Colin Powell was perfectly comfortable with his bloody legacy, writes zakcheneyrice
Photo: Adenis /GAFF/LAIF/Redux Whenever somebody famous dies, and the inevitable public debate gets underway about whether it’s OK to criticize their legacy, I think about something Jia Tolentino wrote about David Bowie’s death in 2016. Bowie was a musician who had sex with young girls, the most famous being 13-year-old Lori Maddox, who later, as an adult, characterized their encounter as “one of the best nights of her life.
In the case of Colin Powell, the former secretary of state who died on Monday at age 84 from COVID-19 complications, one misapprehension that this impulse leads to is the idea that Powell’s legacy needs protecting at all.
This has led to several weird dissonances. Representative Jamal Bowman, a vocal progressive and member of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Squad, used the term “rest in power” in his Twitter eulogy of Powell, applying a phrase typically reserved for marginalized people who fought against powerful interests.
Powell put the multi-decade cultivation of this trait to especially cavalier effect in the leadup to the Iraq War, but never seemed to let the blowback weigh him down too much. “Let others judge me,” the secretary said in 2007, a quote that has since become the last line of his New York Times obituary. “All I want to do is judge myself as a successful soldier who served his best.”
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