Uncle Ewan's Eulogy

Spoiler Alert: If, for whatever reason, you have not yet watched last Sunday's episode of Succession (season 4, episode 9, "Church and State"), read no farther!

“I loved him, I suppose, and I suppose some of you did too, in whatever way he would let us and we could manage. But I can’t help but say he has wrought some of the most terrible things. He was a man who has here and there drawn in the edges of the world. Now and then darkened the skies a little. Closed men’s hearts. Fed that dark flame in men, the hard mean hard-relenting flame that keeps their heart warm while another grows cold. Their grain stashed while another goes hungry. ... You can get a little high, a little mighty when you’re warm. Oh yes, he gave away a few million of his billions but he was not a generous man. He was mean, and he made but a mean estimation of the world and he fed a certain kind of meagerness in men. Perhaps he had to because he had a meagerness about him and maybe I do about me too, I don’t know. I try. I try. I don’t know when but sometime he decided not to try anymore and it was a terrible shame.”

So spoke Uncle Ewan at his brother Logan Roy's funeral in the next-to-last episode of Succession. This post is not a commentary on that long-awaited funeral episode, or on season four, or on the series as a whole. All that will have to wait until after next Sunday's grand finale. Here, I am reflecting on Ewan's words (and Kendall's rebuttal) and their larger significance for how we reflect on our society.

Speaking somewhat unexpectedly, Ewan's steps to the pulpit of Saint Ignatius Loyola Church on Park Avenue were momentarily blocked by his grandson Greg (acting on behalf of Kendall and Roman) and his niece Shiv. And, having heard his eulogy, one can easily see what the Roy "sibs" were afraid of!

Obviously, Ewan's words were directed personally and primarily at Logan. In doing so, however, Ewan has summarized his belief about the meaning of what Logan did with his life, to which he has so long objected so strongly. On one level (as has repeatedly been alleged), Logan Roy may be seen as some sort of surrogate for someone like Rupert Murdoch, but he is also a surrogate for the capitalist mega-rich (and their MAGA enthusiasts) and what they have done and are continuing to do to our world. One could as well address Ewan's eulogy to all the powers-that-be in American capitalist society, a society which likewise feeds that "certain kind of meagerness" in people - in us.

Of course, Kendall got up to make the case for what the "sibs" considered "the other side." As such, they were personally painful for the "sibs," not least because of their obvious accuracy about their father. Acknowledging his father's faults, even publicly calling him a "brute," Kendall made the case - not just for Logan but for the destructive dynamism at the heart of capitalism, which Logan is meant to represent. In a world in which Logan is not longer living and hence no longer around to give or withhold his approval of his desperately desirous-of-pleasing him children, there is still the money, the only real measure of value in the world capitalism has created. 

And, of course, as Kendall asserts, it has created value. Kendall's speech in praise of predatory capitalism represents one of the most on-point portrayals at least since Karl Marx's eloquent praise of capitalism's destructive accomplishments in The Communist Manifesto.

“I mean look at it,” Kendall says. “The lives and the livings and the things that he made. And the money. Yeah, the money. The lifeblood, the oxygen of this, this, this wonderful civilization we have built from the mud. The money. The corpuscles of life gushing around this nation, this world, filling men and women all around with desire, quickening the ambition to own and make and trade and profit and build and improve. I mean great geysers of life, he willed. Of buildings he made stand. Of ships, steel hulls, amusements, newspapers, shows and films and life. Bloody, complicated life. He made life happen. And yes he had a terrible force to him, and a fierce ambition that could push you to the side, but it was only that human thing. The will to be and to be seen and to do. And now people might want to tend and prune the memory of him, to denigrate that force, that magnificent, awful force of him, but my God I hope it’s in me, because if we can’t match his vim then God knows the future will be sluggish and grey. You know there wasn’t a room from the grandest state room where his advice was sought to the lowest house where his news was played where he couldn’t walk and wasn’t comfortable. He was comfortable with this world and he knew it. He knew it and he liked it. And I say Amen to that.”

Was the living Logan really all that comfortable with this world (a highly ironic observation when made so proudly in the sanctuary of a church)? As was hinted in season four, episode one (in his weird conversation with Colin), maybe he was not so completely comfortable. But still certainly comfortable enough to animate him to such heights of civilizationally amazing yet humanly terrible capitalistic accomplishment. And in those competing assessments of a brother and a father are expressed our own culture's long-standing ambivalence about the civilizationally amazing and humanly terrible world we have greedily wrought, a world which, whatever else may be said about it, struggles mightily not to end up "sluggish and grey."