Mark Twain once said, “I’ve never wished a man dead, but
I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”
. . .
Oooooh, look, everybody — it’s Saint Mark Twain! He never wished anybody dead! Well,
color me impressed! Where should we build your church,
Saint Twain? Where should we build your church — on the banks of the Mighty Mississipp’?
I’m not trying to take the piss out of Mark Twain — I love Mark Twain! One of the great American
writers — perhaps the most quintessentially American of them all! But, I hear this sentiment
expressed a lot, usually after some famous — and specifically, famously awful — person dies.
“Well, of course, I’ve never wished someone dead,
but I’m not gonna shed any tears over Pat Robertson now that he’s gone.”
Okay. Good. Neither am I. But, why do so many of us preface “I’m not gonna shed any tears” with
“I’ve never wished someone dead”? Is not being sorry that a terrible person is dead such a bad
thing that we feel compelled to reassure others that we’re only willing to take it as far as that?
A terrible person isn’t alive anymore, I say “the fact that the terrible person isn’t alive anymore
is a good thing, actually, and I’m not sorry about it,” and I have to fear the judgment of my peers,
or the public, or whoever I’m talking to in this hypothetical conversation?
What’s so shameful about thinking the death of a bad person is a good thing, and saying so?
And now that I’ve asked that question, let me ask the obvious related question: what’s so shameful
about wishing a bad person dead? Because that’s supposed to be even worse, right? That’s the
thing that’s being denied — “Oh, I’ve never done that! Wished someone dead? Perish the thought!”
I mean, it’s Pat Robertson — I only keep saying him because he
died fairly recently — finally — but it can be someone else. Pick a shitty dead person:
Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, Phyllis Schlafly, the Unabomber — there’s another
recent example! What’s wrong with wishing death on people like this?
Some people are superstitious about wishing death upon others. I know
this to be true because my grandmother harbored such a superstition. But hers
went beyond wishing death on someone — she warned against wishing any ill on another,
lest that very same ill fall upon you. It didn’t matter if the person you were wishing ill on was
known to you personally or not. If the best player on the Orioles broke his leg and had
to miss the rest of the season, and I said “I wish the best player on the Yankees would
break his leg,” Granny would shake her head and say, “Don’t say that or it’ll happen to you.”
A risk I was more than willing to take, by the way.
Granny was a much better person than I am. At my very best, I never even approach being as selfless
and kind as she was. But, she was my role model nonetheless, and this particular superstition of
hers was a reflection of her kindness, so I can’t fault her for it. I do find it a little silly,
though. I’m not superstitious. Wishing harm on another person might not be very nice — depending
on the person — but it’s not the same as actually inflicting harm on them. Wishes are
just thoughts. By themselves, they have no power to make anything happen. Wishing doesn’t work.
Which is too bad, really, because if it did, it would be the best way to kill people by far.
Think how short wars would be — especially once the soldiers figured out that instead of wishing
to kill each other, they could wish to kill the generals — or better yet, the rich asshole
politicians who probably started the war in the first place. Think how much easier it would be to
hold people accountable who are otherwise able to escape justice through their wealth or position.
Think how many survivors of abuse could be instantly and permanently free from their abusers.
Still, I suppose it’s for the best that wishes don’t work that way,
because the drawbacks are just as obvious as the benefits. How many abusers would take advantage of
it to permanently silence those they abuse? How many criminals would wish death upon witnesses,
or investigators, or prosecutors, in order to cover their crimes? How many deaths would result
from impulsive murder wishes? Guy cuts you off in traffic — dead. Parents get wished into their
graves by resentful children. Old lady pays for her groceries with a check — fucking dead,
every customer in line behind her simultaneously makes the same wish.
Plus, some of the most promising benefits would never happen because they would require
organization and discipline and long-term planning, none of which have historically
been our strong suit as a species — with some notable exceptions, of course. For example,
the wealthy would never wish for the mass deaths of the poor, because if they did that they would
have no one from whom to steal labor so they could continue to enrich themselves. But! Those
in the lower classes could wish for the deaths of the rich. That might lead to something positive.
Though, for it to lead to anything other than chaos, the wish-killings of the one-percenters
would have to be carried thoughtfully, according to a carefully drawn-up plan that would also
assure that their wealth would be allowed to flow downhill into the hands of those who need it. And,
people are selfish and impulsive as it is — can you imagine how much worse it would be if we had
the power to kill each other by wish? None of this would ever work. If our murder wishes suddenly
started coming true, my guess is that humanity would cease to exist in about ten minutes.
