Reply #10: A Few Stories of Crying

[Hidden Stillness]

Thinking about my late Mom makes me cry, still. Thinking about great kindness makes me cry. Ed Muskie, the great progressive Democrat, cried during the 1972 Presidential campaign, after an increasingly vicious Nixon "Dirty Tricks Committee" anonymous campaign of rumor-spreading, (that later turned out to have been Patrick Buchanan and G. Gordon Liddy, and others), leading up to a claim that Muskie's wife was a Lesbian, and was cheating with another Democratic wife on the campaign. Muskie couldn't take the vile lies against someone who was such a good person anymore, and famously cried outside during an angry speech that was supposed to be fighting back and putting a stop to the Republican ugliness. Instead, the emotion was used by vile Republicans as further ammunition. That same year, the new nominee George McGovern's Vice-Presidential choice, Thomas Eagleton, was revealed to have suffered a major bout of depression, cured with drugs and I think electro-shock therapy. When the slander began about how "unstable" and "embarrassing" it all was, it came out that the reason for the depression was that Eagleton's son had been killed in Viet Nam. You can't even suffer and cry, for that. Eagleton, by the way, was one of the most honest, and most respected, people ever in Washington, D.C. It destroyed both of their campaigns that year--"weakness."

About "Imitation of Life"--that movie (the 1959 version) had a scene, the funeral scene, featuring one of the most spine-chilling music, a beautiful gospel song, sung powerfully by the great Mahalia Jackson, who was so great and is largely forgotten. That song alone will make you cry--it was fabulous. Crying is a wonderful, human but even more than human, thing. We would be stupid blocks of ice if not for it.