Cheering Against the Home Team
The country singer Toby Keith has died. He was an outspoken conservative as well as an immensely talented songwriter. Because of the former, and because of Keith’s apparent role in the cancelling of the Dixie Chicks twenty years ago, many on social media have made a great show of declaring they will not grieve his loss.
You may know the old Latin phrase: de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est, which roughly translates to “Say only good things about the dead.” In the modern era, particularly but not exclusively on the left, the opposite aphorism now applies: “Of the dead whom we declare to have been wicked, nothing good should ever be said.” In the impoverished online moral universe, even faint praise for the deceased is unacceptable, as it suggests a whitewashing of the departed’s sins. To speak well of the flawed dead is to be an accomplice to their worst misdeeds.
(I do believe this is more common on the left than the right. But the right is not immune. When Sen. Edward Kennedy died in the summer of 2009, I’d only been on Twitter a few months. At the dawn of the social media age, I was flabbergasted to discover how hated he was, even in death, by many of my conservative friends. As far as I was concerned, far too many of my buddies on the right felt compelled to tweet their dark hope that Mary Jo Kopechne was rejoicing in heaven while Teddy was consigned to the fire.)
We are a people who struggle to draw distinctions. We are a people impatient with nuance. We are a people who have deluded ourselves into believing that acknowledging complexity is complicity with that which we hate. We are, in other words, mostly acting like insufferable teenagers. (I have a fifteen year old who is only rarely insufferable; I know of whence I speak.)
My mother was fifteen, the same age my daughter is now, in March 1953. She was a student in an international boarding school in Geneva, Switzerland.
On this particular late winter day, the headmaster called an assembly to announce that Joseph Stalin had died. The students spontaneously cheered. The headmaster rebuked them firmly, with such emotion and conviction that my mother has remembered his speech ever since.
The whole of life is the struggle against death, the headmaster said. (Possibly paraphrasing St John Chrysostom, who said "all the arts and sciences are rooted in the battle against death.") And while we can be grateful that someone who was doing harm is no longer capable of doing it, to rejoice with glee at another human's death is to take sides against what it means to be human.
The headmaster didn't offer vacuous praise for a monstrous dictator. He simply refused to permit public displays of delight that any living person was no longer with us.
I am not a headmaster of a Swiss boarding school. I am reluctant to proscribe any show of genuine emotion. I have a friend who lost his brother on 9/11, and this friend was exultant when Osama Bin Laden was killed. To my friend, the death of the terrorist mastermind brought relief — and a sense that a long-delayed and imperfect justice had arrived at last. In a similar way, I would like to think that if that Swiss headmaster was addressing not a group of very privileged teenagers, but a throng of gulag inmates whose families had been murdered at Stalin’s orders, he might not be so quick to silence the cheers and the whoops.
Most of the time, however, the emotion we express online at the death of a public figure is less genuine. Very rarely is this a public figure whose actions transformed our lives the way Osama’s actions transformed the life of my friend. Most of the time, our displays of grief or glee are rooted more in tribalism than in trauma. They are more performance than pathos.
Very few people are Osama Bin Ladens or Joseph Stalins. More are like Toby Keith or Teddy Kennedy — controversial public figures, loved and despised in nearly equal measure. We do not have to worry that many around us will praise Osama; we do fear that when a Kennedy or a Keith dies, the “other side” will gain control of the narrative. We worry that a sinner’s sins will go unmentioned; we worry that a good man’s virtues will be erased. So we attempt to police the grieving. We seek to set the record straight. We appoint ourselves judge and journalist and historian, declaring it simply outrageous that anyone could speak so poorly of our recently departed hero — or speak so well of this latest wretch to slough off the mortal coil. We deploy the nil nisi bonum rule to defend the honor of those whose views and whose achievements aligned with our own commitments, and we use the “nil nisi malum” rule to ensure that those whom we regard as fiends are remembered chiefly as such.
I am not only not a headmaster of a Swiss boarding school, I am not an instructor in etiquette. I am however, convinced that we are a people grown distrustful of generosity. Perhaps, it is worth considering the possibility that the enemy is not the person who died, but death itself.
Death is never on our side, the headmaster said, even if he seems to be so. No one is entirely unloved, no one is entirely without good. We are all fighting the same battle against death, a fight we will each someday lose in our own way, leaving behind stricken and grieving loved ones to push on without us. Henry Kissinger or Joseph Stalin or Teddy Kennedy or Toby Keith — or whoever it is that you to your reckoning rightly despise — we should not cheer a single loss for our glorious, broken, human team.
I have been listening to Toby Keith for thirty years, but my favorite song of his is not one of his old raucous hits, but something much more recent. Written for the 2018 Clint Eastwood film The Mule, this is a gentle, somber plea to stay in the fight. It is good advice for us all.