“I love eulogies. They are the most moving kind of speech because they attempt to pluck meaning from the fog, and on short order, when the emotions are still ragged and raw and susceptible to leaps. It is a challenge to look at a life and organize our thoughts about it and try to explain to ourselves what it meant, and the most moving part is the element of implicit celebration. Most people aren’t appreciated enough, and the bravest things we do in our lives are usually known only to ourselves. No one throws ticker tape on the man who chose to be faithful to his wife, or the lawyer who didn’t take the drug money, or the daughter who held her tongue again and again. All this anonymous heroism. A eulogy gives us a chance to celebrate it.”—Peggy Noonan, What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Revolution (1990)
I don’t share Noonan’s romantic conservatism, but the memoir by the White House speechwriter-turned-Wall Street Journal columnist is one of the best-written peeks inside the bubble surrounding the President and those working within his circle. Besides her sharp profiles (see her take on how Michael Deaver took a form of revenge on the Reagans for having temporarily dumped him in the 1980 primary season by securing Edmund Morris as the President’s authorized biographer), it also offers interesting insights such as the above quote (which is itself an outgrowth of equally fascinating reflections on the Irish “certain affinity for death,” especially as manifested in the wake).
What she has has in mind in the above quote, I think, is the send-off given to the type celebrated in Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” where the poet conjured up “some mute inglorious Milton” or “rustic moralist” laid to rest. It was not the wildly over-the-top goodbye to Michael Jackson the other day.
Eulogies often address two audiences: those who knew the deceased well and those who might not have. Aside from the enormously difficult task of addressing the raw emotions of the listeners (with the speaker sometimes having to surmount his or her own), there is also the issue of honesty: i.e., how to acknowledge the faults of the deceased without losing sight of virtues.
Federalist politician Gouverneur Morris was faced with this delicate task when his friend of 30 years, Alexander Hamilton, was killed in a duel. In his diary, Morris bemoaned the impossibility of the job.
Even though he looked to Hamilton as a party leader as well as a friend, Morris also was keenly aware of his faults: “He was indiscreet, vain and opinionated.” In the end, Morris took at least some account of the violent emotions stirred by the fiercely partisan Hamilton by noting that he bore his heart “as it were in his hands.”
The best eulogies that I’ve heard have managed to maintain the delicate balance that Morris despaired of finding, often by offering aspects of the deceased’s character that one never knew and by using these to account for the fault. I’ve remembered those parting sendoffs years after the event, and hope that, when my time comes, someone will treat me with similar humanity—with measured rather than exaggerated assessments of my life and character.
Few such assessments were in order at the Staples Center tributes to Michael Jackson. Some in the media—notably NBC’s Brian Williams—were barely able to hide their squeamishness over live coverage of the proceedings for someone who, after all, did nothing to move the nations of the world closer to world peace.
The most egregious offender was—surprise—Al Sharpton, who credited the singer’s music with helping to elect Barack Obama President. (Sorry, Rev: I think that Martin Luther King Jr., and Congressman John Lewis—not to mention countless civil-rights workers who, over the years, were despised, lost their jobs, beaten, and even killed for their efforts—had just a wee bit more to do with the election of America’s first African-American President. But I guess we should be glad you didn’t take credit for the deed.)
But Sharpton really flew into the face of reality by telling Jackson’s children (including the one that the deceased had named Prince Michael Jackson, or “Blanket”) that there “wasn’t anything weird about your daddy. It was strange what your daddy had to deal with.”
Who are we trying to kid here?
Weirdness by itself is not enough to put someone in legal jeopardy, or otherwise virtually every showbiz celeb on the stage at the Staples Center would have fallen into the clutches of the police.
But there was, as Denis Hamill noted in his Daily News column the other day, something creepy about Jackson’s “disturbing fixation on prepubescent boys.” Like Hamill, I believe that Jackson’s money and fame enabled him to settle for more than $20 million a pedophile civil suit in the 1990s, and that this saved him from jail.
