Colin Sheridan: How strange that courage is celebrated in death and reviled in life

Tributes to Jesse Jackson are easy now because he is no longer a threat

Jesse Jackson stood on the front lines of America’s most combustible moral battles. He took the blows — literal and figurative — and watched his comrades fall.  Picture: Robert R McElroy/Getty

Oh, obituary! Like your bedfellow the eulogy, you serve that magical purpose of allowing people to say things about you in passing they would never in life. 

You permit the living to write the history of the dead — not as factum, but as a projection of what they want to believe.