I wrote about The Economist’s obituary of Ayatollah Khameni in “Tears in Jannah.” In my post I quoted Saul Sadka’s shocked condemnation of the obituary and noted that the obituary purported to take us inside the mind of the ayatollah. It presumed to channel Khameni’s thinking, as James Joyce did Molly Bloom’s in the last chapter of Ulysses.
This accounted for some of Sadka’s takeaways. It wasn’t the obituarist speaking, it was Khameni! Don’t you get it, you dolt?
Even a regular reader of The Economist might not have understood the obituarist’s method. I can’t find any recent Economist obituary (compiled here) that adopts it. The Economist reserves it for the death of egregious malefactors. The point of the exercise seems to be to shock the bourgeoise.
Obituaries editor Ann Wroe explained “The art of writing an obituary” in a 2017 Medium interview. In Wroe’s explanation of the art, she commented on one Economist obituary that especially upset American readers (link in original):
The obituary you wrote for Osama bin Laden is very striking, particularly the passage about how he enjoyed taking his children to the beach and eating yogurt with honey.
I got into such trouble for that! Our American readers were incensed.
Do you have a different approach for someone like him?
You could just write a rant about how evil he was, but as I said, I don’t like to do it from the perspective of other people. I like to do it from his. I’ve done about three people who I think are pretty evil, and the thing is that they hang themselves with their own rope. They say or do something appalling, and you just put it in there. They condemn themselves, as far as I’m concerned. It’s true that there’s no such thing as being totally evil or totally good. We have to recognise that we all have the potential for good and for evil. When I found out ordinary things about bin Laden, I wanted to put them in. Why not mention them? You have to try and give a rounded picture of a person. They’re not entirely monsters. There’s a human somewhere in there. And that should make their evil all the more horrific by contrast. You wonder how those two things could co-exist.
Americans still have the notion that obits have to be of worthy people and that they should be praising like the eulogy you would give at a funeral. The New York Times does them really well, but most of the American press thinks it must be very reverential.
The Economist has undertaken such an exercise on an extremely limited number of occasions. The Khameni obituary can now be added to the list.
Wroe might have had a field day with Hitler. We can be grateful we have Mel Brooks’s portrayal of Franz Liebkind in The Producers to give us some idea of what Wroe would have wrought if only she had been on the case for The Economist in 1945.
Consider this gem from The Economist’s Khameni obituary: “In the Iran-Iraq war of 1980 America even supported Iraq, ruled by a tyrant, rather than Iran.” We are apparenly meant to be struck by the limitation of the thought. Khameni himself is a tyrant. How ironic!
Actually, no. It’s not ironic. That is not how Khameni or the mullahs think. It’s stupid. The exercise of the obituary subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge.
