Media Sensors Pick Up on Insensitivity

Instantaneous reporting through the mass media has made it risky for anyone to express a casual opinion.

In headlines, or on the TV news, one’s words seem magnified a thousand times.

Thus, a Dodger executive naively slurs the capacities of blacks for management, and is suddenly out of a job and out of baseball.

A Glendale judge employs a taboo epithet for blacks, and even though he insists his intent was innocent, he finds himself assaulted from all sides, and his professional life in danger.

In this sense the media act not as censors but as sensors, picking up the covert prejudice, the dormant bigotry. That such slips of the tongue result in such public outrage is a measure of how far we have come in putting bigotry behind us. It may exist, but it is not popular.

Speaking ill of the dead is an even older taboo, and one that is rarely violated. Even the most scurrilous and sinful among us may expect a gracious eulogy at our funerals, and forgiveness and a blessing from some clergyman who probably never knew us.

As the Romans said, and the Greeks before them, “De mortuis nihil nisi bonum”-- “Of the dead, say nothing but good.”

So ingrained in us is this tradition that even the serial killer is committed to the earth with nothing worse said of him than that he was flesh.

Imagine the chagrin, then, of an English vicar who acted on the misguided notion that the family of a departed villager wanted to hear him vilified.

I have his story from a British newspaper clipping sent to me by Jim Moore, the former San Antonio College English department head who is sojourning in England, and not missing a single British quirk.

The deceased farmer Fred Clark’s family was understandably aghast when Canon Michael Dittmer, presiding at Clark’s funeral in the Nettleton parish church, told mourners that the departed had been “a very disagreeable man with little good in him, who would not be missed.”

Especially shocked were Clark’s widow, Pauline, and her four grown children. While conceding that Fred had not exactly been a saint, Mrs. Clark insisted that he had not been a sinner, either, and that he was well liked by his neighbors.

“I am very distressed at losing my husband,” said the distraught Mrs. Clark, 54, “and this has just made it worse. He kept saying my husband was bad-tempered. I was horrified. He should have bothered to find out more about him because he was a very loving husband. He must have got the wrong end of the stick.”

Neighbors came forward to testify to Clark’s virtues. He had served on the village council and recently had lent two fields for a church fete, not even complaining when rain and churning crowds had turned them into a quagmire.

Like the Dodger executive and the Glendale judge, Canon Dittmer was astonished by the vituperation that fell upon him after the delivery of his dubious sermon.

Like them he tried to explain. He had merely been trying to draw a balanced sketch of a man he did not know. The crestfallen canon, who is 69 and has served in the West Wiltshire area for 35 years, agreed that he had indeed “got the wrong end of the stick,” as Mrs. Clark put it.

Perhaps Canon Dittmer, like most of us, had attended or presided at many funerals in which the deceased was delivered into the hands of the Lord with an assortment of alleged virtues that none of us had ever suspected in him.

In talking with the family, he said, he had gathered that they did not want their loved one to be portrayed as “a painted, plaster saint.”

“I did not know the man,” he explained, “as they are not church people. I was ending a man’s days and I have to commit the bad in him and the good in him to God--not just the good. But I 1634169445wrong and exaggerated.”

Mr. Dittmer wrote a letter of apology to all 150 mourners, admitting that his sermon was “distorted and erroneous,” and “delivered in an insensitive manner.”

That is not enough to satisfy the parish council. They have petitioned the Bishop of Bristol, the Rt. Rev. Barry Rogerson, to retire the vicar from his post.

Having approved the vicar’s apology and a statement in the parish magazine, the Bishop said, “I won’t be taking this any further.”

The matter is buried.