Sunday Pages: "For One Who Would Not Be Buried in Westminster Abbey"

An epitaph by Alexander Pope.

Dear Reader,

On Friday night, we went to the Bardavon in Poughkeepsie to see The Possum, the new Mae Martin new show. At one point, Martin, who is 38, was riffing about nostalgia. “Maybe things were just better in the Nineties,” the comedian mused. There followed a collective sighing in the theater—the sound of wistful agreement.

My first novel, Totally Killer, is set in New York City in 1991. In 2008, in the book’s prologue, I wrote this:

Admittedly, the Nineties are not a decade that inspires much in the way of nostalgia. But there will come a day when the significance of the first year of that apocalyptic decade will become readily apparent. The great pitch and moment of that annus mirabilis cannot be understated. As my friend Maddox once remarked, 1991 was my generation’s 1969. In those twelve fleeting months, everything fell into place: culturally, politically, socially, the whole ball of wax.

Here we are, 18 years later, and ha! The Nineties nostalgia is palpable!

I don’t know that things were better in the Nineties. It’s not like we didn’t have a president who flew on Epstein’s plane and couldn’t keep it in his pants. What I do know is that everything was more chill. The first modern reality TV show did not air until 1992, Google did not launch until 1998, and when we decided to go to war against a country in the Gulf, we actually, you know, won. Hormuz, you say? In the Nineties, the only straits that were dire were the guys who sang “Money For Nothing.”

And we all knew it. There was a point in college—this was in the early Nineties—when it felt like we Gen Xers were living through the lamest and most insignificant period of American history. The Greatest Generation beat Hitler; the Baby Boomers had The Sixties—an entire decade of momentous activity that changed the world forever (and which they refused to shut up about). And us? We had grunge, clunky home computers, and The Simpsons.

The Soviet Union broke up my senior year of high school, our president was young and reasonably liberal, there were no endless wars we had to go fight in. The economy was meh for the first part of the decade, sure, but generally, life was cushy. Our greatest generational worry was that our computer programs weren’t smart enough to grasp that 1999 should be followed by 2000 and not 1900. (Now, in the age of massive energy-sucking data centers and ChatGPT, there’d be no suspense; we know AI would fuck that up.)

History, it seemed, had passed us by.

How stupid we were! How naïve!

What seemed like the end of events that mattered proved to be the calm before the storm. Hurricane Clio was merely gathering strength, preparing for the Category 5 onslaught. I am reminded of the opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

The superlative degree of comparison only, meaning, as Billy Joel once sang, that we go to extremes. Every other word out of Trump’s big fat mouth is some superlative: the greatest! the fastest! the hottest! the strongest! Or, for us non-MAGA: the dumbest! the most criminal! the pettiest! the cruelest! the most rage-inducing!

Paradoxes abound. We can send a team of astronauts to the other side of the moon— and bring them safely home!—but I can’t talk to LB when she’s driving down the mountain without the cell service crapping out. Anyone reading this survived the worst plague in a century because of the brilliance of our scientists, who banged out a vaccine in record time, but a significant percentage of the country is convinced that vaccines are an evil globalist plot—including, regrettably, the whale-beheading snorter of toilet-seat coke whom Trump has entrusted with our nation’s health services. Half the world is fighting to overthrow strongmen—shout out, Hungary!—while the other half may as well be right-swiping a despot dating app (called Dictatr, obviously). It may be that Orwell’s grim prophesy will come true—“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”—or it may be that Putin, Orbán, Bibi, and Trump will all go to the great Board of Peace meeting in the sky in time for the Semiquincentennial.

Perhaps this is what compelled me to spend a few hours yesterday revisiting famous epitaphs. While researching the various early-nineteenth-century Brits Shelley calls out in “The Masque of Anarchy,” I came across an epitaph that Lord Byron wrote on the death of Castlereagh, the much-loathed Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs:

Posterity will ne’er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and piss.

Byron’s lines can be easily modified to suit our own purposes, on that happy day when the remains of Orange Hitler are deposited somewhere along Bedminster’s back nine:

Here lies the greatest of the great,
The late great Donald Trump!
The loo’s too far, so do not wait—
Stop here and take a dump.

