Nil nisi bonum

I was wondering if I was too hard yesterday, even as I wrote the thing. I won't lie, I enjoyed the hell out of writing it; the thing gave me a savage pleasure in addition to making myself laugh at what I thought were a few choice lines. But I wondered. I was raised with Nil nisi bonum, "Do not speak ill of the dead". It's impolite, it's undignified, it's cruel to the survivors of the deceased.

But, you know, I also thought this: I thought that if I died, I'd hope that people would say nice things about me, not because they were obliged to, but because they were true. And if they had nothing good to say about me at all, because there was nothing they could say honestly and they were unwilling to lie, how pathetic would that be? Wouldn't that be a terrible indictment of my life, to only be able to dismiss it with silence?

It also occurred to me that the question for anyone who thinks I might have been the least bit unfair to Breitbart might ask if he was the least bit fair to Shirley Sherrod. I know, it's generally bad form to answer a question with a question, but I think that one is more than fair.

I'd hope that everybody--even my worst enemies, if I have any--would say that VanNewkirk, for all of his considerable faults as a man and human being, was kind at times, wise at times, did his best to make things just a little better all around. I don't know if anyone will be able to say these things if I drop off tomorrow. I hope, though. I hope nobody feels obligated to keep their mouth shut because they feel pity for my folks.

Andrew Breitbart was 43. He seemed older to me. Not by his actions, which were inevitably juvenile, but by that shock of white hair and the lines on his face. I'm forty, I'm only three years younger; we've never been at the same geographic location at the same time, so far as I know, but temporally speaking we were in high school at the same time, at college at the same time. I can't think of myself as being particularly old even when I feel old in the morning or find myself reading something or meeting someone that calls out my age, my era. But I'm not actually young, and neither was Breitbart, really. Forty, forty-three, it's somewhere in the middle of life, even if we've culturally pushed "Middle-Aged" up into the fifties (and the fifties aren't far away from forty; they're undeniably closer than the twenties). Not that this matters, actually: teenagers get cancer and twenty-year-olds get hit by buses and thirty-year-olds die of unspecified natural causes--you get no guarantees, even if you have good genes and work out and look twice both ways before you cross the street (and always at the crosswalk, too); and if you're twenty and the bus mows you down in the middle of the street so thoroughly an open casket funeral is beyond all hope of discussion, well, will everybody say nice things or are they merely going to be polite?

Gods help you if the nicest thing anyone can think of is that while you were an asshole, at least you were a funny asshole.

Or this: that you loved your wife and kids. Gods, I know this is probably me getting cruel and unpleasant again, but I think I have thick callouses from playing those strings all the time. Confession: I peddle that shit, myself; I hate talking about work, but here we are: sometimes I go in front of a judge with a client and I say something like, "Your Honor, he's a good father to his kids," a lot of times having to leave out, naturally, the "when he isn't locked up." Sometimes that really is the one good thing you can say about somebody, and when you're pleading for leniency, you've got to say something that's good, and you absolutely don't lie to the Court (if people think that's what lawyers do, and I know people do, they're not getting that the only lawyers who lie to judges are bad lawyers--not just unethical and setting themselves up for Bar proceedings, but also squandering the lawyer's most valuable currency, which is the value of the lawyer's word to opposing counsel and the Court in a system where the workings are oiled with trust and good faith).

But what is that really saying about someone? You're supposed to be a good father or mother to your children: there's a biological imperative to be a good parent, and people who fail in that basic duty through some fault of their own are rightly regarded as monsters, incapable of following a basic natural instinct (and those who fail through no fault of their own are typically regarded with pity). And there may be no biological imperative to be good to your spouse, but the Western tradition is you stand up in front of people and swear--commonly in the presence of your deity, if you believe, setting yourself up to break a promise to Him, Her, It or Them on top of everything else--swear to be faithful and true and protective and honorable and good; i.e. being a good husband or wife is kind of the least you're supposed to do, isn't it? Presumably you got married intending to step up your obligations to someone else, right?

The real question is whether you were good to strangers, isn't it? Not how you treated the people you were expected to be good to.

It nags me that there's an irony here. I am angry with the late Breitbart, a stranger to me, for his unkindness to strangers like Shirley Sherrod, whose career he destroyed. So I am unkind to him (or, depending on how you want to look at it, to his survivors), and I have just said whether you were good to a stranger is a criteria for judging whether you, yourself were good in life. Am I failing to be a mensch or is this a distinguishable case? Is Breitbart even worth raising the question over? I'd like to say this is distinguishable, but then I would like to say that, wouldn't I? It's self-serving of me to think these are different situations, self-serving of me, perhaps, to even raise the question as if trolling for friends and family who read this blog to possibly reassure me I'm not an asshole (of course taking the risk they'll assure me I am).

It nags me, I dismiss it. Perhaps too easily.

And now I think I've said everything I needed to.