In Lieu Of

The Obitsman from the WSJ reports on a noticeable trend of death notices that close with an expressed desired to having those left behind support whoever the political candidate is in 2012 who will run against Barack Obama. They do this, or they express wishes of support for Republicans in general, or the Tea Party.

This of course is not quite like voting from the grave. It is a version of having a building named after you when you don't really have the money to achieve a plaque. It is something I saw a month or so ago when a friend sent me one of those Forwarded e-mails that have been everywhere. I generally delete these automatically, because to me they're never really worth reading. They're usually about how the land mass of the United States in Republican states is so much more than the land mass for Democratic states that obviously we're under some perverse rule. Never mind that the land mostly has sheep and wheat on it, no water, and certainly fewer people than the rest of the country. It does however have missiles. Somewhere.

A trend like this can be spotted and called a trend because so much of what gets written is digitally searchable. As Obitsman points, out a search for 'Tea Party' in these notices produced the Alice in Wonderland kind, and the Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck version.

It is not an alarming trend, although based on the comments from the blog this story appears in you wouldn't think so. People take sides. An alarming trend would be starvation, but that's another story.

For myself, my own comments went toward the observation that the possibilities for what people might further leave us with become endless. A little Twitter tag before the shuffle off.

I believe Dan Rather will leave us instructions that in lieu of flowers or a donation to whatever it is he succumbs to, will be to send money to launch an investigation.

Any investigation.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com/