Anna Nicole Smith: 1967-2007

When I heard that Anna Nicole Smith had died, and that people on the news were comparing her to Marilyn Monroe, I couldn't help but think of what Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

That's really it, isn't it? Marilyn Monroe was the tragedy. Anna Nicole Smith was the farce. It's hard, though, to turn on the news and look at the photo of Anna Nicole with her son and newborn baby and realize that two of the three people in that photo would be dead within six months. Then you think about the little girl she left behind -- and that's when the farce turns back into a tragedy.

Tom Moran