"The national custom to sentimentalize the dead"

I'm watching all the Ted Kennedy stuff like everybody else, trying to swallow as many of the tributes as I can get down, as we all do during such ritual outpourings. (Remember when Reagan died? My God, you'd have thought he was Tim Russert!)

I'm willing to believe Kennedy was a really nice guy, a charming colleague and an effective legislative negotiator. And there were several times during his career when I wanted to stand up and cheer at his sturdy and sometimes lonely defense of what seemed to me to be commonsense bedrock liberal positions.

But Kennedy aside—during these slobberfests, I can never help but devilishly wish we still had an H.L. Mencken around—Bill Maher doesn't cut it—who dared to write an obituary like this one, published immediately upon the death of William Jennings Bryan in 1925:

Did he accomplish any useful thing? Was he, in his day, of any dignity as a man, and of any value to his fellow-men? I doubt it. ...

Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe ... that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.

The job before democracy is to get rid of such canaille. If it fails, they will devour it.

In his obit, Mencken acknowledged that it is "the national custom to sentimentalize the dead." But it's also our personal obligation to keep it real.

Comments

[Diane]

Sounds like Mencken describing himself.

[David Murray]

Not a fan, Diane? Keep in mind, Mencken had just covered the Scopes Monkey Trial, Bryan's prosecution of a teacher for teaching evolution in Tennessee.

[Kristen]

We don't allow this sort of thing anymore. If Mencken wrote this about someone today, the only place it would be published is on TMZ, or his own blog. And we would all disdain it as sour grapes, no matter how true it might be.

It is interesting though, this instinct to say nice things about someone just because he or she is dead. In many cases I have found that these glowing, heartfelt obits tend to not match the reality of some people I've known, and are even at odds in some cases with the previously stated feelings of the people writing/delivering said obits!

[David Murray]

Yes, you're right, Kristen. But I have a complex relationship with these kinds of tributes, because I think we all ought to focus on the best of each other and try to ignore the worst IN LIFE as well as in death.

Half the problem is that we glorify people--everybody from public figures to family members--in death.

The other half is that we pick their nits all the time in life, wishing they could be that, wondering why they're not capable of this.

Then they die and we naturally list all the things they were, and we smack our heads and say: Shit, that wasn't bad.

Unless, of course, we're Mary Jo Kopechne.

[Steve C.]

>>>>I think we all ought to focus on the best of each other and try to ignore the worst IN LIFE as well as in death.<<<<

DAVID!!!! Quick . . . someone has appropriated your computer and is posting lies and pretending to be you!!! I think it's your wife!!!

Steve C.

[Kristen]

Steve: you didn't read all the way to the end! That last line in his comment was pure David Murray, even if it was a bit more low-key than the usual curmudgeonliness.

Besides - Cristie has a REAL job - what does she care about all us self-important "writers" and our petty concerns?! Like she has the time or the inclination to sneak onto David's computer!

[Eileen B.]

Of course the Onion kind of got it right. http://www.theonion.com/content/from_print/kennedy_curse_claims_life_of