Speaking Ill of the Dead

Posted by Kathy G, The G-Spot at 7:39 AM on July 7, 2008.

I've noticed that a few (though fortunately not too many) bloggers have refrained from commenting on the death of Jesse Helms, on the grounds that they "don't want to speak ill of the dead." I find this reluctance to be genuinely puzzling. Obviously, just on the basis of Miss Manners 101, if you know someone personally who has recently lost a loved one, you're not going to go up to them and start railing about what a complete and utter wanker the deceased was. I mean, hardly anyone is big enough of an asshole to do that, are they?

But public figures are public figures, and their legacies are fair game. Their deaths most certainly do not sanctify them, nor does it cleanse their public records of their damnable spots. When a truly wretched excuse for a human being like Jesse Helms shuffles off this mortal coil, it's a huge mistake to stay silent, because if you do, that means that only his friends and admirers will be writing his obituaries.  They will then proceed to whitewash his ugly history and shape narratives about the man's past and legacy that are both highly flattering, and extremely useful to, the conservative movement.

I've heard the argument that by speaking ill of the dead, you cause pain to the deceased's survivors. But anyone who makes the choice to enter public life knows that all manner of criticism and attacks come with the territory. Their friends and family damn well ought to understand that too. Just because their loved one dies it doesn't make him or her suddenly untouchable.

Understand, though, that by no means am I that saying it's okay to wish that a living person is dead, or to publicly call for the death of a living person. That kind of talk should be out of bounds.

But the idea that you're not allowed to speak ill of public figures who are dead is the sign of a deeply dysfunctional political culture. It's the symptom of culture that abhors conflict and shies away from honest and robust debate. It is a symptom of a culture that won't grow the fuck up and grapple with the fact human life is complex and that human creatures -- even, not infrequently, the most respectable and powerful among them -- can be quite monstrous. It is a symptom, above all, of a culture that can't handle the truth.

But making nice and sanitizing conflict doesn't make it go away. Indeed, driving such conflicts underground frequently only serve to make them deeper, more powerful, and more bitter.

Lately, I've given quite a bit of thought to the sickly sweet coat of false sentimentality one frequently finds in the media coverage of the deaths of Important People. One reason is that I'm guiltily aware that I personally fell down on the job, when the death of Tim Russert occurred. At the time, I thought about writing what I truly thought about Russert --that he was a shameless suck up to the rich and powerful, and that, through his work as a journalist and pundit, he was one of the key figures responsible for the trivialization of American political discourse that has occurred over the past several decades. His coverage of Hillary Clinton was unforgivably insulting and sexist. He died with blood on his hands for his role in beating the drums for the Iraq War. All in all, the man was a powerful ally to the conservative movement in this country -- that same movement that has driven this country into the ditch. In short, to paraphrase Jon Stewart, I believe that Tim Russert hurt America.

But I ended up never saying any of those things -- though I wanted to. Why? One reason is that, as I've written before, last year I suffered the loss of several people who were close to me. The sudden and unexpected death of a loved one  really is hell to go through, and memories of my own losses from last year are still so almost viscerally painful that I shied away from writing anything that might, in some small way, increase the pain of the bereaved. The other reason I didn't write frankly about Russert is a lot less noble-- I didn't want conservatives or the mainstream media to cite my writings as an example of those angry, ill-mannered, heartless left-wing bloggers and the mean and hurtful things that they say.

So yeah, I wimped out. And I now regret it. It was the wrong thing to do. About Russert, let me be clear -- pretty much everyone who knew him personally said he was a lovely man, and I have no reason to doubt it. But I didn't know him personally and cannot judge him on that basis. The only criteria I have to judge him by are his public acts and statements, and on that basis, I believe he was a pernicious influence on American public life. Not nearly to the extent that Helms was, of course, but still -- in terms of his public life, the man did an awful lot of harm, and precious little good.

It is a puzzle that America, the cradle of modern democracy, so often refrains from the full and robust airing of our differences that democracy would seem to encourage -- indeed, to require. Perhaps the greatest historical example of this was the fact that, for many years, this country had a gag rule that prohibited

the discussion of slavery in the U.S. Congress. Though that rule may have (just barely) succeeded in papering over the conflict, for a time at least, ultimately of course it did this country no good. All it did was postpone the ultimate day of reckoning, and make it bloodier and more bitter than it was already going to be.

