The Night Whitney Houston Died

On Superbowl Massacres and American Dreams

Whitney Houston drowned in a Beverly Hills bathtub on February 11, 2012. She was 48 years old.

If you were of a certain generation — the generation dutifully lined up on an elementary school stage and made to sing “The Greatest Love of All” because we were The Children People Believed Were the Future — the news seemed impossible.

Whitney was of a pantheon of 1980s artists — Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince — who felt both eternal and synonymous with America. They made America feel eternal to Reagan babies, even as it crumbled before our eyes.

I was not a big Whitney fan. She was too ubiquitous in my childhood humiliations: the soundtrack of my orthodontist and awkward mall dressing rooms and dreaded school concerts.

But I loved her like you love the sky or the stars or democracy or anything you take for granted until it is gone. I loved her like a child.

When I realized decades later that “The Greatest Love of All” was a song telling people to back off because you were going to live by your own rules and retain your pride, even if it made everyone mad, even if it meant you had no heroes, even if it was a lonely place to be, I loved her more. Whitney was a subversive masked by vibraphones.

The night Whitney Houston died, I was on Twitter. Westerners calling themselves “digital activists” were lecturing Americans to pay attention to foreign dissidents instead of a dead American celebrity.

But it turned out that the dissidents were busy grieving Whitney Houston. In 2012, I was doing dissertation research on exiled rebels from Uzbekistan. I went into their chat rooms to see what they were discussing.

“Uitni Xyuston vafot etgan!” the Uzbek revolutionaries wailed. Whitney Houston was dead! They couldn’t believe it either.

Their sadness made sense to me. How do you not cry over a voice like that? How do you not sit in disbelief that she will never sing again?

February 11 is locked in my mind as The Night Whitney Houston Died. Or it was, until this week.

Now February 11 is The Night of the Superbowl Massacre. Another night I spent on Twitter, slammed with gruesome incongruity and a horror deeper than anything I had envisioned twelve years ago.

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I don’t watch the Superbowl because I don’t care about football. This is not a judgment: I don’t care if you like football. My husband likes football. For twenty years I listened to his yells and cheers as I hid upstairs, watching Desperate Housewives or whatever counterprogramming network execs had selected for me like the cliché I was. Those were simpler times.

Network TV is gone now, so after my own attempt at clichéd chick counterprogramming — Fried Green Tomatoes; it holds up — I went to Twitter.

I went with dread, because I knew this was the real counterprograming. And how evil and depraved it was that they timed it this way.

For weeks, the Israeli military had been forcing the population of Gaza south, after destroying the north and killing over 28,000 Palestinian civilians, including over 14,000 children. This is a conservative estimate, since much of the population is starving to death or buried under buildings. For months, Palestinians have lacked clean water and food because Israel blocks delivery. They lack hospitals because Israel bombed them. They lack accurate data because Israel murdered the journalists and doctors who kept track of the dead.

It is a horror show unlike any I have seen, made more horrifying because my government funds it.

By February 11, over a million Palestinians were trapped in Rafah, a city near the Egyptian border. There was nowhere left for them to go.

For days, the world watched their journey to the end of the line. The US government armed Israel with weapons while uttering tepid criticism of war crimes so hypocritical it would have been better, maybe, for them to stay silent, out of respect to the dead.

Out of respect to the murdered.

*          *          *

February 11 was Superbowl Sunday. If you went on Twitter, your timeline might look something like this: A dead and mutilated Palestinian child hangs from a door like a slab of freshly slaughtered human meat. The Kansas City Chiefs tie the game with a field goal. A new orphan weeps in the road after her mother is shot dead. The tension mounts as the game moves to overtime. A Palestinian boy begs for the killing to stop. An American crowd cheers as the football game comes to a close. Three dead babies lie on a table as witnesses scream in terror. Taylor and Travis sing “You Belong with Me” at the after party as fans scream in delight.

The hashtag #SuperBowlMassacre starts to trend, and people learn why.

Americans who had been glued to their television sets come online to see what they missed, and discover it was this — unless the images are blocked for either being so graphic that they violated Twitter rules or so graphic that they violated international law.

Either way, Americans were not supposed to care. The only people who were supposed to matter were the two Israeli hostages freed that night — a wonderful development, but one that was hard to celebrate in the midst of mass slaughter in Rafah. We were not supposed to cry for the scores of dead and injured Palestinians.

But how can you not? How can you not?

Before the Super Bowl, there was a deranged right-wing conspiracy theory alleging that Biden, Taylor Swift, and Travis Kelce were engaged in a plot to sway the election. It was so stupid that I half-wondered if the Democrats had cooked it up, because if I were abetting genocide, I’d much rather people think I was rigging an election with Taylor Swift.

After the game and the mass murder in Rafah, Biden’s Twitter account posted a picture of Biden with glowing red eyes and the phrase “Just like we drew it up.”

This is the “Dark Brandon” meme meant to convey that Biden is not a president so weak he won’t even punish an attempted coup against himself, but an evil mastermind, like MAGA believes. “Dark Brandon” was meant as a joke to highlight Biden’s mild-mannered demeanor, a joke that becomes less convincing the more murder Biden funds.

When I was seven, my favorite book was A Wrinkle in Time. The cover had a picture of The Man with the Red Eyes: a demonic bureaucrat who hypnotizes people and kills children. This picture scared me so much that my mother drew a picture of Mickey Mouse and taped it on top, so I wouldn’t have to see his face.

I wonder if Palestinian children imagine Biden this way.

*          *          *         

The only time I watched the Superbowl was when I was twelve. The Gulf War had started ten days before, and nervous Americans waved giant flags in the stands. It was 1991, and this was my first war.

