Quips Befit Funeral
They Laughed, Thank Goodness
Last updated Monday, August 18, 2008 7:47 PM CDT in Columns
By John Brummett
THE MORNING NEWS
The Rev. Vic Nixon introduced Gov. Mike Beebe as Mike Huckabee. The preacher was so horrified that he had to cover his face. It was no matter. It gave Beebe the opportunity to quip. He responded in kind by calling Nixon, an eminent Methodist minister, "monsignor." Beebe reminded that he wasn't the one on a diet.
It permitted Bill Clinton, who spoke next, to joke that he was certainly glad Nixon hadn't introduced him as President Bush.
This happened at Bill Gwatney's funeral, where quipping, verbal quickness on one's feet, political banter, partisan jab and harmless faux pas by the oh-so-earnest reverend were altogether appropriate to the occasion. Gwatney would have liked the humor, I suspect. You could almost hear him saying -- in that brutally candid and mildly acerbic way of his -- that this is awful, my funeral and all, my getting senselessly gunned down, but you folks may as well lighten up, at least for a moment or two.
Gwatney had this way about him. It was that he was getting ready to rear back and tell you some plain, simple, unadorned truth, if you thought you could handle it. And he wasn't much for airs or affectation.
He surely loved and admired Preacher Nixon, his pastor in recent months, but he would have gotten a kick, I'd wager, out of the well-meaning, soft-spoken preacher's slip.
That's especially true considering that, with all due respect, Gwatney didn't so much care for Huckabee, or at least his politics. It may have been that, so typically of Arkansas politics, he liked the Huckster on those occasions when he wasn't fussing at him.
There was a theme to the remarks delivered at this service by Nixon, Beebe and Clinton. They were hardly original and not all that profound. But they were true, and words to live by. It's that you can't begin to explain such a horrid act of deathly violence, but that there is a way to deal with it.
What you can do, they all essentially said in various ways, is keep alive through your own life, in your attitudes and your conduct, the spirit of the departed.
Clinton said Gwatney was supposed to come to his funeral, not the other way around. Clinton said that as he gets older, he becomes ever more certain that each living day is a stroke of good luck for him and a stroke of bad luck for someone "who's had to go up the river ahead of me."
On this day, you weren't very smart if you got to the church only 20 minutes early. By then the sanctuary was full. The annex for the closed-circuit television viewing was full as well. You had to stand against the wall. And what kept going through your mind as you stood there, peering out on a who's who of Arkansas, was that the senseless violence that took this life was being rejected, overpowered, by this mass of galvanized humanity.
People were saying, "Look at us, devil: We're a president, a governor, a preacher and lots of others, too."
Murder loses, the people were saying, because we're going to keep Gwatney alive. And, by the way, look at this: The preacher's got a red face and we're laughing. How do you like them apples?
About this columnist
John Brummett has been writing about Arkansas and national politics for three decades and as a regular columnist since 1986. Email Brummett at jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.
Click here to read his blog.
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