Idea du jour: the pre-obituary

Arts and Music, Humor, Journalism, Literature 2 Minutes

What a dreary afternoon for a holiday! I needed a pick-me-up, and P.J. O’Rourke provided it.

O’Rourke has a great idea for reviving the newspaper biz, which desparately needs great ideas and revival: the pre-obituary:

What I propose is “Pre-Obituaries”—official notices that certain people aren’t dead yet accompanied by brief summaries of their lives indicating why we wish they were.

The main advantage of the Pre-Obit over the traditional obituary is the knowledge of reader and writer alike that the as-good-as-dead people are still around to have their feelings hurt. It was a travesty of literary justice that we waited until J. D. Salinger finally hit the delete key at 91 before admitting that Catcher in the Rye stinks. The book’s only virtue is that it captures, with annoying accuracy, the maunderings of a twerp. The book’s only pleasure is in slamming the cover shut—simpler than slamming the door shut on a real Holden Caulfield, if less satisfying. The rest of Salinger’s published oeuvre was precious or boring or both. But we felt constrained to delay saying so, perhaps because of an outdated Victorian hope for a death-bed flash of genius.

Let us wait no more. With the Pre-Obituary we can abandon pusillanimous constraint and false hope and say what we think about the lives of public nuisances when their lives are not yet a dead letter. And we won’t be stuck in the treacle of nostalgia and sentiment. We won’t find ourselves saying of some oaf, “His like will not pass this way again.” Or, if we do say it, we can comfortably add, “Thank God!” The precept of Diogenes isn’t “Do not speak ill of the living.”

Think of the opportunities we’ve missed already….

By O’Rourke’s lights, several notables besides Salinger needed pre-obituaries, but we blew the chance:

  • Beatrice Arthur
  • Paul Newman
  • John Kenneth Galbraith
  • Ted Kennedy

But we’re not too late for some others:

  • Jimmy Carter
  • Gore Vidal
  • Noam Chomsky
  • Norman Lear
  • Ed Asner
  • Ben Bradlee
  • Ross Perot
  • Ted Turner
  • Jane Fonda
  • Barney Frank
  • Harry Reid
  • Bernie Sanders
  • Christopher Dodd
  • Bernadine Dohrn
  • Bill Ayers
  • Andrew Lloyd Webber
  • Donald Trump
  • Paul Krugman
  • Ben & Jerry
  • Keith Richards
  • Mick Jagger
  • Janet Jackson

I might quibble with  few on that list, but overall, it’s target-rich.

Published