One of my social media pet peeves happens when someone famous dies. Half or more of the posts on my Facebook newsfeed will suddenly be “RIP so-and-so, sad emoji.” This happens seemingly on a weekly basis, as so many people who’ve had a moment in the spotlight when I was young seem to be passing these days.
It can be a challenge to find the right words when a celebrity one admires passes on, and “RIP” is at least an acknowledgement of a death that feels significant. But those three letters, repeated ad infinitum and at every opportunity ends up feeling less like a tribute and more like a reflex: a meaningless formality. I’ve gotten crap from people for saying so, but my desire in pointing it out is actually to ask that the observance of these passings feel more personal, more weighty, more sincere, and perhaps, I admit, a little bit less prevalent.
The phrase “rest in peace” carries with it some unpleasant associations. As I understand it, the expression came into common usage centuries ago, borne out of fear that a lost loved one might have just been in a deep sleep or a coma. There are folk tales of some poor soul’s body being exhumed and the diggers discovering claw marks all over the inside of the coffin and hunks of flesh missing out of the deceased’s forearm, self-inflicted out of starvation and madness. Because of that, I read “RIP (insert name of deceased person here)” as “Gee, I hope we didn’t bury you alive!”
I know that’s not what people are thinking when they say it, but I can’t escape the association, because someone told me that when I was impressionable. It’s where my mind unfailingly goes.
We ritualize the remembrance of the dead as a sort of lay beatification of people who were not so nice in life. “Don’t speak ill of the dead,” we say, reflexively. As if it matters to them.
Maybe it’s just the thought that they can’t defend themselves, being that they’re no longer around. To my mind, lies of omission that make a person who’s passed seem better than we thought they were in life is still an attack, a distortion of the truth of who they were. We don’t remember the flesh-and-blood human by doing this, we create a chimera and give it the name of the person who’s no longer there to set the record straight.
This week, I’ve been observing this phenomenon applied to former President George Herbert Walker Bush, who died this past Friday, November 30th. I’m also seeing a raft of postings online about how terrible a person he was. The truth must be more complex than either view.
If there is any shred of truth to the idea of a “Deep State,” there has been no more public representative of it that Bush 41. I remember him speaking to a gathering of Wall Street CEOs on September 11th, 2001, in the immediate wake of two planes striking the old World Trade Center towers, another flying into the Pentagon, and a fourth crashing into an empty field in Stonycreek Township, Pennsylvania, foiled by passengers from reaching its destination, the Capital Dome.
The message of his speech, imprinted as indelibly in my memory as the image of claw marks on the inside of a coffin, was that “we need to unfetter our intelligence services.” Against any potential enemy of the state, the intelligence community needs to be given free reign to act.
My thought then was that this country would move in the direction of empowering the state against the needs of the individual. There is nothing about the history of this country since that contradicts that insight.
There’s been a debate for the last decade or so as to whether there is an actual guaranteed right to privacy, despite the clear assumption of it’s existence in the 1st, 3rd, 4th and 5th Constitutional amendments, and allusions to it in landmark court decisions like Griswold v. Connecticut, Roe v. Wade, and Lawrence v. Texas. Bush 41 publicly iterated the intention to infringe on that right within hours of the attacks, both in what he spoke about and who he spoke to.
I won’t go into other knocks against the man being repeated all over the web, other than to echo one that is of particular importance to me as an transgender woman, and someone who lost a brother to HIV/AIDS during the 41st Presidency: his utter silence and inaction as the plague was ravaging the country. That lack of response feels like innate homophobia and a callousness that renders his call for a “kinder, gentler nation” hypocritical.
Yet, much of the mainstream media has presented a much different picture of the man, speaking of his civility, even his warmth, and calling him a moderate. I think there’s validity to that last, at the very least. He was a Republican President who had the will to raise taxes. In these times, that seems like remarkable courage. He paid for it with any potential for a second term as President. It seems to me that he acted with intention for the good of the country.
The reactions I’m seeing among those who knew him suggest that he was likable. I suspect that if you knew him at all, your impression of him was likely to be positive.
Once again, there has been a huge amount of discussion along these lines in the media: I don’t feel the need to recapitulate all of that here. This post is already longer than I would like.
We’re all much more complex than any one person can know. Those who know us best don’t know everything. We all have dark little corners in our souls and little points of light that shine only in certain directions, along with the larger, more obvious facets of ourselves others can either see or dispute. To reduce someone, like this week’s celebrity example, to only the nice things one can say about them, or only the complaints we have against them, or, Cthulhu help us, “RIP,” seems criminal. I want all of the gritty realism. I want to remember whole, complex human beings once they leave this world. That’s how I want to be remembered, all of the good in me is negated if one denies the bad.
In the words of another massively complicated, now-deceased celeb, just gimme some truth. All I want is the truth.
Broadcast From the Brain Radio 