DEATH: The Great Equalizer

In response to the question in the article linked below, “No. It does NOT absolve them of responsibility for their actions. It merely means “it’s all over but the crying.””

And this is the crying.

Emphasizing particularly that it is important to acknowledge someone akin to a debating partner, rather than a mortal enemy. It is a hallmark of civility.

As long has been said, disagreeing on the finer points of a narrow range of subjects doesn’t mean to be disagreeable, though some have so misinterpreted the aphorism. Everyone is welcome at funerals… save then-POTUS Donald Trump, whom Arizona Republican Senator John McCain specifically excluded by name before he died. Like him, or loathe him (ideologies, not personally), John McCain was a man of integrity and honor.

But, death is THE common denominator from which ALL humanity suffers.

Even at a funeral, the attendees all share a common bond — the deceased.

Funerals are NOT for the deceased; instead, they are for the living, to enable them an opportunity to publicly and collectively express their individual, private, and public, sense of loss and sorrow, at the deceased’s departure.

〝Eulogies, by their very nature, often lionize the dead,
and by so doing,
tend to give a flawed, romanticized picture of the deceased,
one that sometimes is not based in reality.
It paints a portrait of the person
as we WANT to remember them,
rather than how they were.〞

Obituaries, on the other hand, can be, and often are, written by another, sometimes not even a relative, such as with the death of a public figure, where elongated obituaries often become human interest feature articles, and can, and do, also sometimes mention difficulties, losses, struggles, and failures, not just the high-lights, or high points of one’s life.

Thinking forward, one will naturally be curious about who will attend Donald John Trump’s funeral. Naturally, there’ll be the likely suspects, Rudi Giuliani, Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, immediate family (children, their spouses & families), a few business associates, and perhaps a few others. But ‘who would want to attend’ such an event is about what I’m curious. How many extras would be hired to give the (false) appearance of being well-attended — as he did exaggeration at his Inauguration? Clearly, there he did not. The crowd size experts that estimated “numbers” of those attending the event was severally estimated by numerous independent agencies, to be between 300,000 – 600,000.

In stark contrast is the 2009 Obama inauguration’s estimated 1,800,000 attendance. That has to rile him something fierce. Of course, Trump’s obituary will likely lead with something like “he was best known for being the only twice-impeached POTUS, and instigator of the January 6, 2020 Insurrection, when murderous mobs armed with unconventional weapons literally broke into the U.S. Capitol Building, and roamed freely throughout, pillaging as they went…”

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They Voted to Overturn an Election.

Did Their Obits Let Them Off the Hook?

By Michael Schaffer
09/09/2022
04:30 AM EDT

When Indiana Congresswoman Jackie Walorski died in a traffic accident last month, readers of the Washington Post write-up had to wait until the final paragraph — below the fulsome tributes from a bipartisan array of colleagues; below the discussions of her anti-abortion politics and her committee assignments — to learn about what may have been the most important vote of her career: On January 6th, 2021, she voted against certifying the results of the 2020 election.

…

It’s not that votes against certifying the election have been universally memory-holed. The New York Times obit for Hagedorn, for instance, led with his election-overturning vote. It’s that the coverage is all over the place. The same vote was mentioned low in the reports of his death offered by the Associated Press and his home-state Star-Tribune, and not at all in the Guardian, a publication that’s generally not especially friendly to baseless conspiracy theories about 2020 fraud.

U.S. Representative Jackie Walorski, R, IN-2 –CENTER– listens during a meeting between President Donald Trump and congressional members in the Cabinet Room of the White House February 13, 2018 in Washington, DC. – Alex Wong/Getty Images

Likewise, Wright’s vote made the last paragraph of the AP obit, but was unmentioned in the lengthy obituary in his hometown Dallas Morning News or the news account of his death in the Texas Tribune. (POLITICO didn’t run traditional obits, but its news accounts of the three deaths — which featured tributes from colleagues but no lengthy resume-recitations — also did not take note of the way they voted on January 6.)

This is all, on the face of it, rather strange. The last few years have featured no shortage of assertions in the media that the preservation of democracy ought to be the profession’s highest calling. The vote on whether or not to certify the election was a seminal one, a moment to pick sides. No less a figure than Mitch McConnell called it “the most important vote I’ve ever cast.” So why not treat it as similarly defining for that vast majority of legislators with careers that have been shorter than McConnell’s?

Part of what’s going on here is our society-wide taboo against speaking ill of the dead and a major-media taboo against appearing biased. The deaths of all three members of Congress were greeted with genuine sorrow by Republican allies and generous aisle-crossing statements by the likes of Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi — warm remembrances attesting to faith and friendship and devotion to public service. Why muck it up by mentioning something controversial?

Rep. Jim Hagedorn addresses a crowd at a campaign rally for President Donald Trump in 2020. — Bruce Kluckhohn/AP Photo

Beyond the fact that mucking things up is what the news media is supposed to do, that speak-no-ill logic assumes that a vote to overturn the election was a bad thing — a statement a substantial minority of Americans disagree with, for better or worse. Presumably, if you believe the election was fatally marred by irregularities, you still agree that the vote to reject it was an important one.

More practically, unexpected deaths of sitting members of Congress are also a place where the measured judgments of people writing for history bump into the reality of reporters covering shocking news on deadline. Though Hagedorn lost a long battle with cancer, Wright was felled by COVID. And Walorski, a much-loved figure, died alongside a couple of young aides in a terrible accident. Much of the coverage of her death came from Capitol beat reporters trying to sort out the catastrophic details in real time, rather than from dedicated obituary writers. But even that latter category might have had trouble.

“If a member of Congress is dying and you’re writing an obit on deadline, you may not even go back and check what their voting record has been recently,” says Stephen Miller, who spent years writing obituaries for the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. “You’ll ask, did they have any major initiatives that they did? ‘Rep. Jones was a major advocate for industrial policy,’ that kind of thing. You’re not going to look at individual votes.”

—MORE—
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/09/09/election-denial-obituaries-00055787