Barbara Bush’s death sparks online bickering
Former U.S. first lady Barbara Bush helped erase the stigma around HIV/AIDS, writes Emma Teitel.
There is no one to like in this story, except maybe the deceased.
Barbara Bush died on Tuesday at 92 years old. The former first lady was extremely popular even when her husband and sons were not. Of course, throughout her life she made gaffes that betrayed her enormous privilege and her prejudices. When she toured a shelter in Houston that housed refugees of Hurricane Katrina, she suggested “so many” of them “were underprivileged anyway, so this (living in a refugee camp) is working very well for them.”
But she did a lot of good, too — as demonstrated by the bipartisan outpouring of grief that met her death this week. She was a champion of children’s literacy. She held HIV-infected infants and publicly embraced an HIV-infected man in the ’80s, when few people would. These actions helped erode the massive stigma around the illness both in the United States and around the world.
In short, she was a person who said the wrong thing on several occasions but did the right thing on many others, and whose status as matriarch of one of the most loathed political dynasties in American history appeared not to stain her reputation in the eyes of many liberals mourning her online.
Save for one: California State University, Fresno, professor Randa Jarrar, a novelist and English professor who is currently the target of vicious attacks on social media.
Shortly after the former first lady’s death, the professor tweeted the following: “Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal. F—- outta here with your nice words.”
When critics and trolls took Jarrar to task, she doubled down: “PSA: either you are against these pieces of s—- and their genocidal ways or you’re part of the problem. That’s actually how simple this is. I’m happy the witch is dead. Can’t wait for the rest of the family to fall to their demise the way 1.5 million Iraqis have. Byyyeeeeeeee.”
If you’re wondering how a person with the emotional maturity of an exceptionally bratty teenager qualified for tenure at an institution of higher learning, take a number.
I’m not a fan of the notion that one must never speak ill of the dead. But I’m even less partial to the notion that it’s perfectly OK to dance on somebody’s grave — especially when that person is not a monster by any means. Barbara Bush may have “raised a war criminal,” as Jarrar argues. But she wasn’t a war criminal herself. Unless the deceased in question was an evil maniac or an otherwise irredeemable figure, I think a grace period is in order where you shut up about her shortcomings until she’s buried in the ground.
But let’s pretend for a minute that Barbara Bush was a thoroughly objectionable person. I still don’t understand the impulse to celebrate death with abandoned glee. It’s a little sick. When beloved evangelist Billy Graham died earlier this year (a man who was not exactly a friend to the gay community) I didn’t throw a party. I just chose not to mourn him.
That said, I don’t think it’s fair to admonish Jarrar for her remarks without admonishing, in far stronger terms, the right-wing internet trolls and otherwise seemingly respectable conservatives who have unleashed a subsequent torrent of hate in the professor’s direction.
It’s one thing to speak ill of the dead. It’s another thing entirely to wish someone dead and in doing so refer to her as a “beast,” an “ugly, fat pig,” and a “dumb bitch.” Unfortunately, a great majority of the criticism of Jarrar’s cruel statements is coming from people who are unduly cruel themselves.
Both parties involved claim to hold the moral authority, when in reality, neither does. It’s interesting, albeit unsurprising, that many of the conservative voices calling for Jarrar to be fired from her job are either silent or indignant when liberals demand the exact same thing in reverse: that a rightwing professor get canned for expressing an unpopular opinion. It seems there is no cause more popular among conservatives than the highly selective protection of free speech they agree with.
In the end, whatever your feelings about Barbara Bush, she possessed something both her detractors and her defenders sorely lack: class.