I usually don’t engage with the news of celebrity deaths. Sure, it’s often sad or in the case of Rob and Michele Singer Reiner, tragic, but I have so little engagement with TV and movies that there’s just so little attachment to begin with even as millions of the living leave this mortal coil daily. Are the Reiner’s any different? Nevertheless, Rob Reiner represents a slight departure for that practice. Over the past couple of years, Rob bombed Twitter/X with the full weight of TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome, on an intermittent basis. He was on, he left, he came back but always the same message, unhinged rhetoric against Trump. I was vaguely aware that he was a TV personality and had done some movie work. I later learned that some of those movies, are ones I enjoyed back in the day. My broad assessment of Rob up to that point was that he may have done some fine work in his field but like the rest of Hollywood, they would have been better to shut up and keep to their day job. Fat chance. Since learning of his tragic murder just days ago, I decided to glimpse behind the curtain and see what others thought of him and the tragedy. And I did learn a few things. This isn’t really about Ron Reiner personally or strictly about how he died. The context of his life, career, and family offer something more sober and deeper than just the gushing admiration of his peers or the taunts of those that criticized his TDS and progressive outlook.
Donald Trump took the occasion to blame his death on TDS although the exact quote is marginally more circumspect than that, nevertheless, it was very ill-considered to say it and not befitting his Presidency. Sometimes it’s better to say nothing. Maybe he realizes that already, I don’t know; he certainly knows he’s not above making mistakes. Given that my primary exposure to Reiner was through his TDS on X, I wondered if there could have been any true connection there. To be clear, Reiner’s TDS was the real and serious variety, and as I learned through other’s closer observations, it did indeed alter his work and perception of other areas of his life. He had a vile and deep personal hatred of Donald Trump. One writer suggested that it was a fatal distraction from his family and yet he was far more engaged with the live-in son than most any of us are or would be, or maybe should be. What I learned suggests that Rob was indeed absorbed into non-family pursuits in a way that had to have influenced the outcome here, his own murder, but it wasn’t the TDS.
Rob Reiner had a whole separate career in governmental activism preceding and apart from hating Donald Trump. It involved a multi-billion-dollar shakedown of tobacco companies and funneling the proceeds of those efforts into preschool children’s health and other programs. He functioned as a one-man NGO in the state of California and nationally, a czar wielding enormous power and influence. He had leveraged this out of his successes in the entertainment industry. While promoting the welfare of young children is something I surely could get behind, I can’t say for sure if the programs he promoted were honest helps or if they included flaws of a woke variety, but I’ll give him the benefit of a doubt here. On top of the entertainment successes came the activism and from that he became an ‘it’ guy in the progressive political world. From that emerged the rubbing elbows with all of the illuminati of left of center power, not just an attaboy here and there but almost daily interactions. Lastly, on top of that, came the TDS.
The entertainment world lives the assumption that all the zillions of us minions out here, all relish their work, their lives and opinions. From that false understanding comes the assumption that we all crave their opinion and thus they’re constantly pushing them onto us and expecting us to worship those outlooks and them with some sense of final authority. To further self-affirm themselves, they slobber all over each other in a gushing way. Fact of the matter is that Ron Reiner’s entertainment work is not all that important to me much less his activism and certainly not his political opinions. It’s not just him, it’s the whole damn industry. I used to watch movies but its hardly worth my time anymore. Comedy? Could care less. TV, uggh, no. The point here is that the only part of Rob Reiner I really saw was what could arguably be called the culmination of career, his TDS. Everything else was just ‘fame’, an idol for which I’m pretty sure I’m immune.
Rob reportedly loved his son so much that he went far above and beyond what any of us ever could or would do to try to save him, but we can’t ignore how he got there. Anyone’s child could go off the rails and if drugs are involved (even legal clinical drugs), all bets are off. But the children of fame, notoriety, and wealth, and all the above, are far more vulnerable. In the case of Nick Reiner, the die was cast decades ago. Life got busy, fame was to be had and enjoyed. Some of this countries’ most important people are calling, the world needs saving, how can they be denied? Sure Rob loved his son Nick, that’s obvious reading the details. Trying to get him into the next rehab, taking him to a party loaded with dozens, maybe hundreds of famous wealthy people; at that point reality was meeting desperation. What is clear is that it was desperation based in self-deception and denial.
TDS is certainly destroying peoples lives, it’s basically now a recognized psychological disorder. In the case of Rob Reiner, it was not the cause of the family tragedy, it was the effect, a common effect from the root of fame and all the attendant ruin that curses so many that it touches. In Rob’s case, it was compounded and leveraged into something even bigger. Rob Reiner is not around to experience the infamy that is now written into new history and it’s not my place to judge what he does experience now. I just know that I’ve observed an example of how not to live, or die.
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