The Dead, Redux

I generally maintain a somewhat, kind of, almost policy of not speaking ill of the recent dead, mainly because there are those who might legitimately still mourn their passing. Even for people like my evil, long-lost twin Richard Nixon, who was a CREEP (natch), but you had to figure that there were some folks who called him Uncle Dicky or whatever his clan called him, and it might make them a little sadder than they ought to be to overhear someone say, "well, I guess we won't have Dick Nixon to kick around any more." Also, as I have said before, if I were in politics I would strive for Franco, but would probably wind up Nixon. Got Bugs?

But then you encounter people whose life work has been nothing but a litany of bad: Derrida comes to mind. You pray that they saw the error of their ways in the end, but you find that it is hard to put your own heart into it. You don't want to hear yourself saying, "welcome to Hell, creep" but once in awhile you catch a little echo or two of something along those lines.

There was a death recently that falls into this second category. A death of someone whose influence on art, culture and architecture has been nothing but unfortunate. A person whose philosophy may have sometimes hidden under a cloak of fake irony, but was rotten and evil to the core.

Phillip Johnson passed away in his nineties. Let's pray for his soul and that his work perishes with his body. I always imagined him as a blank-eyed zombie, constantly on the hunt for ways to spread a blanket of doom and despair. He took the worst from every artist, philosopher and architect he studied and rolled it into a big bundle of hideousness.

But he did it with charm and the sort of charisma that appeals to pimps and petty criminals and obviously a lot of East Coast high society. As a result his work was given far too much attention, had far too much influence, and all for evil ends.

If you want to engage in pious hand-wringing about the dead, save it for Carson, who may have been an ephemeral period piece (and he was), but he was good ephemera whose work (overlooking for now his golfing tendencies) was decent and more on the side of good than bad. There is no harm in exagerating the good of a decent, though flawed man. There is great harm in continuing the legacy of Phillip Johnson.