By Steve Janoski
“Crack is cheap…I make too much money to ever smoke crack.”
Yes, we all remember what Whitney Houston said in her now-infamous 2002 TV interview with Diane Sawyer.
At that time, there was suspicion about the famous singer’s drug abuse, but over the years, her battles with drug-addiction became well-chronicled, and many people (such as me) suspect that her demise two weeks ago had everything to do with it.
But in New Jersey, stuff like that doesn’t matter, especially to Governor Chris Christie, who officially decreed last Friday that, by executive order, the American flag would be lowered to half-staff in commemoration of the Newark native’s mysterious death.
Christie has come under intense criticism for this, but, according to Suburban Trends’ sister paper The Record, he’s defended his position by saying that Houston was a “cultural icon” that belongs in the same category in NJ music history as Frank Sinatra or Bruce Springsteen.
Her accomplishments, he said, are “a great source of pride for the people of the state.”
He did the same thing when Bruce Springsteen’s saxophone player Clarence Clemons died last June, but that move didn’t generate the same fire, perhaps because Clemons was never known for the erratic behavior and drug abuse that Houston became synonymous with over the past decade.
Now, it’s possible that ole’ Chris has some sort of affinity for Houston’s music — maybe one of her songs was his wedding song, or he just enjoys karaoke-ing to “I Wanna’ Dance With Somebody” at his neighborhood bar on a Saturday night.
But regardless of where his love for Whitney comes from, the fact that he doesn’t understand that lowering the flag for a musician — any musician at all — cheapens and degrades the significance of that momentous accolade, is a shame.
The American flag is no mere piece of rag — it is the emblem of a nation born out of the greatest ideas of the Age of Enlightenment and forged in the furnaces of war. Every piece of it drips in symbolism, and for many a man over the course of the past 250 years, that fluttering banner was the last thing they saw before their lives escaped them.
To lower that flag to half-mast is to say that collectively, this nation is giving a heartfelt tipping of the hat, a fond adieu, to one of its greatest citizens, to someone who idealizes what it means to be an American.
It’s an honor that is nearly unparalleled, and should be reserved for soldiers, cops, and former or current politicians who gave either their lives, or a part of them, in the service of this country and its people.
The flag is not a toy or prop to be lowered every time someone with a modicum of talent passes away, especially when that someone was a drug-addled diva that set the worst possible example for those who admired her, and appears to have squandered whatever talent she had left before departing in true celebrity fashion — alone in a hotel room amongst bottles of prescription drugs.
To treat it as such is to do the greatest of disservices to those brave men and women that have, as Lincoln said, “laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.”
And personally, I would rather see that flag stay at half-mast until every single World War II veteran is dead than ever see it lowered again for someone like Whitney Houston.
Email: janoski@northjersey.com
http://www.northjersey.com/news/140104843_Lowering_the_flag_for_Houston__We_have_a_problem___.html
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