PICKING YOUR FUNERAL SPEAKERS

Remember all the national mourning when Craig Thomas died, the outpouring of grief when Frank Lautenberg passed away?

Of course not, because the deaths of those two sitting United States senators — both since 2007 — were both blips on the news, little more than news briefs on inside pages of newspapers.

Neither served during the presidential administration of Donald Trump, though. Neither rarely if ever took the opportunity to tow the national media line about a president they love to hate.

But John McCain did, and, Vietnam prisoner of war though he was and presidential candidate though he was, was thus the subject of an enormous outpouring of news coverage, tributes and lionization. If he had not added thorny Trump critic to his resume, as stellar as that resume was, his death would not have been the weeklong tribute it became.

The politicization even extended to his funeral services, as it did to those for gospel and soul singer Aretha Franklin last week. The moral of the story: Be sure you know the person who speaks at your loved one’s funeral. The McCain family did and apparently was OK with it; the Franklin family did and, in at least one case, apparently was not.

The die was cast in the McCain scenario by Trump himself, who had made disparaging remarks about McCain during the 2016 presidential campaign, including that he was “not a war hero because he was captured.”

The McCain family made sure the slights would be paid back by not inviting the sitting president to the late senator’s funeral. Understandable if not diplomatic. First daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, represented the president.

And then the invited speakers were only too glad to make notso-veiled references to Trump, which is both what the national media hoped and with which they were only too happy to lead their coverage.

“We gather here to mourn the passing of American greatness,” daughter Meghan McCain said. “The real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly, nor the opportunistic appropriation of those who lived lives of comfort and privilege while he suffered and served.

“The America of John McCain,” she said, “has no need to be made great again because America was always great.”

McCain “understood that if we get in the habit of bending the truth to suit political expediency or party orthodoxy, our democracy will not work,” said former President Barack Obama, his 2008 presidential opponent, adding that he “championed a free and independent press that’s vital to our democratic debate.”

“So much of our politics can seem small and mean and petty. Trafficking in bombast and insult, phony controversies and manufactured outrage. It’s a politics that pretends to be brave and tough, but is instead born of fear,” he said. “John called on us to be bigger than that.”

McCain “detested the abuse of power and could not abide bigots and swaggering despots,” said former President George W. Bush, who knocked off the senator in the 2000 GOP presidential primary.

“He respected the dignity inherent in every life, a dignity that does not stop at borders and cannot be erased by dictators,” Bush said. “… John’s voice will always come as a whisper over our shoulder: ‘We’re better than this, America is better than this’.”

At Franklin’s funeral, Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson referred to Trump by saying: “You lugubrious leech, you dopey doppelgänger of deceit and deviance, you lethal liar, you dimwitted dictator, you foolish fascist.” The Rev. Al Sharpton suggested someone needed to teach Trump what the word “respect” — the name of one of Franklin’s biggest hits — means.

Singer Stevie Wonder, like Meghan McCain, mocked the president’s favorite slogan by saying, “What needs to happen today not only in this nation, but throughout the world, is that we need to make love great again.”

But the Rev. Jasper Williams, pastor of Salem Baptist Church in Atlanta and the man who eulogized Franklin’s minister father, was the invited guest the family wish they’d uninvited. Instead of joining in the Trump pile-on, he spoke a truth the crowd did not want to hear.

He said black America had lost its soul, that women alone who run the majority of black households cannot raise boys to be men and that black America had abandoned its past when “Jim Crow laws and segregation … forced us to each other instead of forcing us on each other.”

“If you choose to ask me today — Do black lives matter?” Williams said. “Let me answer like this. No. Black lives do not matter. Black lives will not matter. … Black lives should not matter. Black lives must not matter. Until black people start respecting black lives and stop killing ourselves, black lives can never matter.”

Wrong message at the wrong time, many said. But when is the right time? When is the right time for a black leader to cut through the rhetoric, to cut through the obfuscation, to cut through the blame game, to cut through the generational cycle and say, “Stop. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Speakers at both funerals last week hoped to send a message. Time will tell if any of the messages find purchase.