The Grim Reader: This Week in Death
by Michael Schaffer
MAY 29, 2009 TAGS:
The biggest death of the week was such big news that many media outlets never bothered to cover it with a formal obituary: the suicide of former South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun, who leaped off a cliff near his native village of Bongha on Saturday.
In the New York Times, Seoul correspondent Choe Sang-Hun’s report opens with a tick-tock of Roh’s final hours, playing down the traditional life story and legacy analysis. Perhaps because the corruption inquiry that haunted the ex-president remains a contentious story, the author shies from conclusions, lapsing instead into evenhanded cliché: “Mr. Roh’s strong stands as president proved divisive,” for instance, or “Even in retirement, Mr. Roh inspired strong emotions.” Same goes for the Washington Post, whose report carries a Tokyo dateline and plays up Roh’s recent state of mind (he’d started smoking) while burying the bare bones of his 62 years (born to a poor family, self-educated, defied right-wing military regimes, ran for president on an anti-American, pro-peace platform, left office with his once-squeaky reputation sullied) after the jump of the story.
Such are the distractions that obituarists face when the work of reflecting on a life is interrupted by the need to cover the fallout from a death. In fact, the corruption case wasn’t even the biggest obstacle for those who would pause to remember Roh. A day later, North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il conducted a nuclear test — a frightening example of how Roh’s peninsular diplomacy failed. Kim’s condolence message to Roh’s family was the sort of thing a critical obituarist might have mocked. Instead, most stick with analyzing the death as a political event, with the Times’ Choe treating suicide like a political tactic: “His public image has transformed into that of an honorable man who chose suicide to defend his reputation,” he writes. (Interestingly, the stories note that Korea, unlike Japan, has little tradition of political suicide, meaning Roh’s end was less than a foregone conclusion.)
Across the pond, where the media are more willing to wait a few days before running an obit — thereby letting their area experts cover the breaking news — the Economist dedicated its single obituary to Roh, writing sympathetically about his early years defending dissidents (“When he saw ‘their horrified eyes and their missing toenails,’ he said later, his comfortable lawyer’s life was over”) and his status as an outsider in Korea’s clubby political culture (“while they had been at Seoul National University, or Oxford, or Harvard, he had been pouring cement and mending nets”). The magazine also brought a smile to Grim Reader when it described Roh entering a meeting with Kim, “striding keen as mustard down the fluorescent pink carpet towards the potbellied little tyrant in his zipped-up uniform.”
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Elsewhere in the Obitosphere, everybody covers the passing of Israeli writer Amos Elon. Given that alleged bias on even the most peripheral Mideast issues prompts stateside audiences to cancel subscriptions, U.S. papers are circumspect in how to describe a guy who made his name chronicling those issues. The Washington Post, in its lede, chooses to punt: “Amos Elon, 82,
one of the most distinguished Israeli writers of his generation and a leading chronicler of Jewish history and the intractable problem of building a livable home for Jews and Arabs in the Middle East, died Monday in the Tuscan region of Italy.” The Los Angeles Times offers a hint: “Amos Elon, whose critical explorations of Jewish history and the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict made him one of the most distinguished and provocative Israeli authors of his time, died Monday in Italy.”
Those not in the mood for a close textual analysis of their obits might prefer to check out the description in the U.K.’s Independent: “Amos Elon, a leading Israeli writer and historian who became increasingly disenchanted with the course taken by his country after the 1967 Six Day War.” For that matter, the conservative Jerusalem Post is also a lot clearer about just why Elon was provocative: “Author Amos Elon was glad when the State of Israel came into existence, he immediately criticized the ‘occupation’ of the Palestinians, and he eventually left the country for a quiet life in Italy,” the obit begins.
--
The Los Angeles Times does a nice piece on the passing of Rolf McPherson, the son of the famous early 20th-century evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. Less charismatic than his mom, McPherson was a much better administrator, growing her Pentecostal church into an international behemoth that claims 8.4 million members. Like a lot of obits that involve multi-generation stories, the history of the McPhersons also reminds readers how much things have changed since Sister Aimee’s heyday. Who knew that hipster-dominated Los Angeles neighborhoods were once an epicenter of American evangelicalism?
