A man goes to a newspaper stand every day, buys a copy of Pravda, glances at the front cover, curses, and throws it away.
After a few weeks of this the seller just has to ask what’s going on: “why do you always look at the cover but never inside?”
“I’m looking for an obituary.”
“An obituary? But those are in the back!”
“Oh no, the obituary I’m looking for will be on the front page.”
For most of my youth, I thought I’d feel that way about Dick Cheney. I relished the actuarial tables that indicated I would live to see the day he passed, and would celebrate it. Callous young me thought I’d be so delighted to see a world without him, I’d jump for joy the day he died.
I was wrong. I’m not happy. I’m not precisely mournful either. If I had to name it, I’m feeling dread. Numbered among the things Trump ruined is teenage me’s dream of gloating over Dick Cheney’s grave, because Trump somehow turned him from an avatar of villainy to a Shakespearean tragedy.
Everything Dick Cheney stood for has failed. In many ways, I think that’s a perfectly good outcome; I don’t think American global hegemony was a force for good. But there are plenty of other values and principles that he held, and all of them have been tossed by the wayside as his political project turned into an ethnofascist nightmare.
This disintegration of the party he used to lead ended with him voting for Kamala Harris, and encouraging others to do so as well. Surely he knew the odds he’d live to see another election. He picked this as his last act of political defiance. And in the end, even that was a failure. She lost. He won. We all failed, sure, but Cheney failed specifically in this. Even with all the power he spent his life accumulating, at the cost of so many lives, it wasn’t enough to pull up back from the brink.
And then he died.
My father passed away in March of 2016. At some point during Trump’s first term, my wife made a comment that she’s glad he did not live to see Trump win. I had to agree. Even though I’d do anything, pay any price, just to spend another five minutes with him, I wouldn’t want his twilight years spent watching the country that he fought for crumble around him like this, leaving a mess for his children, and their children, to clean up. If you thought it important, that’d be existential torture.
We all hope to leave the world a better place than we found it. Dick Cheney did not. He inherited a bountiful world, and by chance and by choice left it watching his country slide down into dictatorship. At the sunset of his life, he knew it. He loathed it. He tried to stop it. He died knowing he didn’t. I can’t imagine what that must feel like.
I’m not happy he’s dead. I’m not grieving his loss. This is not an elegy. I’m simply realizing that I do not want that happening to me, and I know I’ll have to fight to make sure it doesn’t.