"The odes and elegies to Ruth Bader Ginsburg have proceeded apace, seemingly endless and inexhaustible and essentially banal. We do this with heroic Americans. We repeat all the cliched talking points and tropes until we have memorized them. And then we repeat them back to each other, perhaps on a yearly basis," writes Keith C. Burris. "Then we place the great man or woman on the national mantelpiece as a petrified or stuffed artifact — this was something other than the rest of us. Something too fine for this world. Thus we never have to try to be that thing ourselves."