{"id":441,"date":"2025-11-21T19:48:18","date_gmt":"2025-11-22T00:48:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/morsepower.net\/?p=441"},"modified":"2025-11-29T14:44:40","modified_gmt":"2025-11-29T19:44:40","slug":"elegy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morsepower.net\/?p=441","title":{"rendered":"Elegy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There’s an old Soviet joke:<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A man goes to a newspaper stand every day, buys a copy of Pravda, glances at the front cover, curses, and throws it away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I’m looking for an obituary.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“An obituary? But those are in the back!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Oh no, the obituary I’m looking for will be on the front page.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For most of my youth, I thought I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be so delighted to see a world without him, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d jump for joy the day he died.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was wrong.  I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not happy.  I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not precisely mournful either.  If I had to name it, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m feeling dread.  Numbered among the things Trump ruined is teenage me\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dream of gloating over Dick Cheney\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s grave, because Trump somehow turned him from an avatar of villainy to a Shakespearean tragedy.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everything Dick Cheney stood for has failed.\u00c2\u00a0 In many ways, I think that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a perfectly good outcome; I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think American global hegemony was a force for good, for example.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d live to see another election.  He picked this as his last act of political defiance.  And in the end, even that <\/em>was a failure.  She lost.  He <\/em>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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t enough to pull up back from the brink.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then he died.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My father passed away in March of 2016.  At some point during Trump\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s first term, my wife made a comment that she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s glad he did not live to see Trump win.  I had to agree.  Even though I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d do anything, pay any price, just to spend another five minutes with him, I wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be existential torture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t.  I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t imagine what that must feel like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not happy he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dead.  I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not grieving his loss.  This is not an elegy. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m simply realizing that I do not want that happening to me, and I know I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll have to fight to make sure it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s an old Soviet joke: 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?” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morsepower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morsepower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morsepower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morsepower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morsepower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=441"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/morsepower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":444,"href":"https:\/\/morsepower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441\/revisions\/444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morsepower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morsepower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morsepower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}