--
The U.K. papers are also all over the death of Ken Gill, a 1970s trade union leader who was one of the last militant Communists to hold a prominent position in British life. The Times’ report notes that Gill was charming and warm to rivals, but remained dutifully loyal to the Moscow party line even as the Soviets crushed dissident movements from Hungary in 1956 to Poland in 1981. Grim Reader, who is more keen on the human drama than learning what some British labor leader thought about the Prague Spring, wishes there was some hint about what Gill thought as the whole Communist apparatus fell apart in 1991 (or, for that matter, as capitalism took its licks this year).
Further afield, the Guardian has a nice report on Mats Akerlund, a Swedish obstetrician who developed Atosiban, a drug that suppresses premature labor, still the main cause of perinatal death…. The Washington Post’s Adam Bernstein has a charming piece on death at age 94 of Joan Alexander, the radio actress who played Lois Lane in 1940s serials…. Maria Amelia Lopez, 97, was the world’s oldest blogger, according to a report on the female-centric blog Jezebel. (Actually, the posting is reports from elsewhere, with added context and wit from the bloggers. Lopez would surely approve).
--
Grim Reader’s must-read obit of the week has to be that of 103-year-old Daniel Carasso, “the father of modern yogurt.” Born in Salonika, Carasso moved with his family to Switzerland, where a chance encounter with a yogurt-making Bulgarian immigrant got his father thinking seriously about the theretofore little-known food. “Those were high times for yogurt,” writes the Washington Post’s Emily Langer, explaining that a Russian Nobel Prize winner had argued that the bacilli in the substance could promote health. Relocating to Barcelona, the elder Carasso started one of the first modern yogurt factories, naming it “Danone,” after Daniel’s nickname. It might have stayed a niche product if not for the Nazis. Young Daniel was running an offshoot in France when war broke out, forcing him to flee to New York.
The rest, Langer writes, is history: American ad men convinced him to change the name to Dannon and experiment with the recipe. “‘Fruit on the Bottom’ was enough to turn an obscure ethnic food into a favorite American snack.”
--
Michael Schaffer is a regular contributor to Obit. His book, One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry, was published March 31.
In the New York Times, Seoul correspondent Choe Sang-Hun’s report opens with a tick-tock of Roh’s final hours, playing down the traditional life story and legacy analysis. Perhaps because the corruption inquiry that haunted the ex-president remains a contentious story, the author shies from conclusions, lapsing instead into evenhanded cliché: “Mr. Roh’s strong stands as president proved divisive,” for instance, or “Even in retirement, Mr. Roh inspired strong emotions.” Same goes for the Washington Post, whose report carries a Tokyo dateline and plays up Roh’s recent state of mind (he’d started smoking) while burying the bare bones of his 62 years (born to a poor family, self-educated, defied right-wing military regimes, ran for president on an anti-American, pro-peace platform, left office with his once-squeaky reputation sullied) after the jump of the story. Such are the distractions that obituarists face when the work of reflecting on a life is interrupted by the need to cover the fallout from a death. In fact, the corruption case wasn’t even the biggest obstacle for those who would pause to remember Roh. A day later, North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il conducted a nuclear test — a frightening example of how Roh’s peninsular diplomacy failed. Kim’s condolence message to Roh’s family was the sort of thing a critical obituarist might have mocked. Instead, most stick with analyzing the death as a political event, with the Times’ Choe treating suicide like a political tactic: “His public image has transformed into that of an honorable man who chose suicide to defend his reputation,” he writes. (Interestingly, the stories note that Korea, unlike Japan, has little tradition of political suicide, meaning Roh’s end was less than a foregone conclusion.)
Across the pond, where the media are more willing to wait a few days before running an obit — thereby letting their area experts cover the breaking news — the Economist dedicated its single obituary to Roh, writing sympathetically about his early years defending dissidents (“When he saw ‘their horrified eyes and their missing toenails,’ he said later, his comfortable lawyer’s life was over”) and his status as an outsider in Korea’s clubby political culture (“while they had been at Seoul National University, or Oxford, or Harvard, he had been pouring cement and mending nets”). The magazine also brought a smile to Grim Reader when it described Roh entering a meeting with Kim, “striding keen as mustard down the fluorescent pink carpet towards the potbellied little tyrant in his zipped-up uniform.”
