Rajpal's Column

15th August 1999

Four or five Kennedys, a funeral, and get a life…

By Rajpal Abeynayake

Jaded by politics? This is one country that is rarely jaded by politics as politics provides the thrills and spills of daily life for a generally entertainment starved community. Sri Lankan's find political bedfellows more interesting than simple sexual bedfellows, for instance.

On the other hand, "people are jaded by politics,'' said John Kennedy Junior, the hunk that conked. ( Ooops, this kind of irreverence would have got me into the public doghouse in America.) Criticising America is one thing — but John Kennedy embodies the disembodied-ness of the American spirit..

So, the day Kennedy's plane went down somewhere off the shores of New Jersey or wherever, I was having lunch with friends, who were quite emphatically Sri Lankan. Kennedy's death was dissected by these good people with much aplomb and a great knowledge of the Kennedy trivia, and when one gentleman said "Jacqueline brought up the kids well'' or something to that effect, I almost absent mindedly asked whether he had met this Jacqueline in the canteen the other day.

Then I remembered, Jacqueline Kennedy was supposed to be the dead man's mother. But it is not the Kennedy mystique and the whole rigmarole that I'm getting at. ( The man was handsome. He was probably the male version of Princess Diana, and if the papers could make money with any male — that was him.)

Kennedy, says TIME magazine, had a hard time. "( " HE went through a lot,'' writes the magazine's Managing Editor this week.) There is much maudlin, breast beating inside TIME's pages about the Kennedy death, and Newsweek went one better and devoted one whole glossy edition to the passing of Kennedy Jnr.

But the Editors of TIME for instance should have read Spectator magazine, the British version. The Spectator piece is titled " the curse of the Kennedy women." American magazines had made much about the so called Kennedy curse, devoting whole pages to the fact that there were many tragic deaths in the Kennedy family .

Spectator says that the whole "Kennedy curse'' was invented by damage control artistes after Edward Kennedy drove a girl to her death off a bridge in a place called Chappaquidick. The girl had been working for Senator's campaign headquarters or some other Kennedy outfit that had been established on behalf of a Kennedy cause. After Kennedy drove off the bridge and the car sank , he swam off , and didn't report the accident for some nine hours.

The next day Kennedy showed up at the funeral, says the Spectator writer "wearing a neck brace that was seen only that day." A short while after that, he went on television and said that "this seems to be the continuation of a Kennedy curse.'' ( The phrase "Kennedy curse'' was not invented until then, says the Spectator writer, but the media was quick to latch onto it, and soon the Kennedy's were anointed with the mysterious curse that has somehow served to glamourise some Kennedy transgressions.) The real curse says the Spectator writer, is with the Kennedy women, because most of them were "done in'' by the Kennedy's.

For instance, says the writer , John Kennedy junior had no business flying that day when professional pilots had cancelled their flights due to the prevailing haze over the area from which he took off. He put the life of the two sisters at risk ( his wife and her sister ) and in real life, says the writer, the relatives of the sisters would have cause for a civil action against the Kennedy estate for negligence.

But, he says, the Kennedy women can never take that kind of action because the Kennedys generally buy them off, or they settle their grievances with money. This happened to most of the Kennedy women who were aggrieved; for instance the woman who was allegedly hurt in a car accident in which one Kennedy was involved and who was left paralysed for life — and some others such as the wife of the Kennedy who slept with an underage baby sitter.

Now, other than for pure vicarious sleaze value, these doings in the Kennedy family would not interest anyone, but the intention here is not to be titillated by the soap opera but to muse about the crypto Feudalism of American society by analysing the American values that can be divined from the Kennedy death.

American media has defined this crypto - feudalism quite well by going totally overboard with the death of John Kennedy junior's coverage, and in the process looking like lachrymose slaves at the death of the Master. This was American mainstream media, which devoted lengthy analysis to the death of a man who by all accounts had little accomplishment to his credit in any field of endeavour.

But, most of the gems of the mainstream media coverage were hidden and could be picked up from reading between the lines. For instance, there was the oft repeated line that Kennedy chose not to go to Harvard, and that he went to Brown University. Implicit in that statement was that the political aristocracy had to go to Harvard. There was after all, no real accomplishment in Kennedy's record that would have made him seem like an academic achiever who deserved to go to Harvard.

Then there were the reams of analysis, that were contained in various publications as pseudo serious political junk , which attempted to justify the coverage of the Kennedy death because of the "great traditions of the Kennedy's in public life." As John Kennedy Jnr is himself said to have mused once, his father felt tremendous mobility from being in politics, and it was not as if this "public work'' by the Kennedy's was something accomplished through tremendous self sacrifice.

But in the main , the Kennedy death gave glances of what the America is really all about.

American society generally is touted by the elite's in American society as antipodal to the stuffy hierarchical British social order. But now we have confirmation that the revolution or the Boston tea party had done nothing to replace the hierarchical social order that the British, the "victims'' of the revolution, cultivated.

Perhaps all of this is best exemplified by the way American institutions such as fraternities, sororities Ivy League Universities and organsiations such as TIME Newsweek still function. The Ivy Leagues still recruit more on the basis of social clout than excellence, and these being the best educational institutions of America. But somehow, the Kennedy death sort of made it all obvious and it was as if the American hierarchy was so caught up in their apoplectic grief that they forgot their sense of finesse and in the process exposed what crypto - feudalists they were at heart.

In this lack of finesse, they were like some mourners at a village strongman's funeral — you know, when all the dead man's mistresses start crying at once….

Hulftsdorp Hill

Editorial/Opinion Contents