Last week when the Taoiseach managed to exit the Oval Office with his dignity \u2013 and then some \u2013 it\u2019s fair to say that many of us felt relieved, if a little dirty. Those images will never not be disturbing. But then, as if we needed to be reminded precisely whom he had been consorting with, a Trump post promptly blasted through what the 18th century philosopher Edmund Burke called \u201cthe decent drapery of life\u201d. <\/p>\n
\u201cGood. I\u2019m glad he\u2019s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!\u201d, wrote the five-time draft dodger of Robert Mueller, an honourable public servant and decorated war veteran, an old man dead from Parkinson\u2019s, his wife and daughters still absorbing the terrible finality of his last breath. Trump\u2019s celebratory post landed only minutes after the public announcement. <\/p>\n
Though many of us cleave to the old guidance of not speaking ill of the dead (in public anyway, and with a decent time lapse), we know better than to expect decency from Trump, a man who has delighted in abusing the memories of people like John McCain, Colin Powell and Rob Reiner after their deaths. <\/p>\n
In a normal world, that chilling absence of empathy will always stop people in their tracks and even remind us why manners matter. Burke believed that manners are more important than laws because the laws depend on them. \u201cThe law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarise or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Whatever the flaws in Burke\u2019s philosophy, those universal truths endure. So does his conviction that the cultivation of human sympathy and a capacity to share in the suffering of others are fundamental to a healthy society. Manners, sympathy and empathy. Now try mapping that full house on to Maga and the White House.<\/p>\n
Contrast Trump\u2019s barbarism towards Mueller and his beatification of Charlie Kirk, the hugely influential Magaverse podcaster shot dead last September. Apart from his verbal onslaughts on gun control and DEI initiatives, Kirk targeted empathy itself. He couldn\u2019t stand the word, viewing it as \u201ca made-up, New Age term that does a lot of damage, but is very effective when it comes to politics\u201d. <\/p>\n
From his heavenly perch he must have been perplexed at the Magaverse\u2019s turbocharged performances of empathy on his death, not to mention their hounding of minor social media figures who lost their jobs for expressing relief or merely quoting his more controversial words. <\/p>\n