Once upon a time there was this humorless ogre who terrorized villagers just to hear their screams, twirled an imaginary fiendish mustache as he stockpiled oil barrels in his living room, had a pet dragon named Halliburton, and was the source of all evil in the modern world. Then the ogre endorsed Kamala Harris, and presto! Dick Cheney was no longer the most despised man by the global social set.

Maybe it’s inconvenient as outlets do the ritual glowing remembrances of the former vice president, who died Monday at the age of 84, but I remember the other guy. The guy who for most of this century was vilified in movies (like Oliver Stone’s W, one of the most one-sided hit jobs in the history of Hollywood), countless bestselling books and drive-by assassinations on “Saturday Night Live.” How the Ivy League-trained writers of America had fun with Yale dropout Dick Cheney! The jokes weren’t always kind — they usually weren’t in fact — and were often personal and sometimes homophobic. Cheney’s daughter, Mary, who happened to be a lesbian, was much to her family’s chagrin a source of fascination by his many critics.

A typical joke after Cheney accidentally shot someone on a hunting trip: “There is a little discrepancy about what happened on this hunt, because Ann Armstrong, the woman who has this ranch, said there was no alcohol involved, and Dick Cheney said he had one beer. So apparently, Dick Cheney can’t keep his rifle, his story, or his daughter straight.”