[Vision2020] Chris Witmer

[Andreas Schou]

Chris was seldom pleasant to me. I was seldom pleasant to him. I
thought that most everything he believed was objectionable in some way
or another. It would be dishonest to piously claim that I thought he
was a great guy, or that I forgave him -- as though he ever did
anything to me which requires my forgiveness.

I never encountered him in any situation in which I might learn that
he was a great guy. I knew him as an Internet crank. But though I have
entirely self-interested reasons for thinking so, I somehow doubt that
in the universal moral calculus, Internet crankery is anything but a
pretty trivial checkmark in the negative column. I appreciate that he
was an equal-opportunity crank, engaging (and enraging) both liberals
and the totally insane racists to the right of him.

Not knowing the subtle shadings of the far right, I didn't see this
two weeks ago. But I can see it now in the reaction of the
aforementioned insane racists to his untimely death: people who didn't
like him couldn't dismiss him. He had an understanding of what others
believed, and could work his fingers into the hidden fissures of their
arguments and pry. That requires a certain amount of empathy, or at
least dogged intellectual perversity of a type I can appreciate.

As for everything else, the kind of ideology that we disagreed about
so vociferously subsides in the face of everyday, personal moral
decisions. The type you have to make with your gut. One doesn't make
the decision to marry, to live in a foreign country, or to be with
your family even as they make choices that you believe will damn them,
in order to evade your liberal critics. Those decisions imply a
broad-spiritedness that I don't quite understand.

This is all faint praise from a person who didn't know him and whom he
didn't like. But I can see the place from which those who loved him
will eulogize him.

-- ACS

P.S. If anyone who knows him better is listening (Dale, I know you
are), could you throw up a link when his church passes around the
basket for his family? I'd like to tip what I can afford into the
kitty.