Anna Nicole’s tabloid life getting tabloid funeral

Beside the raging and ongoing debate about whether it was the chicken or the egg that came first, there is now this one:

What came first, Anna Nicole Smith or the vitriolic culture vultures who crucified her?

I suppose it’s hard to cut the recently departed Smith any slack for her short but overly magnified life. She married a geezer and fought in court to get his money. She savored the celebrity existence. She posed for Playboy. She participated in a reality show. She was no Greta Garbo.

She willingly generated her own intense scrutiny. She turned the spotlight on herself. As far as the paparazzi, the tabloid reporters and the Internet gossip gurus are concerned, she was, and still is, fair game.

But just as she turned herself into a target, she also inspired the stockpiling of ammunition that the public aimed at her. When she died suddenly, the period of mourning lasted about 10 seconds, if that. Then the assault began.

The debate over which came first is now moot. The relevant fact is that she’s dead, and a party has apparently broken out on her grave.

The level of meanness in our current society isn’t exactly a news bulletin, but this is brutal. When someone like Anna Nicole Smith goes, with all her baggage and scandalous exploits, it says a lot more about the people who dump on her dead body than it does about the woman herself.

Video: Anna Nicole Smith Birkhead leaves Bahamas with Dannielynn May 1: In this exclusive video, Larry Birkhead boards an airplane in the Bahamas with his daughter, Dannielynn, in tow. Dannielynn can leave Bahamas Court: Birkhead can leave Bahamas with baby Anna Nicole's half-sister's tell-all book Birkhead talks to MSNBC Anna Nicole: Paternity solved Make room for Daddy Stern: 'I’m very disappointed'

She died Thursday after collapsing at a Hard Rock hotel in Hollywood, Fla. Only five months before that her 20-year-old son died in the Bahamas in what is believed to have been a drug-related incident.

Smith’s death came only a few days after a female astronaut put on a diaper and drove a few hundred miles to try and kidnap a romantic rival. Naturally, that story was met with all the dignity and sensitivity of a mud-wrestling contest. Certainly it was bizarre and worthy of a few wisecracks. But clearly the woman was sick and had some sort of breakdown. Yet the response in the media was the modern equivalent of stoning a mentally challenged person in the town square.

Now it’s Anna Nicole Smith. The message boards in the coming days will be filled by cretins offering their warped observations on her life, their juicy speculation about her death and their cyber high-fives to each other. When Romans fed Christians to the lions, they did so with more hesitation than some of the drooling louts who are piling on a deceased tabloid queen.

Again, she is responsible for much of it. When she chose to marry oil baron J. Howard Marshall II in 1994, she knew he was 89 years old. She knew this was not a May-December romance but a May-next December romance. She surely knew the term “gold-digger” might be uttered. She accepted those consequences when she married him.

She also had to understand that a career path that began in a strip club as a topless dancer and extended onto the pages of Playboy might be met with some derision.

This is not an apology for Anna Nicole. You reap what you sow. It’s more a lament about the avalanche of glee that occurs whenever someone in the public eye takes a fall.