We are coping as best we can this weekend with the backlit glare from a political legend crafted over more than six decades, under a reluctance, both instinctive and inculcated, to speak anything but pleasantly of the dead. Coincidental occurrences, irrepressibly happening while he had been rightfully empowered to alleviate or prevent them — the enshrinement of the evildoer Willie Horton as the baseline of Republican dog whistling, the elevation of the mendaciously malignant Clarence Thomas to the highest Federal court, the nasty indulgence of AIDS in America and thence in the world, the denial of reality as the touchstone of governing — we blow aside, for Peggy Noonan’s Sancho Panza of “decency.” 
Much more to the point, would be to take at face value the cardinal myth of the late President, breeding, and indulge not in his current successor's gaudy 30 days of lowered flags, and parades of lachrymose crocodiles, sacrificial virgins, and legions of redhats; but rather, take up a patio with circumspect grief and calm reflection. The incumbent President manifestly has pervasive ignorance on his side, of the Presidency under remembrance now, which in any case cannot be filled in or topped up by information alone. It calls for a recital from Tony Kushner, of what human life was reduced to by decisions in that place in this country, and how indolence and insolence cleared the way for a regime we claim not to have expected.
Edward Hopper
1909
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