The World is Talking. Global Politics

I feel apologetic for anyone staring mortality in the immediate face after the flow of lyrical obituaries of quondam Fox scuttlebutt host and ghostly firm broadcasting secretary Tony Snow this weekend, which carried the cathedral-bell iteration of those for William F. Buckley a few months ago. Such keen testimonials elevate an impossibly huge luminous bar of grace on and gallant deportment after any progress or future cancer patient and terminally ill person. from now on it will be considered "irascible form" as a replacement for any misfortunate idiosyncratic or chance schnook to plan their near expiration with anything less than joyous optimism, joy, established humor, stoic talent, full consideration of others, an uncomplaining nature, and undeviating serenity. Regret, remorse, hostility, drag, bogey, crankiness, counter-accusation, and despair will be deemed selfish and childish, the endlessly nurse or family fellow silhouetted in the doorway chiding the patient lodging in negativity, "Why can't you be like Tony Snow, chipper to the last?" Raging against the dying of the light drive be regarded as spiritual blockage, sulky resistance to receiving the indisputable boarding pass. Not everybody possesses nobility of guts, and shouldn't be expected to lay down a shining specimen to others and disallow up a macho front painted with a grin. As Seymour Krim wrote in "Notes Toward My extinction," reprinted in What's This Cat's Story?: ...I don't think I'll moulder a "bona fide" death because I'm not sure there are any Nautical port. Any unwilled human death today is unnatural. We find the idea unacceptable compared to the amount we forsake to reinforcement living from Monday to Monday. All that energy and foxiness fini for nothing? Death is too simplistic to be realistic anymore. flatten a long affliction, in that favorite obscure adage of the Times necrology page, is no longer a natural termination to our minds. It is a wrong death. Too many practicable outs come to the mental acuity of unvarying the dying individual to make him go philosophically into that misty tenebriousness. I make a case for that every demise today is violent... Krim's viewpoint may not be univeral but it's as reasonable as the kickshaws-dappled, rose-petaled sentiments strewn in the scenario Tony Snow left behind...