All kidding aside, we all understand that on an intuitive level, I think. Just as we
all know it’s a good thing that we can’t hear each other’s thoughts, we also know
it’s a good thing we can’t send those thoughts out into the world as invisible assassins.
That might be one reason why wishing death on someone who isn’t dead yet is seen as so
transgressive, especially if the person whose death is being wished for is someone of note.
If I publicly wished for the death of a current head of state or other holder of high office,
for example — regardless of how serious I was or what my intentions were,
it’s likely some folks would take that as a threat. And with good reason,
because it’s just as likely some other folks would take it as a suggestion. That’s why I
keep all my death wishes to myself until after the fact. It’s just safer that way.
It can’t be interpreted as a death threat if you don’t say it until after they’re already dead.
Besides superstition, and wanting to avoid making unintended death threats, there’s also this idea
that all life is precious and the death of any person is a tragedy, a loss to the whole of
humanity that should never be celebrated. And when an awful person dies, the tragedy is also that
they never found redemption. There’s a religious form of this — Christians would call it dying in
sin, when a person dies without having accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior, and Christians
believe those who die in that condition go to Hell, which is something Christians would like
the rest of us to believe they feel bad about, so if they do enjoy the thought of the unsaved
burning forever in the Lake of Fire, which I suspect a good many of them do, they don’t let on.
But, there’s a secular form as well, the idea that as long as there is life, there is hope, and
no one, no matter how wicked a life they have led, is beyond reform and reclamation. Look at Scrooge!
Miserable old bastard, hoarded his money, regarded his fellow human beings with contempt. Then, he
has a crazy dream about some ghosts on Christmas Eve and the next day he wakes up a new man! He
donates to charity! He sings Christmas carols! He gives his employee a raise! It’s never too late!
What a lovely story. One of my favorites — no foolin’. What a lovely thought, too,
that even the most wicked among us, the biggest, proudest assholes alive,
have the potential to turn it around and become giving, selfless, and open-minded.
Honestly, though? Most people who die in a state of assholedom do so with no guilt, and no regrets.
In real life, major, character-inverting change doesn’t happen all in one night. It takes time.
Years. Decades, even. So, yeah, if a person who has been terrible most of their life seems to be
on the road to becoming someone better, if they’re aware they need work and they’re working on it,
and they die before they quite make it over the hump, by all means treat that as a tragedy.
Pat Robertson, though? That old fucker was never gonna get any better. Phyllis Schlafly was just
as much of a retrograde bigot on the day she died in 2016 as she was back in the ‘70s when she was
campaigning against the Equal Rights Amendment. These people were never going to change.
They saw no need to, they didn’t want to, they resented the suggestion that they
ought to. Some people refuse to be redeemed. Some people can’t be
redeemed. They live their shitty lives, they die, and the world is better off without them.
Chapter five of the Gospel of Matthew tells us that God makes the sun rise on the evil
and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust — I’m an atheist, I don’t believe in god,
but I appreciate the general idea. Nobody asks to be born, we’re all in this together, and when
life is over a good person and an evil person are equally dead. That doesn’t make their impacts on
the world equal, though, does it? If we say a good person is good because they’ve done good,
then their death is a tragedy because now they can do no more good. If an evil person is evil because
they’ve done evil, and their death means they can do no more evil, how is that also a tragedy?
Celebrating the deaths of shitty people is seen as gauche, crass, not the classy thing to do. But,
why shouldn’t it be the classy thing? There’s no absolute, immutable standard for what is
and isn’t classy — it’s a social norm. We could change it if enough of us wanted to.
You know who had the right idea about this? Bette Davis. After her longtime
rival Joan Crawford died, someone asked Bette Davis about it, and Davis replied,
“My mother told me I should only speak good of the dead. Joan is dead. Good.”
Bette Davis never actually said that — it’s a paraphrase of a Moms Mabley joke — and while I’m
on the subject, Mark Twain never said “I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries
with great pleasure” either — it was Clarence Darrow — but it sounds like something Mark
Twain would have said, right? And “Joan is dead, good” sounds like something Bette Davis would have
said about Joan Crawford — and if she didn’t say it, it’s the sort of thing we wish she had said.
Because we only live once, we are all captives of circumstance and fate,
most of us don’t have as much control over our own lives as we want,
but we all have the choice to try to do good, or not — and when someone who chose not to do good,
someone who made their community, their country, the world in general a worse place to live,
dies, I see no point in extending to them post mortem courtesies. Fuck ‘em!
They sucked, they’re dead, that’s a good thing, it would have been even better if
they had died sooner, and instead of tut-tutting people who say so,
I’d rather pour a drink, raise a glass, and offer a humble toast: to absent fiends.