Praising the Dead

ITS FUNNY THE WAY WE call people scumbags while they are still alive, and we call them saints when they die. Either way, we exaggerate. Nobody among us, said Goethe, if sufficiently fortunate to escape either praise or blame. Amen to that. In America, however, we do a lot of things backwards. Maybe we should praise people while they are still living, and tell the truth about them when they die. It would spare feelings. Besides, the dead cannot profit from praise, but the living can. In Syria, President Assad butchers his own people by the bushel, merely by refusing to forfiet his office when thousands of people are dying demanding that he does. Suddenly, Nelson Mandela dies, and Bashar Assad, eulegizing and praising the dead just like the rest of us, describes Mandela as "lesson and warning to tyrants". What exactly does he mean by that? Is it even remotely possible that Bashar Assad is aware that he himself is among the world's great tyrants? Do tyrants ever consider themselves tyrants? Bashar Assad probably thinks of himself as a freedom fighter, or a champion of the people, or something equally inane. American conservatives are even praising Mandela, even though Mandela was a communist. You would think they would be condeming him as th practitioner of a failed ideology. If anything, Nelson Mandela was "liberal" in the truest snes of the word; he wanted to change the world. He didn't like the world he lived in, and he wanted to change it, the status quo. In most if not all cases, conservatives do not want change, preferring to defend the status quo.