Grief, Inc. - This ties

Grief, Inc. - This ties in nicely with the story on the Harvard study, below.

If you live in the Twin Cities, you can't go a day without encountering the extended orgy of mourning in which the late Senator Wellstone's supporters have been marinating themselves.

Now, as far as this blog is concerned, Senator Wellstone's death was an unmitigated tragedy. Like many conservatives, I have been just as up-front about my reasons for respecting the late Senator as I was about my differences with him.

But many of his supporters have been just awful. From the Paulapalooza, to the irresponsible conspiracy theories spread by everyone from run of the mill DFLers to Ted Rall and Barbra Streisand, to their endless, self-indulgent, self-righteous invocations of His name at every political turn, they're turning into the mirror images of the self-absorbed fundamentalists they themselves lampoon so mercilessly.

The trade in Wellstone memorial bumperstickers ("Never Park the Bus", "What Would Wellstone Do") is cloying and plays in cheap sentiment. Which is fine, but to display such melodramatic emotion and not expect a backlash, whether satiric or angry, is naive and just a tad solipsistic.

To get self-righteous about the backlash? Well, that's called "Laura Billings".

But did anyone expect any less from her? She plaintively asked in a column last week, "What happened to 'changing the tone' in politics?".

What, indeed?

Nine months ago, having a green 'Wellstone!' bumper sticker on your car was like wearing a black band on your arm. For a few days at least, before the ill-fated memorial service made people crazy with partisan feuding, people walked a respectful distance around your grief.

Interesting observation.

Yes, there is a time to grieve. But after a while, walking around clothed in black (unless one is a recent immigrant from, say, rural Mexico) is going to draw some comments. This is America. We move on, unless the deaths were a result of an attack on all of us ("Remember Pearl Harbor!", "Remember 9/11"), we tend to keep grief in its place.

But this isn't just your ordinary grief.

More on this below.

Now, nine months after that plane crash, a friend of mine finds that her bright green bumper sticker and lawn sign have a rather different effect.

Regularly, she finds the words 'commie,' 'socialist' and others I can't print here scratched into the dust that coats her car. Twice she's been flipped off, for no apparent reason, by drivers with competing 'Coleman for Senate' stickers on their tailgates. Neighbors have started to ask, some in rather tactless terms, when she intends to take down the lawn sign she staked in her front yard long before the election.

I'm not surprised. While I'm pretty laissez faire with my neighbors, I'd probably start rolling my eyes by now, too.

Picture a parent that loses a child. This engenders the most intense grief you can imagine (yes, Laura, worse even than the grief over Wellstone). Visible signs of that grief are inevitable, understandable, even healthy.

But if the parents are plastering the minivan with pictures of their dead child nine months later, people might be forgiven for mixing their sympathy with isolated thoughts that the bereaved parents might wanna get some counseling - right?

But people have a right to their feelings. They also have a right to their opinions.

According to the latest political bumper sticker, people like her — and there are many — should just face the fact that "it's time to park the bus," a reference to the green bus the former political science professor drove all the way to Washington.

Put more pointedly, as another bumper sticker spews, "He's dead. Get over it.''

In a recent Associated Press story about the advent of such anti-Wellstone advertising around town, state Rep. Michael Paymar, DFL-St. Paul, called these messages "below the belt" and "highly insensitive.'' He's right, of course.

It'd be right - if and only if they were directed at the late Senator himself.

But you'd have to be dense - or awash in solipsistic self-pity - not to know that the stickers have nothing to do with the late Senator. They are aimed squarely at his disciples, who nine months after the funeral are still flogging the electorate with Wellstone's sainted corpse.

He's dead! Let him rest in peace! More importantly, to quote that most irritating Democrat artifact, move on! Wellstone's legacy may guide you - but it is time for you Democrats to find your next living inspiration to get behind!

Remember the movie Ordinary People, with Donald "Kiefer's Dad" Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore and Timothy Hutton? The family's older son dies, and the parents keep beating the younger son over the head with the elder's blessed legacy, and the younger son eventually tries to off himself because there's just no way to live up to the legacy of the sainted departed...

See where this is going, DFL?

Of course, in Laura Billings' world, there's just no way this is a DFL problem. No, it's those icky, talk-radio listening, blog-reading Republicans:

And yet, I would also add, they're not all that surprising in a political culture that is increasingly characterized by its crudeness, rudeness and willful lack of respect for anyone who doesn't see things exactly as you do.

She's referring to Republicans, of course.

