Now DEFINITELY ain't the time for your tears!

I've always thought "it's wrong to speak ill of the dead" only goes so far. Is it really speaking ill to tell the truth about someone who just wasn't a decent human being?

You may have heard by now that William Zantzinger, the real-life villain of Bob Dylan's Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, died last week. What you probably didn't hear was the full story behind that one line tucked into the next-to-last paragraph of the obit, about how Zantzinger "later became a foreclosure auctioneer." Yes and no. What he actually did was become a slumlord in the 1980s. When he became delinquent on some property taxes, the bank foreclosed on some of his properties - but his tenants didn't know that, so Zantzinger continued collecting rent from them. When some of those tenants fell behind on their rent, he sued them for the back rent. And he won. He was eventually caught, and spent a year and a half in jail (three times as long as he'd spent for murder!). At least one account I've read of that case mentions that some of his tenants - in shacks without running water or plumbing - supported him at trial, saying they'd be homeless without him. Sounds like a variation on battered wife syndrome to me, but I guess that's beside the point.

As for his claim that Dylan's song is "a total lie," to be completely fair, it does get a few things wrong. Zantzinger's family did not "react to his deed with a shrug of the shoulders," nor was he released on bail "in a matter of minutes". But the main point - that he beat a woman to death and basically got away with it - is true. I guess you can't prove conclusively that his social standing and his victim's race were factors in the injustice, but it's hard not to connect those particular dots. (Tellingly, Dylan never actually mentions in the song that Carroll was black. There's absolutely no need to.)

I understand the rules about being respectful of the deceased, but I find it a bit disrespectful of his various victims that so much was not said in that obit.