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Dick Cheney Is Dead

 
 
 
Toni said:
laughing dog said:
No one gets out of here alive. For some reason, I thought he had already passed away.

I have empathy for his family. But that’s it.
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Meh. I have some respect for Liz. That’s about the extent of it.
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I honestly wonder how Liz feels right now. Like... I'm not gonna lie, I am NOT a fan of my own biological father. I learned some things over the weekend and had a conversation with him that ended something like "spend the next week figuring out how to make yourself feel bad (for something very specific)."

If he can't manage to accomplish that for the entire rest of his life, the fact is, I will have no remorse over his passing. I will have sadness in mourning a man who died, having been told point blank what his claim of love requires of him, to feel the pain of guilt over his past decisions, or to be pushed to the very edge of my own life, further than he already sits.

That's my own biological father.

When he dies -- which he thinks is going to be rather soon, though I question that -- and this is my own father I am talking about, I would not consider it a disrespect for people to speak ill of him. He is a shameless man who ought instead be shameful.

I cannot speak for Liz, but when the so-very-flawed man that is my father passes, the only thing that would be disrespectful to me in what others may say is if they made judgement of me on account of him, or falsified the account to put more blame on him.

I will be clear: I have tried my best, and often failed, to avoid being the villain in my own story. People should talk about this at my passing; so I cannot say we should avoid speaking true things of the dead. Only lies may speak ill of them, as far as my own father's eventual death is concerned, and as far as my own death is concerned, too.
 
I honestly wonder how Liz feels right now. Like... I'm not gonna lie, I am NOT a fan of my own biological father. I learned some things over the weekend and had a conversation with him that ended something like "spend the next week figuring out how to make yourself feel bad (for something very specific)."
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I read a very long article this morning that said Cheney was very close to his children and his grandchildren, so I imagine that despite all of his many flaws, Liz will miss him to some extent.

My own father was very flawed, and he could be an abusive bully to me and the second born. But, not only did I stand up to him, I became very close to him and I know he loved me till the end. I look at it this way. We don't have absolute free will. We are all highly influenced by our genetic and environmental heritage. My father was raised by an abusive mother, and a very depressed father in the midst of the Great Depression. He had to steal food to survive as a child when his own mother would run off for weeks. He suffered from bipolar disorder and severe PTSD from 4 grueling years of combat during WWII. He suffered from extreme guilt for killing Japanese soldiers.

Then he was brainwashed to become an evangelical Christian as a young adult. So, imo, he couldn't help who he was, so I tried to emphasize his better traits and the fun things he and I did together during my youth, instead of dwelling on is negative side. He bullied my sister much more than me, but even she has forgiven him in retrospect because she also realized he had a harsh early life, and suffered from mental illnesses. He was 87 when he died of cancer, after suffering with severe chronic pain for decades. I can't say that I felt any sense of loss, but we lived far apart and I rarely saw him. In fact, I probably had more pity for him than anything else. Maybe Liz also thinks of her father's better traits while not dwelling on his disgusting side. Based on what I've read, she loved her father.

Sorry that you have a father who isn't lovable. I can certainly understand that. My father did a lot of horrible things, including throwing my sister out of the house in the middle of a snowstorm when she was 19. That's just for starters. Yet somehow my sister survived and forgave him in the end. He did apologize to her a few years before he died, so I guess in some ways he realized he had damaged her.

Still, there is no need to feel as if you have to love or care about your father. We all have different ways of coping with difficult family members who hurt us. Plus, despite sometimes missing my mother. She had a long life and so I can't say I really grieved when she died at age 97. It was past time for her to go after living with dementia for about 7 years.
 
southernhybrid said:
Still, there is no need to feel as if you have to love or care about your father
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That's the funniest part... I do love and care about him.

That's why my last call with him ended with "do this" rather than "we are done".

That said... Whether I ever accept that he really loves me back hinges entirely on whether he can do the thing love demands: to shoulder the burden of his guilt.

If he can do that, I can say at his funeral "he learned the true meaning of love, even if at the end", but I will also still say "though it pains me all the time before that he had not learned this."

Those boundaries are what makes love capable of existing, between the boundaries we respect of each other and the personal challenges we overcome.

I don't think our freedoms are absolute. Getting any measure of freedom and capability in this world is hard. But I do know that there are only two paths for that man: to die sad and lonely as someone who mistook his love for himself as love for others, or to die sad and guilty and maybe also lonely (but less lonely) and to be remembered as someone who learned to love.

Tricky Dickey is out of paths. We can see which one he walked, despite seeing others walk other paths.

I think it is right to judge him on the path he walked, now that he has walked it, and to see that he did great evil.
 
Jarhyn said:
Toni said:
laughing dog said:
No one gets out of here alive. For some reason, I thought he had already passed away.

