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If We’re Going to Speak Ill of the Dead, Can We at Least Not Be Lazy About It?

"De mortuis nil nisi bonum" is not a maxim by which I set much stock. It is, for one thing, explicitly pagan. Only those who believe that treasures, including good reputations, can and ought to be shored up on earth will give a fig what anyone thinks of them after they are dead. That families and friends ought not to be distressed is more understandable, but I can’t help but feel that the whole thing smacks of magical thinking, as if the words themselves had the power to alter the facts of the matter about the deceased.

There is also the partisan problem. "Let’s just let people grieve here" is the reflexive cry of people who will be sneering next week when the other team’s captain dies. On the other hand, the arguments explicitly in favor tend to be bad: too often the response to anyone who professes to finding this sort of thing distasteful is something along the lines of "Would you not have attacked Hitler after he died?" as if standards of decorum had been established with fascist dictators in mind.

All of which is a preface to my saying that, just as there are points to be made both for and against the practice in general, there are also, relatively speaking, good and bad ways of going about criticizing the dead. Mencken’s obituaries, for example, are classics of American prose. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Salon dot com via Twitter*:

Is it going too far to call this the apotheosis of #content? What this translates to is, roughly, "Here from our Twitter account in light of Nancy Reagan’s death yesterday is a piece from 2013 that we in turn licensed from Full-Stop.net that was itself largely a summary of an essay published nearly a quarter century earlier by Joan Didion in the New York Review of Books." Gotta squeeze out those clicks somehow.

*Everything I hear from colleagues suggests that my Lenten Twitter fast has not been much in the way of a sacrifice.