I don’t want to make someone’s untimely death all about me, but it’s been a rough 24 hours. Mainly because I’ve had to listen to so many people — from his Senate colleagues to schizo pundits like Meghan McCain who regularly ran him down in print before placing flowers on his virtual grave — pretend that Lindsey Graham was a decent person. Instead of stating plainly, as Charlie Sykes has, what he became over the last decade: a publicity tapeworm who compromised everything he once believed in to feed like a ravenous parasite off his more dominant host, while enjoying every second of the proximity to power that his sycophancy brought him. After initially being a committed Trump detractor like so many others (including Trump’s own vice president), no Trumpian humiliation was too great for Graham not to suck it up, in order to keep sucking up. That said, rest in peace and may his light shine brightly in his loved ones’ selective memories.
And not to worry, this is not going to be a career lowlight reel of the senator from Obsequia. It would be too arduous a task to sift through Graham’s innumerable self-abasements. And it’s not that I have no sympathy for the dead. After all, I plan on being dead myself someday.
But it does have me reflecting on what we owe the dead, if anything.
Since their only immediate accomplishment — the one that’s supposed to uniformly strike reverence in us — was ceasing to live. Which they usually have little-to-no say in. (Poor Graham was reportedly taken by an aortic dissection, with no imminent warning or protracted illness.)
When Charlie Kirk was murdered last year — not by his wife (sorry nutjob conspiracists) — I respectfully took note of the occasion, denouncing the violence, without flattering Kirk in the least, as so many have during and since. Since I regarded Kirk, both before and after his death, as a sleazy little demagogue who preyed on people’s fears as a divisive bomb-thrower while placing himself in the service of some of the worst people who have ever infected our political system, in order to gain more fame, power, and money for himself. Not exactly behavior that should see him memorialized in a mural on the broad side of a local barn, as one minister of my acquaintance promised/threatened to do in the days after his death.
In welcome contrast, Reverend Doctor Howard-John Wesley, a black pastor at Alford Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia — who’d had it with all the slobbering Kirk encomiums — put it memorably in a phrase that has stuck with me ever since: “How you die, does not redeem how you lived.”
So that the more I think about it, the fewer bonus points should be allotted simply for expiring. The mere fact of someone’s death should not put too much of a shine on a life which was dishonorably led. Your life speaks for your life, more than your death does— even if the latter is a premature one.
Having been in this business for some three decades, I’m no stranger to the “hit obit,” as some in our seedy little trade call it. (Basically, dancing on someone’s grave.) I’m not proud of it, but I’ve done them plenty of times, and will likely be unable to resist doing them a few times more. Especially if JD Vance goes before I do. Conversely, I have violently (and perhaps hypocritically) protested when it’s one of my dead guys getting their grave danced upon.
Back in 2012, when my friend Andrew Breitbart unexpectedly dropped dead from heart failure at the tender age of 43, just weeks after I’d traveled with him on a story, I took after the writer Matt Yglesias in print, after he’d written: “Conventions around dead people are ridiculous. The world outlook is slightly improved with @AndrewBreitbart dead.” Then and now, I regarded that as a terrible thing to say, even if by then, I’d come to abhor Andrew’s politics (and told him so in no uncertain terms). But I suggested maybe Yglesias could pass those sentiments on to Breitbart’s fatherless children since they don’t follow him on Twitter, before calling him a “prick.”
I have no idea if Yglesias is actually a prick. I’ve never met him. But I stand by that assessment — it was a prickish thing to say. However, in the fullness of time, I’m not as certain that there isn’t some kernel of truth in there. We shouldn’t celebrate anyone’s death, but neither does it make much sense to pretend that they were all righteousness-and-light just because they died.
Another old pal of mine, Christopher Hitchens —who I did the opposite of a hit obit on when he expired in 2011 — used to observe this precept with religious fervor, at least for an atheist. Hitchens held that you should “Never say anything nasty about the dead that you weren’t brave enough to say while they were alive. Everything else is fair game.” And he did, too. Ransacking the old Latin chestnut “De mortuis nihil nisi bonum,” (of the dead, speak nothing but good), Hitchens believed that if you came in for a beating from him on this earthly plane, he saw no reason why passing from it afforded you blanket immunity. Which he backed up by taking to the woodshed everyone from Mother Teresa (the “ghoul of Calcutta”) to Jerry Falwell (“if he had been given an enema, he could’ve been buried in a matchbox”).
And so, instead of asking WWJD (the Bible has no strict injunction against speaking ill of the dead, though it’s not keen on us speaking ill of people, generally), I hope I am forgiven for turning to Hitchens for moral absolution. As he was one of the Bible’s more prominent detractors, even if he knew it backward and forward and regarded the King James as one of the most important works of literature in the English language, “second to Shakespeare.” But in doing so, I already feel better about name-checking Graham just two short weeks ago, when none of us knew what was coming:
Please join me in a word of prayer for our 80-year-old president. That he finally finds the peace of mind and general all-around happiness that has clearly eluded him with his very blonde, very 34-year-old aide Natalie Harp. Who reportedly left a note for him saying, “You are all that matters to me.” Something Melania would never say, as she likely hasn’t let him touch her since the first Obama administration. But which is something everybody needs to hear. And it’s high time someone told Mr. Trump that besides Lindsey Graham.
As for ailing Mitch McConnell, who was recently rumored to be dead, but who we are now assured is most definitely still alive (maybe?), what a relief! I still have time to trash him as a feckless, cowardly enabler who failed at every turn to check Donald Trump, whom he loathes, from remaking/destroying the party he loves. And to do so with a clean conscience. Though I will likely go into greater detail, with a conflicted conscience, upon his passing.
Bonus Track: As a music fiend, I used to insist to my wife when we were in our twenties that if I went before she did, my funeral song should be Tom Waits’s “Anywhere I Lay My Head,” the closer off his critically-acclaimed 1985 Rain Dogs album. Partly because I love his hell-with-it vocals. Partly because I’m always a sucker for those dirge-y New Orleans horns. But upon further reflection, it does seem a tad over-dramatic. It’s hard to picture, say Mitch McConnell, sitting at my wake, without rolling his sad-turtle eyes when Waits honors me in song. So I’m open to better funeral-song suggestions. But in the meantime, here’s “Anywhere I Lay My Head.”
Bonus Tom Waits writing: The Spectator World magazine — the American version of Britain’s The Spectator, the world’s oldest continuously published magazine — recently asked me to kick in a paragraph for a 250th birthday poll on “Who is the most underrated American.” Since they didn’t pay me for it, I have no qualms about sharing it here. (Come and get me, Editors, or else send me a check.) The entire feature can be found behind a paywall here. But this is what I wrote, in answer to their most-underrated-American question:
Tom Waits. He’s never had a Hot 100 hit. He’s not big on TikTok. But anyone capable of putting such wisdom into circulation as “the world is a hellish place and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering,” or “I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things,” or “you have to keep busy, after all, no dog’s ever pissed on a moving car…..” Well, there’s a man who should be mandatory reading in school. Or mandatory listening, since the kids can’t be bothered to read.
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