I'm not the greatest Whitney Houston fan in the world. I don't own any of her songs. I have a few videos of her in my music video collection, but that's because of the historical significance of the videos. Just like I cringe when I hear that Titanic song, when I hear Whitney sing I Will Always Love You I get crazy mad. In the first few hours of hearing about Houston's death, I said she went out “like a diva.” C'mon, her life and death is so Hollywood that if you put it to a script it would be rejected by every studio as being to cliché. And to think, she dies a day before the Grammy Awards, at a famous hotel, in a bathtub hours before a party by her musical mentor is to begin, and the party goes on. That is over the top melodrama on the order of Douglas Sirk!

Having that with her meteoric rise and fall, the relationship with Bobby Brown, the 'crack is whack' statement, the drug use, the stumbling comeback, yes her death under the circumstances was bound to bring out the ghoulish comments and the endless speculations. What I honestly didn't expect to happen was the crazy talk I have been hearing the past few days, and it is surprising to think it has been less than a week since she has died. It was somewhat of a surprise, a good surprise I might add, that Lawrence O'Donnell and Chris Hayes had rather moving segments on their shows about Houston. The coverage on Houston was very close to the coverage I remember on the death of John Kennedy Jr or Princess Diana. There had been rumors of bad behavior, of questionable circumstances about the death of Kennedy Jr and Princess Diana, but in the end a majority of people, especially the people who admired those two, thought about the good they did and didn't dwell on the pain in their lives. It did take time, because those who wanted 15 minutes of fame dug up every hateful and questionable action to bring attention to themselves and not the person who died. Anyone who had a beef or wanted to profit off of the death of Diana or Kennedy Jr was given a platform by someone in the media. It didn't seem to matter, in the case of Kennedy Jr, you had a family that was mourning the loss of a promising family member. He was a Kennedy, we was as close as Americans got to having a royal family, and to speak of him in scandal ridden terms was just par for the course. Every chef, ex-lover and hanger on came out to speak of the dirty laundry between Diana and her husband. It didn't matter that she had two small children that were grieving for the loss of their mother. Diana's death was a meal ticket, a shot at a few minutes of fame for some.

What is happening right now with Whitney Houston is the same thing that happened with Diana, Kennedy Jr and others who live in the spotlight. There are those like Nancy Grace and Bill O'Reilly that will pick at her barely cold corpse to get attached to the tragedy. Anyone who had passing contact with Whitney Houston in the days leading up to her death are trolling the infotainment shows to latch on. People that haven't talked to the singer in decades are being asked to comment. Just a few hours before writing this I learned two radio hosts from Los Angeles, who have had a long history of saying knee jerk (emphasis on jerk) comments about immigration, race relations and other controversial subjects, were suspended for ten days because on air they called Houston and crack ho and said her death was 20 years in the making. They didn't say what they said because of any concern about the family, or bringing awareness to addiction, or even as some cautionary tale to those who may be suffering from addiction. They made the jerk comments for ratings.

The most astonishing event I have seen in the wake of Houston's death has been this YouTube inspired (and I'll reface it by saying I have only seen this on YouTube but not in print by any reputable news agency) conspiracy alleging not only was Houston killed, but she was killed as some sort of balance of nature pact because of Jay-Z, Beyonce and their new baby. According to the speculation, for their baby to take her 'rightful' place in the musical firmament Houston had to be sacrificed. Yes, it sounds like something out of breeding program in the book Dune.

The point I'm trying to make is there are going to be a lot of people making stupid statements in the next few weeks because of the tragedy of the death of Whitney Houston. Her story was something that was straight melodrama, worth of the term diva, and people will speculate, conjecture and will try to rip their own fame from the tragedy.