I'm sure she's not referring to DFLers who think concealed-carry supporters are compensating for some sort of sexual inadequacy, or that balancing the budget is a plot to starve children and the elderly, or that conservatism is a psychological problem, or that conservatives are something to be libeled and silenced.

This may explain the best-selling success of conservative bomb-thrower Ann Coulter, author of "Treason," a book with such a tediously black-and-white premise (liberals are to blame for everything) that even her supporters are starting to wonder if her ranting is getting dangerous. If you've seen her on television lately, and she's always on television, you may have been treated to a tirade about how Joseph McCarthy was, in fact, a fine American patriot cruelly slandered by liberals, or about how liberal pundits are actually mourning the deaths of their pals Odai and Qusai Hussein, since liberals always side with the enemy.

Ms. Billings - isn't it "crude, rude and disrespectful", and doesn't it lower the level of our political discourse, to associate all of your opponents' thought with the most comically extreme example of it?

That'd be like my saying "Laura Billings? Pffft. This explains the popularity of this Democrat hate site".

Right?

Of course, I'd be "crude, rude and disrespectful" not to note that Ms. Billings does have at least one even-handed bone in her journalistic body...

And no, it's not just Republicans or their supporters who aren't living up to their promises to "change the tone" in politics. Case in point: California Democrat Pete Stark. As Democrats filed out of the House during the recent pension bill fracas in Congress, Stark stayed behind, getting into a verbal feud with a Republican from Colorado who told Stark to shut up.

"You think you are big enough to make me, you little wimp?" replied Stark. "Come on. Come over here and make me. I dare you. You little fruitcake. …" Though Stark should receive censure from both sides for such a moronic outburst, I've heard more than one observer praise him for "standing up" for himself.

Fair enough.

But it doesn't make up for the grating illogic or tortuously-derived conclusions at the root of this column.

Illogic?

In such a spew-loving environment, it may come as no surprise that former Ventura administration apologist John Wodele, who in his four years with the governor developed a gift for calm understatement, was recently let go by conservative talk radio station KSTP. "I needed to be more confrontational, with a harder edge. But that's not me,'' he told media critic Brian Lambert. "Some callers go well beyond having fun with a difference of opinion."

Woedele wasn't canned because he was polite and calm. He was canned because he was awful on the air,and got terrible ratings, and showed no signs of being able to improve as an air talent or ratings machine (which is what it's all about in radio). Perhaps Laura Billings can chalk Woedele's axing up to "crudity, rudity and disrespect"; it'd certainly fit her stereotype of KSTP's largely conservative audience.

But to tie it to the perceived disrespect for the sainted Wellstone is the sort of illogic that makes the worst of Ann Coulter seem pretty measured.

Did I say "tortuously-derived conclusions?"

No kidding. And when bumper stickers start "having fun" with the death of a senator, his wife, daughter and five other good people, it's clear we've crossed the line from mere incivility to simple-minded cruelty.

That people react incivilly and cruelly is part of human nature. It's a human trait that crosses all political boundaries.

But while Wellstone's true believers are entitled to their grief, and can suffer it as long and as tortuously as they want in their personal lives, their constant flogging of the Wellstone memory in public has long since turned maudlin and tasteless.

Billings comes perilously close to making my point:

Maybe that's one of the reasons so many of Wellstone's supporters seem reluctant to get rid of symbols that serve as reminders of him. Because rather than seeming enraged by his opposition, the late senator was one of a disappearing political breed who actually seemed engaged by his opposition — energized and up for a fair fight. And the more invective and incivility that is heaped on Wellstone's memory, the more his amiably argumentative style seems sadly missing from the public debate.

Right.

John F. Kennedy was a great influence on Paul Wellstone (and, indeed, on his opponent, Norm Coleman). Wellstone embodied much of what he himself admired about Kennedy. He even noted in interviews the impact that Kennedy's death had on him.

He didn't make Kennedy's death his entire reason to be. He didn't beat us over the head with the symbolism of the assassination. He didn't plaster that damn green bus with stickers saying What Would Kennedy Do? and Don't Moor the PT Boat.

He grieved, he learned, he moved on. He didn't roil with hatred over those whose grief ended earlier, or was confined to human rather than political grief.

As these hateful, hurtful bumper stickers are beginning to make clear, people who care about passionate but respectful debate may have more than Wellstone's passing left to mourn.

Yes. They need to mourn their own relevance.

And perhaps question the depths of their obsession.

It is time to park the bus. He is dead, may G-d keep his soul, and it is time to get over it.

Because, to answer the sticker's question "What Would Wellstone Do?", the answer is "put the grief where it belongs and move on".

Posted by Mitch at August 6, 2003 09:41 AM