Gary Laderman

One sign of success is leaving your mark on society, making an impact; being famous brings you out of the anonymous masses and bestows celebrity, a status that affords you to an afterlife that most will never achieve; individual biographies of lives lived are more compelling than questions of postmortem judgment or the possibility of reincarnation—these lists of the dead convey profound lessons about what counts in life to the living in twenty-first century America. And nothing teaches a profound moral lesson like a corpse.

In the last couple of weeks we have been rocked with scandals rooted in some of the worst offenses imaginable: the profanation of sacred trust placed in the protection of children and the disposition of the military dead.

While there are some religious elements to be found in Democratic politics, the party as a whole doesn’t begin to approach its rival’s Republicanity.