Gross, yes, admittedly—but then, so is Donald.

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The most famous epitaph writer is probably Alexander Pope (1688-1744), the sort of naughty wit who, if he were alive today, would be doing improv with Mae Martin, but is now known solely for writing the way-too-long poem from which is taken the title of a zany Charlie Kaufman film.

The death of an earlier and less consequential queen than the mum of King Charles—Caroline of Ansbach, wife of George II—inspired Pope to compose one of his more searing epitaphs. Stricken by what was probably colon cancer, the unfortunate Caroline died when the royal surgeon, attended by a ninety-year-old doctor who accidentally set his wig on fire during the procedure(!), decided to slice away part of her protruding intestine rather than repair it. It was, shall we say, a shitty was to go. Of his former friend, with whom he’d had a falling out, Pope wrote:

Here lies, wrapt up in forty thousand towels,
The only proof that Caroline had bowels.

That one, needless to say, was not immortalized at Westminster Abbey—although quite a few of his other epitaphs were. Pope himself was interred not at Westminster but at St. Mary’s Church in someplace called Twickenham, which I’m pretty sure is made up. This is the epitaph he wrote for himself:

For One Who Would Not Be
Buried in Westminster Abbey

HEROES and KINGS! your distance keep;
In peace let one poor Poet sleep,
Who never flatter’d folks like you:
Let Horace blush, and Virgil too. 

Telling the Romans to fuck off, I must say, is excellent form.

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Inspired, I tried my own hand at the epitaph. I dare say Pope would approve of this one:

An Epitaph on Queen Elizabeth II

The wonder of her long reign is
The lack of public rows and quarrels.
The worst that we can say of Liz:
She tried, but couldn’t outlive Charles.

The rest of my epitaph subjects are, alas, still alive. But in the same way newspapers don’t wait until the last minute to write obituaries, I think it’s prudent to have these little poems ready for humanity’s rapid response team to deploy:

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An Epitaph on Putin

Vast was his treasure, and great was his fall.
Everything else about Putin was small.

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An Epitaph on Netanyahu

This time, it’s not a false alarm
Spurred on by bad AI—
Bibi the Butcher, bringer of harm,
At last really did die.

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An Epitaph on JD Vance

Behold, the tomb of JD Vance—
His loss, our spirits bolstered.
Come! Join us in our joyous dance—
And safely get your couch upholstered.

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An Epitaph on Peter Thiel

To live forever, Peter Thiel,
His fortune gladly would have gave.
And so it thrills me to reveal,
You’re standing on his grave.

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An Epitaph on Stephen Miller

Yes! Death did Stephen Miller finally fell—
For this we’d all impatiently been waitin’.
He’ll vex the damned and make intol’rable Hell—
It makes me have some sympathy for Satan.

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An Epitaph on John Roberts

Citizens, unite!
He who posterity dislikes
Occupies this cursèd ground.
Umpire for the far-right
No longer calls our balls and strikes,
But rests beneath the mound.

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An Epitaph on Jeffrey Epstein

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An Epitaph on Donald Trump

The moment that he died is when
He made America great again.

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An Even Shorter Epitaph on Donald Trump

Here: lies.

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We can’t go back to the Nineties, obviously. And I don’t want to—not least because I didn’t start dating my wife until 2000.

But I see now what a luxury it was, to feel like I was living in a boring historical period. The last ten years feels like the Universe making up for lost time—like karma traffic police writing tickets willy-nilly to meet some sinister celestial quota.

Is it too much to ask to bring back some of that Nineties “Oh well, whatever, never mind” energy? To take it down a notch? To make America chill again? Heck, it would make a cute little bumper-sticker acronym for the 250th:

Make America Chill Again! Restore Our Nation’s Integrity!

Put a feather in slogan on our cap and call it #MACARONI.

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PROGRAMMING NOTES

Two weeks from today, I will be speaking at the Writers Resist! benefit in Woodstock. It’s a great lineup. Please come out if you’re around.

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Note: Part of this piece ran in October 2022, before the ‘24 election, when Biden was president, and life was great.

Photo credit: Cassiano KW.