New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, a reasonable and reasonably respected conservative voice on the great paper’s Op-ed page, had a column a few days ago, a laudatory column about right-wing commentator Charles Krauthammer.
Stephens noted that Krauthammer has announcedthat he is going to die soon of cancer. What vanity, to announce your own impending death.
That means Krauthammer, who has been paralyzed from the neck down since a diving board accident while a student at Harvard Medical School will die at age 68. He must be admired for finishing that course of study and becoming a psychiatrist and the work he did in that capacity — but for nothing else.
He need not be admired for his second career so praised by Stephens; his years as a faux philosopher of conservatism when in fact he has been a voice enabling the extreme right and the misshapen world it has wrought. Stephens would have you believe Krauthammer represents an acceptable perspective in his writings different from this monstrous regime, when in fact he is one of those who spawned it.
So the Stephens column is in large measure the obituary of a still living man. In it Stephens extols Krauthammer. I will not explain why or quote from it at all, much less at length. It is easy to find and read the column if you want. But why would you waste your time doing it?
The Times’ regular Op-ed columns are spaces in which The Times always permits its readers to post their responses. So I did. I do frequently. I do not like Charles Krauthammer. So I did.
It may be unkind to say so but I have always privately believed that the bitterness and anger that comes through in his often vitriolic writings (Mr. Stephens of course sees great, wisdom, charm and balance in the same writings — he is entitled to his opinion and I to mine). I have always thought them to be a response to the circumstances that put him in and kept him in a wheelchair most of his adult life. A man containing an inner anger about that happening to him needs some way to strike out against his circumstances.
I don’t know the man, it’s simply intuition as to what would have made him so resentful of anything generous and liberal in our society. My conclusion may be unkind and entirely wrong. But no one would, could or ever will convince me that the damage to his body needed to leave him with a damaged view of the world.
So this is what I posted on the Stephens column. Read it understanding that in these perilous times, when the nation is at war with itself, when some of the nation is at war with our friends in the world, that this is in fact a war in which no prisoners are tbeing taken and the wounded are being left to die (so far at least in the figurative, not the literal sense).
And so this I posted this on Mr. Stephen’s column:
“I beg to differ with Mr. Stephens. Charles Krauthammer has been a voice for division, inequality, internecine political war and resentment — resentment rooted perhaps in his own circumstances.
“If you do what he has done and you are not one of his intimates, one of his family or friends, then you can only judge a man by the way he has conducted himself as a public man.
“As a public man I have found him to be despicably dishonest, divisive and disingenuous in a manifestly far right expression of views as he participated in the poisoning of American political discourse.
“Like all those who know only his public voice, I am left to judge the public man, the man who insisted on being a public man. That man I judge harshly.
“We are told not to speak ill of the dead. He is not — though he says he will be. I’ve suffered the same general disease, twice. I let family and friends know. I did not announce it to my larger world, tho that is a smaller one than his. Were I a more public person, I would not ever announce it to the world.
“The world can know we have died when we do. It need not know we are dying. Announcing that condition is to seek a handout of sympathy and empathy. Save that for the tiny children at the border. For us individually, that’s not for the world to give but for those close to us.
If you choose to be a public man or woman, keep your private lives private with the understanding the greater public will know and judge you without mercy by what you do and did and said as a public figure.”
Peeling the Onion 