God Hates Schadenfreude

Hi Ray,

I want to write about Fred Phelps, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to express my thoughts on him and his passing. Like most things, it's complicated.

I spent years reviling the man and the acts of the Westboro Baptist Church. I thought his message of hate was wrong-headed and un-Christian, whatever that means, and that his tactics were offensive and classless. I seethed with anger when he and his kin would picket the funerals of homosexuals, servicemen, and anyone else that would get them news coverage. When his attorney daughters stood on the steps of the Supreme Court after their victory over the father of a Marine whose funeral WBC picketed and smugly busted out some Ozzy Osbourne "Crazy Train," I actually felt nauseous. It was then that I realized that members of this family have some serious mental health issues.

The Phelps version of legal decorum and 

compassion for a grieving father.

So you might think I'd be on board with all the folks tweeting their joy at his demise with messages like "Dear Fred Phelps: sorry you're going to fucking burn in hell, you gay bashing soldier hating shitbag" and the like. But I'm not. His death doesn't erase the great pain he caused others in his life. It doesn't undo him celebrating the tragic death of Matthew Shepard. What is does do is remind me that at the end of the day, we are all just people. As Tyler Durden would say, we are all "the same decaying organic matter as everything else." In the end, Fred Phelps was just another sad, old human being, probably scared and lonely, and dying. Maybe I'm just lazy, but what would it accomplish to go picket Fred Phelps' funeral (if he'd had one) or to tweet vitriol about him?

Best,

Patricia

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Hi Patricia,

A couple years back, I was engaged in a debate about the proper way to say "So Long!" to a high profile politician. Their death really felt like a good time to unleash a proper hate obituary.

But, as with many things, the next morning's sobriety made a fantastic idea look not so fantastic. There was enough clarity in rescinding my hackneyed take-down that I spent some time thinking about where it went awry. To that end, I developed:

Ray's Three Rules For A Proper Hate Obituary
(Spoken in the Royal You, which is actually Me, so no offense.)

1) You must say something interesting. Stuttering through twelve paragraphs of "he was a doodie head," shows your failing as a person and as a writer. The true hate obituary weaves words together in order to set a torch to the memory of a high profile person. If you are only playing with wet matches, go the hell home.

2) You must know the person. A proper hate obituary has to be personal. You can't be some low grade newspaper hack or anonymous "political" blogger. If that person couldn't pick you out of a lineup if your name was on your shirt and your hair was on fire, you do not have standing to hold that person's jockstrap. Such a hate obituary will simply rehash all of the tired old tropes about the person, and we will all be worse for it.
3) The person has to know you hated them. No pot shots after death to ride the anti-canonization bandwagon, slacker. You must have been close enough to the person to taste the stench of the devil on his clothes and have his foul breath peel back the edge of your scalp. If you were a coward and smiled at his crooked teeth and shook his sickly little hand, you lost your opportunity. Purest hate, that which creates a proper hate obituary, can only be fostered on a personal, reciprocal level. Don't be a poseur.

There have only been two legitimate Hate Obituaries. My favorite is Hunter S. Thompson's one fingered send-off to Richard Nixon. It is, like much of his later writing, a profane final round with an old punching bag. But damn, it's a lot of fun.

The other is H.L. Mencken's utter destruction of William Jennings Bryan. Mencken leaves no word unsharpened or unsaid while gutting Bryan's carcass. It is a evisceration of profound beauty.

As different as they are, these two pieces share something deeper. Normal obits make us feel the loss of the person who has died. They make us notice the hole our lives will have moving forward. Mencken and Thompson make us notice the hole our lives had while that person was living. 

So many of the things that have been said about Phelps review the nastiness of his beliefs and the reprehensible actions of his church. My pet gripe against them is how their exploits are funded by the Kansas Department of Corrections and a perverse incentive in the law that allows a family of barred attorneys to bait folks into suing them.

That said, were our lives noticeably worse for Phelps' existence? The yelling and the hate bring all of us lower. But he had to sit and watch the country change around him. If anything, he was simply a survey pole left in the ground to measure how much earth has been moved. And now he is gone.

Which leaves us wanting to say something deep in the face of death, and he won't know what we thought about him. Isn't that always the way?

Cheers,
Ray

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Hi Ray,

Wowza, those are some seriously hateful hate obituaries! They are perfect illustrations of your 3 very sensible (and exquisitely penned) rules.  But hate obituaries?  Sure, I like a good snark as much as the next girl (actually, probably a bit more), but hate-o-bits are a touch one dimensional, no?  They reduce the deceased to a single element of his life and harp on that.  Thompson found Nixon to be a crook and a bad President; got it. Mencken thought Bryan's performance in the Scopes Monkey Trial was pathetically bad and characteristic of his litigation and general temperament in his later life; okay.  But is that all there was to them?  Of course not. 

