Jerry Falwell is dead, hosannah! Anyway, where is this stupid idea of speaking ill of the dead comes from?
Not at all wrong, if someone's an asshole then all that changes when they're dead is it becomes past tense. Why should anyone have to be quiet about it? It's not as though anyone says only nice things about Hitler right?
I'm kind of in the opposite boat. I knew this guy who, if he was still alive, would now be my father-in-law. I talked with him quite a bit when he was alive, and he was one of the coolest people you could hope to meet. He had plenty of funny and/or interesting stories about places he'd been and people he'd met, and he knew how to tell them. I'll always remember him smiling and laughing while I and some friends of mine sat outside on warm summer nights with him listening to him tell us about his service in the Air Force, the strange things that happened behind the scenes at American Airlines, and other things. After he died, his own family told me what a Triple-A he was; Abusive, Alcoholic, Asshole. They were glad he was dead and thought his death in a gutter on a scummy side of town was too decent for him. I couldn't believe this was the same guy, but they told me that a person like that is very good at hiding it from "outsiders". I don't know. I have no bad memories of him, but I can't deny the validity of what his own family has told me. My only solution is to let them have their memories and I'll have mine. Neither of us will be wrong.
It's a cultural courtesy blown well out of proportion. Take a flip-side: when I was fourteen or so, I attended a memorial service for a friend, a girl from our school whose body had been dragged out of a local park requiring forensic identification. Now, let's get a few facts out in the open: she hated her family, fought with them regularly, smoked, drank, fucked, used pot, meth, glue, whatever she could get her hands on. She stole cars, ran with grown men to either steal cars or deliver drugs .... At her funeral, the Christian preacher cast her as an angel, one nearly without sin (for none can be without the sin we are born into), who worked hard for her community and school, and was a pillar of her family's stability. It was all lies. There would be absolutely no reason to stand up at her funeral and call her a skank, a meth-whore, &c. And there's pretty much no reason to now. But what I don't get is how the mere truth of the things she did and said is considered disrespectful. Calling a stubborn man stubborn is not speaking ill of the dead. Calling a pious, stubborn man a crotchety old bastard is. It's hard to not speak ill of someone like Falwell, but I'm satisfied to have shared a grin and a bong with a friend over the dead Rev's name. To the other, though, Larry Flynt is officially exempted: if he'd wheeled up to the Rev's hospital room to cuss the holy-roller to the last breath, I couldn't say Falwell didn't deserve it. If you must stab after Falwell, toast the people who survived his lust for hatred.
Falwell: Just one more skank who was able to prove that you can sell genocide to enough of the people enough of the time to make a lot of money. If he had had brains he would have been dangerous.
We call Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, etc. assholes, S.O.B.s, losers, etc. all the time. Why do we do that if we believe it is wrong to speak ill of the dead? I think it all boils down to your perspective of the subject's life.
It's also not politically correct to mention anything good about those people. So come on! Let's break a rule today. Let's say something nice about historical assholes. I usually apply Dick Clark's recordrating system on "American Bandstand", where he believed no record was entirely good or entirely bad. Hitler's dog must have thought he was the greatest person ever to live. I used to have a book that showed Adolph playing with the dog (I think the dog was named Blondi?). He didn't seem to begrudge Eva for her Scotty dog, so did the guy just like dogs in general? Not a bad quality.
