Opinion: Is it possible to say an ad hominem kaddish?
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Luke Ford, the Mr. Blackwell of Orthodox Judaism, finds a suitably inappropriate way to send off his old friend Cathy Seipp: quietly video- and audio-recording her funeral for maximum snark and catty caught-in-the-acts. Ford’s icy neutrality on questions of loyalty and good taste has produced an unsurprising negative reaction from friend and foe alike. From an ad hoc Seipp mourners’ list, here are some of the few fit-for-family-reading responses:
I am flat-out astonished at your utter lack of sensitivity, decorum or even the thinnest hint of empathy. You seem to believe that your brutal honesty somehow insulates you from proper judgment. Not in my book, pal. Had I known you were recording the service, I’d have personally intervened and attempted to remove the device from your person. As I write this, I actually find myself shaking with rage... How do you even live with yourself? Oh yeah, that’s right, being the center of your universe, you are unaware of any other way. It’s the method of the sociopath whom you so obviously are. Luke is the reason anti-Semitism is on the rise.
I’m barely even an armchair Ford watcher, but it seems like every time there’s a brouhaha like this (i.e., every month or so), the conversation turns to whether this time, this time!, he’s gone too far, whether it might finally, finally!, be time to write the Vulcan porn gossip out of polite society. I suspect the reason he always comes back can be found in this recent defense of a Seipp family enemy. If he were just some amoral jerk who constantly turned on his friends, they would drop him without further thought. But Ford always has some elaborately worked-out justification for doing the wrong thing—and even if the morality is understood only by Ford himself, there’s something compelling in the amount of thought and ethical self-torment that goes into the decision. In any event, the last laugh belongs not to Ford but to Evelyn Waugh, who somewhere in Purgatory gets to look up or down from his holy torments and see the plot inspiration for The Loved One II, wherein an emotional Forest Lawn funeral ends up as some fakakta gossip item that won’t be remembered next week.