The next time we want someone to celebrate, we had better look around to the people in our own lives who, whatever their very human faults, strive to live in a responsible way, demonstrating the “anonymous heroism” that Ms. Noonan celebrated. Celebrating a celebrity hopelessly ballyhooed in death sends a horrible message to children about what we value as a society.
I don’t share Noonan’s romantic conservatism, but the memoir by the White House speechwriter-turned-Wall Street Journal columnist is one of the best-written peeks inside the bubble surrounding the President and those working within his circle. Besides her sharp profiles (see her take on how Michael Deaver took a form of revenge on the Reagans for having temporarily dumped him in the 1980 primary season by securing Edmund Morris as the President’s authorized biographer), it also offers interesting insights such as the above quote (which is itself an outgrowth of equally fascinating reflections on the Irish “certain affinity for death,” especially as manifested in the wake).
What she has has in mind in the above quote, I think, is the send-off given to the type celebrated in Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” where the poet conjured up “some mute inglorious Milton” or “rustic moralist” laid to rest. It was not the wildly over-the-top goodbye to Michael Jackson the other day.
Eulogies often address two audiences: those who knew the deceased well and those who might not have. Aside from the enormously difficult task of addressing the raw emotions of the listeners (with the speaker sometimes having to surmount his or her own), there is also the issue of honesty: i.e., how to acknowledge the faults of the deceased without losing sight of virtues.
Federalist politician Gouverneur Morris was faced with this delicate task when his friend of 30 years, Alexander Hamilton, was killed in a duel. In his diary, Morris bemoaned the impossibility of the job.
Even though he looked to Hamilton as a party leader as well as a friend, Morris also was keenly aware of his faults: “He was indiscreet, vain and opinionated.” In the end, Morris took at least some account of the violent emotions stirred by the fiercely partisan Hamilton by noting that he bore his heart “as it were in his hands.”
The best eulogies that I’ve heard have managed to maintain the delicate balance that Morris despaired of finding, often by offering aspects of the deceased’s character that one never knew and by using these to account for the fault. I’ve remembered those parting sendoffs years after the event, and hope that, when my time comes, someone will treat me with similar humanity—with measured rather than exaggerated assessments of my life and character.
Few such assessments were in order at the Staples Center tributes to Michael Jackson. Some in the media—notably NBC’s Brian Williams—were barely able to hide their squeamishness over live coverage of the proceedings for someone who, after all, did nothing to move the nations of the world closer to world peace.
The most egregious offender was—surprise—Al Sharpton, who credited the singer’s music with helping to elect Barack Obama President. (Sorry, Rev: I think that Martin Luther King Jr., and Congressman John Lewis—not to mention countless civil-rights workers who, over the years, were despised, lost their jobs, beaten, and even killed for their efforts—had just a wee bit more to do with the election of America’s first African-American President. But I guess we should be glad you didn’t take credit for the deed.)
But Sharpton really flew into the face of reality by telling Jackson’s children (including the one that the deceased had named Prince Michael Jackson, or “Blanket”) that there “wasn’t anything weird about your daddy. It was strange what your daddy had to deal with.”
Who are we trying to kid here?
Weirdness by itself is not enough to put someone in legal jeopardy, or otherwise virtually every showbiz celeb on the stage at the Staples Center would have fallen into the clutches of the police.
But there was, as Denis Hamill noted in his Daily News column the other day, something creepy about Jackson’s “disturbing fixation on prepubescent boys.” Like Hamill, I believe that Jackson’s money and fame enabled him to settle for more than $20 million a pedophile civil suit in the 1990s, and that this saved him from jail.
The next time we want someone to celebrate, we had better look around to the people in our own lives who, whatever their very human faults, strive to live in a responsible way, demonstrating the “anonymous heroism” that Ms. Noonan celebrated. Celebrating a celebrity hopelessly ballyhooed in death sends a horrible message to children about what we value as a society.
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