--
Elsewhere in the Obitosphere, everybody covers the passing of Israeli writer Amos Elon. Given that alleged bias on even the most peripheral Mideast issues prompts stateside audiences to cancel subscriptions, U.S. papers are circumspect in how to describe a guy who made his name chronicling those issues. The Washington Post, in its lede, chooses to punt: “Amos Elon, 82,
one of the most distinguished Israeli writers of his generation and a leading chronicler of Jewish history and the intractable problem of building a livable home for Jews and Arabs in the Middle East, died Monday in the Tuscan region of Italy.” The Los Angeles Times offers a hint: “Amos Elon, whose critical explorations of Jewish history and the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict made him one of the most distinguished and provocative Israeli authors of his time, died Monday in Italy.” Those not in the mood for a close textual analysis of their obits might prefer to check out the description in the U.K.’s Independent: “Amos Elon, a leading Israeli writer and historian who became increasingly disenchanted with the course taken by his country after the 1967 Six Day War.” For that matter, the conservative Jerusalem Post is also a lot clearer about just why Elon was provocative: “Author Amos Elon was glad when the State of Israel came into existence, he immediately criticized the ‘occupation’ of the Palestinians, and he eventually left the country for a quiet life in Italy,” the obit begins.
--
The Los Angeles Times does a nice piece on the passing of Rolf McPherson, the son of the famous early 20th-century evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. Less charismatic than his mom, McPherson was a much better administrator, growing her Pentecostal church into an international behemoth that claims 8.4 million members. Like a lot of obits that involve multi-generation stories, the history of the McPhersons also reminds readers how much things have changed since Sister Aimee’s heyday. Who knew that hipster-dominated Los Angeles neighborhoods were once an epicenter of American evangelicalism?
--
The U.K. papers are also all over the death of Ken Gill, a 1970s trade union leader who was one of the last militant Communists to hold a prominent position in British life. The Times’ report notes that Gill was charming and warm to rivals, but remained dutifully loyal to the Moscow party line even as the Soviets crushed dissident movements from Hungary in 1956 to Poland in 1981. Grim Reader, who is more keen on the human drama than learning what some British labor leader thought about the Prague Spring, wishes there was some hint about what Gill thought as the whole Communist apparatus fell apart in 1991 (or, for that matter, as capitalism took its licks this year).
Further afield, the Guardian has a nice report on Mats Akerlund, a Swedish obstetrician who developed Atosiban, a drug that suppresses premature labor, still the main cause of perinatal death…. The Washington Post’s Adam Bernstein has a charming piece on death at age 94 of Joan Alexander, the radio actress who played Lois Lane in 1940s serials…. Maria Amelia Lopez, 97, was the world’s oldest blogger, according to a report on the female-centric blog Jezebel. (Actually, the posting is reports from elsewhere, with added context and wit from the bloggers. Lopez would surely approve).
--
Grim Reader’s must-read obit of the week has to be that of 103-year-old Daniel Carasso, “the father of modern yogurt.” Born in Salonika, Carasso moved with his family to Switzerland, where a chance encounter with a yogurt-making Bulgarian immigrant got his father thinking seriously about the theretofore little-known food. “Those were high times for yogurt,” writes the Washington Post’s Emily Langer, explaining that a Russian Nobel Prize winner had argued that the bacilli in the substance could promote health. Relocating to Barcelona, the elder Carasso started one of the first modern yogurt factories, naming it “Danone,” after Daniel’s nickname. It might have stayed a niche product if not for the Nazis. Young Daniel was running an offshoot in France when war broke out, forcing him to flee to New York.
The rest, Langer writes, is history: American ad men convinced him to change the name to Dannon and experiment with the recipe. “‘Fruit on the Bottom’ was enough to turn an obscure ethnic food into a favorite American snack.”
--
Michael Schaffer is a regular contributor to Obit. His book, One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry, was published March 31.
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