I haven't written much about the death of Ted Kennedy. It's difficult to write about. He was among a pantheon of my teen heroes, alongside John Havlicek, Bobby Orr, and Carl Yastrzemski, all Great Men to a youngster growing up in Massachusetts. Yet that personally-situated memory of Ted Kennedy seems to trivialize him. He wasn't a star athlete. He was a star of American history.
So to Republicans Senators like John McCain and Orrin Hatch, now mooning for the TV cameras to twist his legacy into a moderate-centrist story of "bipartisanship," and to conservative pundits complaining that Senator Kennedy's funeral will be an homage to liberalism, I say this:
Get your own casket.
More below the fold....
GOPers, Get Your Own Casket
Most of the time, funerals aren't really about the dead but about the living. The dead need mourning rituals the way fish need bicycles. It's the living who need those mourning rituals, to communalize the grief and crystallize what is now absent by celebrating what was once present. Most of the time, the eulogy is about our memories of the deceased, what he/she meant to us.
Most of the time.
But once in a while, a person's life is more than our memories of him/her, individually or even collectively. Once in a while, someone transcends the individual to become the historical. Edward Moore "Ted" Kennedy was one of those persons. His life spanned nearly a third of our nation's history, and he lived almost all of that life at the epicenter of that history. He knew Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., and Cesar Chavez. His brothers and their roles in our history need no elaboration, nor does his legislative legacy as an eight-term U.S. senator. He was a lifelong champion for the ignored and the excluded.
And when I was teenager in Massachusetts, he was my senator. My memories of him at that time are trivial: a living political legend esteemed among living sports legends whose accomplishments now pale by comparison. Such is the personal lens of a teenager.
And, apparently, some Senate colleagues.
I'm sure Senator Ted Kennedy was a skilled political dealmaker. Much of what happens in politics is not much different from the way we traded sports cards when I was a girl. I'll give you a Carl Yastrzemski for your Carlton Fisk. I'll support your amendment if you'll support mine. Lawmaking as dealmaking. That's why Otto von Bismark said one should not watch laws or sausages being made.
Perhaps if you live and work in the sausage factory, it's hard to see beyond that, just as it was hard for a teenage girl with delusions of athletic brilliance to see Ted Kennedy as distinct from Havlicek, Orr, and Yastrzemski. We see our world through narrow, personal lenses, and it's often difficult to recognize historical moments as we live them.
I certainly didn't when I stood beside Ted Kennedy in a line at a deli in Washington D.C. At the time, he was just another famous political figure in a town full of famous political figures. If you lived there, you met some of them, inevitably. And trivially. It wasn't a lofty conversation on important issues. He asked where I was stationed and what I did. We probably mentioned the summer heat. I think the deli's new cheesy fries came up, but that may have been another time and someone else. When my sandwich was ready - or his, I'm not even sure which of us was ahead of the other in line - I shook his hand and told him I'd enjoyed meeting him. He said the pleasure was all his, a stock political reply that I remember only for the seeming sincerity with which he said it.
A living political legend slotted alongside living sports legends. That was Ted Kennedy for me, as a teen. A trivial, accidental encounter with a famous politician among many such encounters in a city full of famous politicians. That was Ted Kennedy for me, as a young Marine. To recall him only for what he'd meant to me personally would be to trivialize one of the most important historical figures in our nation's history.
Was Ted Kennedy a political dealmaker? Sure. But to talk about him as if he were just another political dealmaker is like my writing of him as if he were no more than another 1970s Bay State teenage icon, or another miscellaneous famous person - that is not an oxymoron - in 1980s D.C.
In fact it's worse. My personal narratives of Ted Kennedy are accidents of geography. The narratives being pushed by Senators McCain and Hatch are calculated partisan revisionism. When I heard them, my gut reaction was as if they were trying to climb into his casket for a photo op.
Their revisionist narratives track with a narrative already being pushed at places like the National Review Online, suggesting there is something inappropriate about remembering the Liberal Lion as ... a liberal. They seem to resent that his unabashed, unalloyed liberalism will be given the sepia glow treatment that accompanies the death of great leaders, as if it's unfair that conservative narratives must take a back seat while our nation mourns. Especially as the White House and Congress try to realize one of Senator Kennedy's lifelong dreams: universal health care.
So they want to talk about the political dealmaker, and discourage any celebration of his real legacy as a liberal champion. Because it's just not fair to celebrate Ted Kennedy's liberalism when the nation is focused on one of Ted Kennedy's most cherished liberal visions.
Well, maybe it's not fair. But it's fitting.
So Republicans, if you want a sepia-toned celebration of conservatism at this critical moment in the most important domestic policy debate of our generation, here's a thought:
Get your own casket and your own funeral.
+++++
Godspeed, Great Lion. Happy Friday, wherever you are.