Six Feet Under The Bus

On speaking ill of the dead

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.