I have empathy for his family. But that’s it.
Click to expand...
Meh. I have some respect for Liz. That’s about the extent of it.
Click to expand...
I honestly wonder how Liz feels right now. Like... I'm not gonna lie, I am NOT a fan of my own biological father. I learned some things over the weekend and had a conversation with him that ended something like "spend the next week figuring out how to make yourself feel bad (for something very specific)."

If he can't manage to accomplish that for the entire rest of his life, the fact is, I will have no remorse over his passing. I will have sadness in mourning a man who died, having been told point blank what his claim of love requires of him, to feel the pain of guilt over his past decisions, or to be pushed to the very edge of my own life, further than he already sits.

That's my own biological father.

When he dies -- which he thinks is going to be rather soon, though I question that -- and this is my own father I am talking about, I would not consider it a disrespect for people to speak ill of him. He is a shameless man who ought instead be shameful.

I cannot speak for Liz, but when the so-very-flawed man that is my father passes, the only thing that would be disrespectful to me in what others may say is if they made judgement of me on account of him, or falsified the account to put more blame on him.

I will be clear: I have tried my best, and often failed, to avoid being the villain in my own story. People should talk about this at my passing; so I cannot say we should avoid speaking true things of the dead. Only lies may speak ill of them, as far as my own father's eventual death is concerned, and as far as my own death is concerned, too.
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I understand. My own feelings with regards to my ( long deceased ) father are complicated. I loved him deeply, and respected him for many reasons but—and there is always a but—some decisions he made, basically to save himself in a bad situation—had unforeseen terrible consequences for my siblings that are still playing out-and to a much lesser extent, for me. But you had much different, much deeper issues/traumas re: your dad. God knows mine are bad enough but from the little you’ve written over the years, they paled in comparison. You definitely did not deserve that.

I have some respect for Liz Cheney although we disagree politics calmly about almost everything.

When my father died, there was a lot of grief. And some relief as well. For many reasons.
 
Toni said:
Politesse said:
Are we allowed to be rude about this one?
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Truth is harsh. Which is different than rude.
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See, I feel that way about everything, which is why I'm rude as fuck. If I don't tell someone they're wrong, how will they know? I would want someone to tell me if I was wrong about something. Especially if I was the Vice President of the United States of America.
 
Politesse said:
Toni said:
Politesse said:
Are we allowed to be rude about this one?
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Truth is harsh. Which is different than rude.
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See, I feel that way about everything, which is why I'm rude as fuck. If I don't tell someone they're wrong, how will they know? I would want someone to tell me if I was wrong about something. Especially if I was the Vice President of the United States of America.
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And we all love you for it.
 
Toni said:
But you had much different, much deeper issues/traumas re: your dad
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That's the thing. They aren't MY traumas. They are mostly my sister's; I walked in on the situation 20 years cold on the ground, him a lonely sadsack who doesn't understand his life and his own misery or how to love someone other than himself.

I walked in, had some interactions with all the parties involved, and came to the conclusion that the man who sired me for lack of a better word is a primary cause of his own misery.

When I let myself emotionally attach to the situation all I feel is shame and disappointment about him, and a dread for what that says about me.

There's a gaping wound in my sister a mile deep that's dripping with the poison of emotional abuse and I don't know how she can keep it together from what I am assured by my uncle is just a small slice of a much bigger pie.

But none of that compares one iota to if he had been so tragically unaware and powerful.

One thing that I know runs in the family is that we can kind of choose how much and whether and sometimes even what to feel.

I'm not sure this is something everyone can do. It's definitely something that many people claim wholely to be unable to do, but what is the feeling of forgiveness but something someone allows themselves to feel?

So from my perspective, when I see others act a way and then either fail to feel or fail to feel later about their lack of feelings and fail to act in a way that will improve the consistency of their feelings about things, it seems to me like a personal failure.

With my biological father, I know for a fact that he can, because a lot of the hardware is the same (for better or worse), and he's expressed that he understands some of that experience.

With Cheyney, I think we might hear from Liz before too long, because she has her own opinions and is known to speak them.

I expect that she will acknowledge her father as a man with deep flaws whom she loves, though I can say for myself, it's perfectly fine to not respect one's parents because of the decisions they made and the decisions they did not make.

...But I would also kind of expect her to accept the fact that others are crass and rude about his life, insofar has he disregarded their well-being, or in some situations straight up decided to bomb them, or say things that led to them being bombed.

To wit, I think that Tricky Dick is with Charlie Kirk now*.

*Dead, and remembered as men who caused great harm through their lives though in different ways.
 
H. L. Mencken wrote a scalding piece about William Jennings Bryan. It appeared in Baltimore Evening Sun on July 27, 1925. Bryan had died on the 26th. Mencken called him "one of the most tragic asses in American history" and went on:
"It is the national custom to sentimentalize the dead, as it is to sentimentalize men about to be hanged...But what of his life? Did he accomplish any useful thing?...I doubt it....Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things...Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything he was not."
 
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