Political conflicts also tended to be successfully suppressed during the years following World War II, an era that has been lauded for its "bipartisan consensus." But once again, burying the conflicts on race, sex, and other subjects only served to make them all the more powerful when they finally erupted in the 1960s.

Perhaps the single most dearly held credo of the powerful political and media elites who control public policy and public discourse in America is that Americans can't survive open political conflict. We couldn't impeach Ronald Reagan's sorry ass for Iran-contra, because Americans somehow couldn't "handle" another "failed presidency." That's the same reason, I suppose, why we can't impeach Bush, Cheney, & co. either, or hold them criminally liable for their misdeeds. And remember the Florida recount? There was enormous pressure on the part of elites to get Al Gore to concede as soon as possible, because America supposedly wasn't capable of simply waiting for every vote to be counted before declaring the winner of the 2000 election. But the reality was, America seemed content to wait it out, and the uncertainty didn't appear to inflict any damage on us whatsoever.

On the one hand, you have this American tradition where elites cling to this weirdly paternalistic, conflict-averse notions of politics, and where they do their level best to discourage robust debate and to whitewash unpleasant truths. On the other hand, you have, say, the Brits. Can you imagine the U.S. having a tradition analogous to Prime Minister's Questions, where members of Parliament directly interrogate the Prime Minister, frequently with questions that tend to be quite pointed, if not rude?

Or -- getting back to the subject at hand -- how the grand tradition of the warts-and-all British obituary?  British obits, bless 'em, tend to lack the sentimental, prettied up glaze of the American versions. They're not only far more grown-up and honest than the American variety, but they're vastly more entertaining as well. For example, just read some of these choice excerpts from the remarkable Jesse Helms obituary that ran in Britain's The Guardian:

Senator Jesse Helms, member of the US Senate's foreign relations committee for two decades and its chairman from 1995 to 2001, has died at the age of 86. To echo this newspaper's memorable comment on the death of William Randolph Hearst, it is hard even now to think of him with charity. From his earliest years, Helms's attitudes recalled those of an earlier southern bigot, Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, who so outraged his Senate colleagues, that they eventually refused even to

let him take his seat.

[. . .]

His allegations were often mind-numbingly bizarre. "Your tax dollars are being used," he claimed in one letter, "to pay for grade school classes that teach our children that cannibalism, wife-swapping, and the murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behaviour." But his rhetoric convinced millions of Americans and, invited to save the nation by donating a dollar, they did just that. A river of cash poured into the club.

What happened to it all remained a constant mystery and, as the rules on election finances were slowly tightened, the club's accounts grew ever fuzzier. Some cash certainly went to the Coalition of Freedom, which had Helms as its honorary chairman until federal tax authorities began investigating its illegal campaign activities.

What is beyond question is the malign impact of Helms's innovation on all subsequent American politics. He inaugurated the age of massive back-door political donations, now euphemistically known as "soft money". In his own 1984 re-election battle, he spent $16.5m, then the most expensive Senate campaign in American history (and the federal election commission twice penalised him for using illegal contributions). Sixteen years later, a New Jersey candidate would lavish $60m on gaining a Senate seat, making it evident how effectively Helms's initiative had opened political office to the highest bidder.

[. . .]

For all his political posturing, however, Helms repeatedly showed himself inept at the tedious business of shepherding legislation through Congress.

The Senate's tradition of choosing committee chairmen by seniority eventually brought him to head the agriculture committee (1981-87). It should have been an enviable chance to promote North Carolina's farming and tobacco interests, which employ half its people. Yet the state, ranked eleventh by population, had one of the nation's highest poverty rates and lowest levels of federal funding.

Helms contributed his share to this misery with his ownership of rented houses in poor black districts of Raleigh. Some tenants reported that his properties had been without adequate heating for 30 years. The city's building inspectors repeatedly issued summonses against Helms to remedy a wide range of dilapidations, from rotting floors to leaking pipes.

[. . .]

This sudden loss of power, allied to his failing health, at last convinced Helms that it was time to give up. In August that year, he announced he would not run again when his term expired in 2002.

