Pious Lying About the Dead

(8:00PM EST – promoted by Nightprowlkitty)

With the news of Tony Snow’s ultimate departure, we’re faced with yet another round of grappling over how to respond to the death of someone whose temporal behavior enabled dark forces to exercise their plunder and rapine. We are exhorted to hold our tongues out of respect and compassion. And, if we can’t muster that, then out of self-interest, for, inevitably, some day someone we love will be laid to rest. Some day we will be.

Most people who argue, with Chilon of Sparta, that we should speak no ill of the dead put a time limit on their prescription. It’s not that we shouldn’t ever speak ill of the dead, in their view, merely that we should allow the decedent’s family time to get the corpse in the ground before lighting the flamethrowers. It’s understandable in that “we’re all sinners, let God judge” kind of way. Who gets hurt if we roast some war criminal or child molester or lying government shill after the Reaper swings his scythe? Certainly not the target of our wrath. Just kin and friends. What purpose is served by intensifying their grief at its peak? Where is our human kindness?

The trouble with this polite posthumousness isn’t that it gives space to the begrieved, a worthy and understandable behavior. Nor is it that speaking the truth is held in abeyance for a few hours or days. It’s that people who should know better get carried away with themselves. It should be remembered that we’re not talking here about the passing of somebody’s great-aunt Dolores who may have ripped off the collection plate as it passed by or had an affair unbeknownst to great-uncle Phil. We’re speaking of public figures, women and men who so often become saints at graveside services, no matter how despicable their life’s work.

Instead of a mere biting of tongues, these people who should know better go to great lengths to invent praise for the departed, something we witnessed several prominent Democrats do in the case of Jesse Helms earlier this month. Silence wasn’t good enough for them. They had to pile on the bullshit.

As I.F. Stone once said, “Funerals are always occasions for pious lying.” He didn’t say that approvingly. Indeed, he said it about John Kennedy, and he didn’t stop there.

In her 2006 book, All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone, Myra MacPherson wrote:

In November 1963, the world mourned in shocked despair when President Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas. To watch him was to be “delighted by his wit, his intelligence, his capacity and his youth,” wrote Stone. “Those made the terrible flash from Dallas incredible and painful.” Stone then took a deep breath and plunged into an astonishingly tough column, an appraisal of Kennedy that was only replicated by writers long asfter the revelations of a tarnishd Camelot: “Perhaps the truth is that in some ways John Fitzgerald Kennedy died just in time. He died in time to be remembered as he would like to be remembered, as ever-young, still victorious, struck down undefeated. …” But, Stone continued, “The Kennedy administration was approaching an impasse, certainly at home, quite possibly abroad, from which there seemed no escape. … The President was caught between these old men [in Congress]. Their faces set stubbornly towards their white supremacist past, and the advancing Negro masses, explosively demanding ‘freedom now.'” In foreign affairs Kennedy was stymied by Cold Warriors when attempting any minuscule thaw with Russia.

Stone asked his readers to face deep realities and decried the tendency to either applaud or ignore covert acts of the CIA, from the killing of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo to the assassination of the Diem Brothers in South Vietnam. “We all reach for the dagger, or the gun, in our thinking when it suits our political view to do so. … In this sense we share the guilt with Oswald and Ruby and the rightist crack-pots. Where the right-to-kill is so universally accepted, we should not be surprised if our young President was slain.” Stone addressed the growing acceptance of “murder on the widest scale as the arbiter of controversy between nations.”

Stone said it was necessary to take a “clear-sighted view” of Kennedy and his advisers, who were “in some ways a warlike Administration.” It seemed ready to “send troops into Vietnam” and “in violation of our own laws and international law” embraced the inglorious Bay of Pigs invasion. As for the Cuban missile crisis, Stone asked, what if Russia “called our bluff and war had begun and escalated?” If any historians had survived, “would they have thought us justified in blowing most of mankind to smithereens, rather than negotiate, or appeal to the UN, or even to leave in Cuba the medium-range missiles which were no different after all from those we had long aimed at the Russian from Turkey and England?” These facts should be remembered in case Johnson had a mind to imitate the slain president. “Think it over carefully before canonizing Kennedy as an apostle of peace.”

Dissenting from worldwide eulogies – “funerals are always occasions for pious lying” – Stone firmly concluded, “Abroad, as at home, the problems were becoming too great for conventional leadership, and Kennedy, when the tinsel was stripped away, was a conventional leader, no more than an enlightened conservative, cautious as an old man for all his youth, with a basic distrust of the people and an astrngent view of the evangelical as a toll of leadership…. In the clouds of incense … it is easy to lose one’s way just when it becomes more important than ever to see where we really are.” [pp. 388-389].

Whether our obituary is for a muckety-muck or a minion, few, if any of us, have the eloquence or analytical skills of an I.F. Stone to put everything in perspective. For that reason alone, as well as for general persuasiveness, it’s wiser to stick with facts than sink to vituperation. But it serves nobody if we cannot be “clear-sighted” and willing to strip away the tinsel from the eulogies of those whose behavior had broad and pernicious impacts.