The Obituary Of The Transparent Ironist

[Editor's Note : The following obituary is reproduced from The Potomac Herald (London edition), March 26, 2005. It is the only authorised obituary of the Transparent Ironist, and it speaks more volumes for what he most passionately believed in when he was alive than any auto/biography of his ever can.]

Mr Robert McCullough, veteran Republican senator for Colorado has died in his sleep in his country home in Nashville at the old age of 86, Reuters reports. Mr McCullough, who played a vital role during the Nixon administration and was at one stage even highly tipped for the post of the Secretary of State, wrote a weekly column in the Washington Post under the pseudonym of the Transparent Ironist to popularise his Republican views. What nobody knew, however, except for some of his closest friends, was that he himself criticised his own views under another pseudonym, the Banal Optimist, in that very same newspaper. It was widely believed that the Banal Optimist was Mr Crispin O'Hear, Democrat senator for Idaho, but the truth is finally out that it was, in fact, none other than the devious Mr McCullough, as crafty as a prairie wolf, who wrote as a Republican under one name and as a Democrat under another. So skillful indeed was Mr McCullough, the hardened Republican, in talking, thinking, feeling, and behaving as a Democrat that on one occasion in 1992 he was even mistaken by Bill Clinton for a Democrat at a party convention.

It is no wonder, then, that some of Mr McCullough's most intimate and beloved friends were not Republicans but Democrats. He once told a Democrat friend that he had taken to heart Jesus's great commandment, Love thy enemy, and that it was possible for him to do this only by placing himself in the shoes of precisely those whom he disagreed with, that is, the Democrats. It was this dangerous desire of his to see the world through the eyes of his sworn enemies that often placed Mr McCullough under the suspicion of his fellow-Republicans, and earned him the bemused admiration of his Democrat opponents.

Mr McCullough was a lover of the good things in life which he associated with what he called the high culture of Beethoven, Homeric tragedy, white wine, Proustian prose, German Romanticism, Corsican cheese, Russian caviar, and a liberal dose of irony. Not that he was unaware, being the ironist that he was, of how 'politically incorrect' and 'elitist' these loves of his were, but he nevertheless remained forever loyal to them in a world where nothing is stable, nothing is solid. He was a life-long antagonist of genetic determinism according to which we human beings are merely survival machines for the propagation of our selfish genes. As if to refute such a determinism through his own life, he leaves behind no children.

The night before he died, he wrote the following words which were found on his desk by his house-keeper :

'We men have become living ghosts', the old man said

Standing at the smoky street-intersection

'For we have forgotten how to die'

And I leaned towards him

Trying to catch his words

That were soon drowned

In that great unholy din

Of the rush-hour traffic.

Mr McCullough once wrote that there is only one genuinely philosophical problem : why do we go on living when we know that there are billions of human beings who are living through the most unspeakable agony, agony that we cannot mitigate in any way. This morning after his death, we might perhaps like to pause for a moment in silence and put that question to ourselves : why do we go on living in spite of knowing that we can do nothing to remove, or even reduce, the suffering of billions of the wretched on this planet?