Though

there was dismay in North Carolina, his decision was greeted with relief by most of the country. The New York Times observed: "Few senators in the modern era have done more to resist the tide of progress," and Robert Pastor, whose ambassadorship to Panama was scuppered by Helms in 1995, commented that, "nothing Jesse Helms did in his entire career will enhance America's national security more than his retirement."

Compare and contrast that with the stunningly anodyne, mealy-mouthed New York Times obituary. Why oh why should I have to read a bloody foreign newspaper to learn the truth about my country and its history?

A friend of mine from back in my Brooklyn days, Steve Miller used to run Goodbye!, a zine and online website that consisted of obituaries à l'anglaise. Their motto was "Because the dead can't sue for libel." It was terrific. Alas, it stopped publishing in 2002, when Steve was hired to write obits for the New York Sun. And although he's still the best American obituarist in the business, I'm afraid that working for a mainstream publication has cramped his style. The obits he did for his own publication were franker, and more fun.

I'll say one more thing about why I believe that the "don't speak ill of the dead" rule is a crock. Last year, my family suffered the devastating loss of my 7-year old niece Allison. She had been perfectly healthy (so far as anyone knew) and she died suddenly in her sleep. Her death was by far the worst thing that ever happened to my family, and as I've said before, God help us if anything worse ever befalls us.

The day after her death, when our grief was still agonizingly raw and fresh, and our eyes had not yet stopped being red from crying, my mother said something profound. We were all talking about how much we adored Allison. We told stories about her caring and affectionate nature, her generosity, her wicked sense of humor -- in short, all the things we loved about her. At some point, though, my mother said, "It's important that we don't turn her into Saint Allison."

She was saying this, she explained, for the sake of Allison's 10-year old sister, Kristen (who wasn't in the room at the time). Kristen adored her sister, just like the rest of us did. But Kristen was perhaps even more aware than the rest of us of exactly what Allison's faults were. Allison, as we all knew, could be quite willful, demanding, and emotional (we'd nicknamed her "the drama queen."). As my mother put it, "Sometimes, that kid could be a real pain in the ass."

My mother thought it was important to talk about Allison's faults as well as her more lovable qualities. Above all, this was for the sake of Kristen. Though Kristen wasn't verbalizing it at the time, we all understood that the poor kid was most likely overwhelmed by guilt over her sister's death, and must be berating herself for every time she'd treated Allison unkindly, or had a hostile thought about her. And we wanted to make sure she knew, basically, that that was all right. Allison wasn't perfect. She could be difficult and she sorely tried our patience at times. Yes, even this angelically beautiful and completely lovable and adorable little girl had her faults, like everyone else. And it was perfectly okay if, during her lifetime, Kristen had not always been overflowing with sisterly love for her.

In short, we thought it was healthier, more honest, and far more humane to talk about warts-and-all Allison than about plaster-saint Allison.  That was the reality.  We are all fallen creatures after all, and to act  as if we're not is not only blasphemous, but puts an intolerable burden on we the living -- because it requires us to behave as if we're not human.

Now, getting back to Helms -- it could be said of him, too, that, like the rest of us, he wasn't perfect either. But why stop there? To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, there are times when it is not only a duty to speak one's mind -- it is a pleasure as well. Here's what I have to say about you, Jesse. You were an evil, hateful son of a bitch and  a miserable piece of shit. The world would have been far better off had you never been born.

I especially appreciated what two commenters on the gay gossip site, Datalounge, had to say about your death. One of them wrote that your death is important because it's:

a clear sign that his era is dying

fast. We'll be doing a lot better because of it.

A second commenter replied,

Word . . . These old haters are dying off and NO ONE is going to take their place. 

For the moment at least, that appears to be true. The conservative movement is in ruins, and I don't know of any conservative in the House or Senate who has the kind of power Helms was able to amass -- either the kind of legislative power he had to stop laws and bills dead in their tracks, or the political power he had to raise money and get like-minded reactionaries elected.

This November, I believe we will elect an African-American president. And within my lifetime, I trust that we'll see legal gay marriage in every state in the union. There are so many areas where America falls short, and we have a long, long way to go. But progress is being made, and the dwindling surviving relics of some of the ugliest tendencies in American life are dying off. For that we can be profoundly grateful.

Tagged as: death