It is natural to write about the things for which a person was most well-known.  When you're the POTUS or a history-making attorney, people are unlikely to write about how much you loved cats or what a great cook you were. Positive obits are just as shallow, though.  We just don’t notice so much because, unlike the hate obits, they tend to be so blandly and formulaically written as to be instantly forgettable.  

I'm fond of the statement, "people are complicated" – so much so that it is the official tagline to my other blog.  It's the way I try to see the world so I can manage the cognitive dissonance I feel when my actions and/or beliefs seem contradictory. I also use it to try to get a handle on inconsistencies in others.  It's a simple statement, but it can help quiet my brain when it is trying to make sense of why folks who are widely considered "good" confusingly do "bad" things, or vice-versa. My brain has a hard time shutting up.

Fred Phelps caused pain to great numbers of people at times when they were most vulnerable. It'd be easy to hate-o-bit him as a monster who used his twisted notion of god to kick people while they were down.  And that would not be untrue.  But, strangely, he was more. According to this article, what we know less about Phelps is how he was an Eagle Scout who was the speaker at his high school commencement, graduating at the age of 16 at the top of his class. He was an ordained Baptist minister at 17. He became a lawyer in the 70s and focused his practice on civil rights. (Civil Rights!) Something must have gone sideways in his head by 1980, though, as he was disbarred by Kansas and suspended from Federal practice because he went completely psychopants on a court reporter who he said didn't have a transcript ready on time. He sued her and held a circus-like trial that was a clear foreshadowing of the public shaming and humiliation that would become his modus operandi in later years.  He’d exhibited crazy-dude behavior before, but this incident was particularly egregious and public.

He was a father to 13 kids. It'd be nice to be able to say that at least he was a good, loving father who, due to mental illness, spewed vitriol and psychosis at strangers, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Phelps kids estranged from the Cult of Fred describe him as a mean and abusive dad.  Most of his kids grew up to be as mentally unbalanced and monstrous as he was.

Looking at Phelps as more of a complete person than simply the force behind one of the most hateful and hated groups in modern US History, he still comes out soundly on the asshat end of the spectrum. I suppose it's the civil rights thing that trips me up. He stated in the news that he became a lawyer to fight for social justice. (Me, too!) He argued that it was impossible for a black man to get a fair trial in the Kansas federal courts in the 80s and accused sitting judges of numerous types of prejudice including, ironically, religious intolerance. What happened to you, Fred? 

Apparently Phelps was ousted from his own church a year before his death. Some reports indicate that the cause was his call for his congregation – essentially his children and their spouses – to treat each other with kindness. Was he starting to see what he'd done?  Would his refound compassion have eventually turned outward? Would he have repented from his sins against society and tried to atone? We'll never know. Alas, he'd trained his kids too well. When he started talking about tolerance and kindness, they shuttled him off someplace to die and cut him off from contact with the outside world.

I don't intend to come off sounding overly sympathetic with a man whose greatest achievement was inflicting pain on others. But I don't know that I can go so far as to say I am glad he's dead. But even if I were, I don't know that I'd be on board with a protest or even a guilty pleasure hate obit. It's not like there is anyone who doesn't know who he was and what suffering he caused. Does he really need more press? 

I suppose if there is one good thing the man accomplished, it was fostering unity and community among those who opposed him. He motivated and radicalized people who may otherwise never considered their feelings about those under attack. He may have helped pave the way to all the recent victories in the struggle for marriage equality. Was that your plan, all along, Fred? Were you some sleeper agent martyr rallying the forces of equality by giving them a common enemy?  Okay, probably not.

I think the best reaction I've seen to Phelps' death is depicted in the KSHB-TV screen grab below.

Image source: Screen grab via KSHB-TV

I doubt these folks really believed that their message would be warmly received or change hearts in the WBC camp. And it didn’t. But I suspect that is not why they did it. I think they were demonstrating that compassion is not something you earn by your good deeds. It is something you give because as humans, there are things we all share. On many levels, we are more alike than different and we all affect each other in some way. 

Also, like those extraordinarily patient FaceBook posters who engage in lengthy social and political arguments with staunchly dug-in counterparts, their message isn't entirely for their opponents. Reason indicates that their adversaries will not be swayed no matter what persuasive, logical argument might be made. Their message, instead, is for the fence-sitters who quietly follow the skirmishes with interest and learn more about each side in doing so. Like those FaceBook patriots of one ilk or another, the group of people expressing condolence to the WBC – an organization in which most members had just lost their father or father-in-law – were making a statement to the rest of us. Meet hatred not with hatred, but with love.  Show compassion to those who seem to deserve it the least. Remember that we all share certain aspects of the human experience and that death comes to all, eventually. And that people, even those who seem so one-dimensional as to be cartoon characters, are complicated. 

Best,

Patricia