My mother told me that the US had learned the lessons of Vietnam, and we would not get sucked into a pointless quagmire war again. This was a common belief among boomers, one that tormented them later in the 21^st century, when their children were sent to fight their own pointless wars.

I was afraid of the Gulf War. I did not trust that it would end because I was in seventh grade, and in seventh grade everything bad seems to last forever.

When I was twelve, my favorite book was The Stand, an apocalypse tale about everything bad lasting forever. On the school bus, one of my bullies — convinced the SK embossed in the corner of the hardcover were my initials, not Stephen King’s, and that I was some arrogant asshole who stamped my name on books — grabbed my copy and beat me over the head with it, and all I could think of was Why didn’t I get the abridged version?! It was paperback!

I settled on the couch on Superbowl Sunday with my parents and sister, none of us except my father particularly interested. But I did not feel much like being alone, even if it meant watching football.

And then Whitney Houston appeared, jubilant in a white track suit and matching headband, and started to sing.

The Whitney Houston version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” is legendary for good reason. It is the standard by which all past and future versions are measured: a virtuoso display of technique and raw power. You are pulled into patriotism by its gorgeous fury. You want to be from the same country as Whitney Houston. You want to be an American and you want America to win — for the duration of the song, at least, before you think about it too hard.

But you also want Whitney Houston to win, and that’s why I loved watching her. She knew she was the best. You can see it on her face, particularly at the end: the gleam in her eye, the swagger in her smile. I loved that she knew she was the best and she did not care that we knew she knew it. We should know it. We should be in awe.

I did not understand yet the magnitude of a Black woman becoming the master and holding all of America in her sway. The national anthem was sung in the service of the military-industrial complex, a machine using Houston. But Houston was so good, it felt like she was using them.

Everything — the game, the war — was just a backdrop to Houston’s gift.

The passion of her performance was no act, though the fairy tale version of her life was. The dichotomy of Whitney Houston, that secret darkness, makes her version all the more quintessentially American of a song.

The Whitney Houston marketed as an obedient American Princess was never real. She was brash and opinionated and funny. She was an addict who struggled with her sexuality and lived an anguished life of abuse. Her death, after years of public struggle, was shocking but not surprising.

I cried when Whitney Houston died: a full-throated sob that startled me. I was grieving my childhood, but I was also grieving the future. All the possibility in Houston’s voice. All the ways that feeling had been weaponized and squandered.

Her triumphant Superbowl smile: how proud she was, how proud we all were, for a few minutes, to be Americans.

*          *          *

The silence is deafening.

I don’t know if most Americans know what happened in Gaza while they were watching the Superbowl. I do not know if they are aware that their tax dollars are funding genocide, because they were fed propaganda through Israeli Superbowl ads and are fed silence the rest of the time.

Many Americans have checked out of politics altogether. There have been too many tragedies in too short a time. If they are aware of the war crimes, they may find them too much to bear. It feels like a prelude to a broader crisis, even though many of its atrocities are already unprecedented: the Israeli Tik-Tok war crime stream; their ceaseless targeting of children.

The tactics are unprecedented, but the grotesque showmanship feels like a culmination of the seed planted in 1991.

The Gulf War was the first American war marketed as round the clock entertainment. Cable news was novel. CNN made its mark by showing the rockets red glare and the bombs bursting in air. The lyrics were terrifying when you saw them in real time.

I was horrified that it was possible to watch a war on television and that it was presented as an action movie. Every time a bomb dropped, I asked my mom if it killed someone, and if they were going to show us who. I could not grasp why this information was not seen as important.

I wondered what was happening to my counterparts: Iraqis in seventh grade, wondering if everything bad would last forever. Kids enduring horrors worse than anything I had conceived, much less survived, and my country was the cause of it.

The United Nations deemed the damage the US did to Iraq in 1991 “near-apocalyptic”, with an estimated 3000 Iraqi civilians killed. That damage does not come close to what Israel has done to Gaza since October 2023. To compare the conflicts is to watch a warp-speed erosion of morality.

In 1991, US newscasters hid what Iraqi civilians endured. In 2024, Israelis flaunt it, with their own civilians blocking Palestinians from receiving humanitarian aid. They do it with impunity. American officials either back them or withhold their critiques for fear of pushback.

I have never seen a war like this, because I have never seen constant cruelty displayed like this in my lifetime. Wars are of course by nature cruel, but in the past, war criminals feared discovery. They worried about repercussions and retribution.

There were universal taboos. The biggest taboo was to kill a child.

I want to believe that child murder is still something universally reviled. But Israel — and the complacent reaction to Israel by Western nations — is trying to destroy that innate revulsion. I do not know with what warped pretense of morality they intend to replace it. But the idea that 14,000 dead children are not supposed to matter terrifies me.

There are two Superbowl images forever in my mind: Whitney’s proud smile, and the corpse of a Palestinian child hung from a door.

*          *          *

On February 11, 2012, Whitney Houston died, and a little bit of America died with her. This happens whenever an icon passes, but we have the comfort of collective mourning and eternal song. Good things can last forever too.

On February 11, 2024, scores of Palestinians died on the American dime, and a little bit of America died with them. Because we do not mourn them, just like we do not mourn most of the travesties our government carries out here and abroad.

We rarely even mourn our fellow Americans, these days, even though everyone deserves someone to grieve them. The part of America that they are trying to kill is our innate humanity.

There is a good America hidden in the hell our government brings upon ourselves and others. But for that America to be heard, our voice needs to be loud. It needs to sing with bravado, with a patriotism born of values, not of obedience — especially not to a foreign land.

Belt out your condemnation of this inhumane war without apology, with soul and rhythm straight from your broken heart — loud and proud, the American way.

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Whitney wins the Superbowl, January 1991

The Man with the Red Eyes