We have had many terrible days in our history. None worse than the day President Lincoln was assassinated. We survived that and many more that came afterwards. The Kennedy assassinations and that of Martin Luther King are seared into the memories of many of us who lived through that period. They are not mere historical events. They are wounds that have barely healed, easily ripped open by a careless word,a thoughtless phrase.
It is part of our national covenant to treat those memories with respect. Our leaders, even those on the opposite political side, are dear to us. Even if we don't know them personally, over the years we form a bond with them, they almost become family. The thought of anything happening to them pains us. As Democrats, we might have opposed many of President Reagan's policies, but none of us would ever use the attempted assassination of him to score a political point. In all my years of watching American politics I have never heard anyone refer to that event with anything but respect. We might have a few crazies in our midst, but we are, in the end a civilized people.
At least so I thought until yesterday.
After the initial disgust wore off, all I feel is a deep sadness. That it has come to this. I also feel confusion. Why did we not see this coming? How could we be so wrong about someone? Why did we not see the monstrosity hidden behind that grim face? I am still not able to think clearly.
The signs were all there. This individual has had a bizarre fixation with the RFK assassination for quite a while. Time Magazine March 2008:
Primary contests used to last a lot longer. We all remember the great tragedy of Bobby Kennedy being assassinated in June in L.A. My husband didn’t wrap up the nomination in 1992 until June. Having a primary contest go through June is nothing particularly unusual.
When something is in the back of your mind it pops up into your conversation at unguarded moments. Casual references to Robert Kennedy were quite common in her speeches and interviews. At some level, has she has been thinking of the unmentionable as her Plan B? That thought itself is unmentionable, but how can we avoid that given her words?
Lady MacBeth too was considered a part of the nobility. Some of the respect her husband had earned was transfered to her initially. Her ambition was fierce, but at first the people around her-not even her husband- did not think of that as a basic character flaw. She did have a conscience at first. She prayed to dull her conscience:
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty!
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
in order that she can fulfill her purpose. Her cold calculation and Godless ruthlessness were not natural even for her. She strived hard to achieve that, a large part of her struggle was within herself, to dull her own sense of shame. What drove Lady MacBeth was not just ambition, but a sense of destiny, of entitlement. She knew she had to be Queen and the fastest way to it was the murder of Duncan. She thought her husband was a weakling, she fought her own decent impulses to drive herself forward.
Even the most despicable of us has a decent side. The criminal minds learn to suppress that inner voice that holds them back, and win that struggle against their own better side.
You can hear that struggle when she complements her opponent
I am so proud to be here with Sen. Barack Obama
and within a few ours launch into the kitchen sink strategy. Listen to the hesitation in her voice as she utters those infamous racially divisive words
Like Lady MacBeth, she thinks of that sense of shame as a weakness. She struggles against it and appears to have defeated it for now. But perhaps in the end her own conscience will be her undoing. As the tragedy of her life unfolds so publicly before our eyes, we might see her riven apart by regret of her own words and actions. Her cold and calculating apology shows that we are not there yet. In truth she cannot apologize her way out this one even if her conscience were to return.