-President Jimmy Carter to issue a statement saying, “With Elvis, a part of our country has died.”

What, then, explains the difference? Why would there be a hostile reaction to the way New Jersey memorialized the drug-abusing Houston, when there was no such hostile reaction to the way the drug-abusing Sinatra and Presley were memorialized?

The answer, of course, is rooted, in part, in racist and sexist double standards.