Whenever the topic of death comes up, I always think that the experience of losing someone close to you is something that plunges you into a deep dark place – and the person that surfaces is never the person who went under.
For Ted Kennedy, too much of his life was shaped by death. One hopes that he finally found refuge from all the ghosts.
With him goes virtually the last fighter from an era of pre-Vietnam muscular liberalism – an era of happy cold warriors who saw nothing wrong with drawing lines in Berlin, or Cuba, or Southeast Asia, while bringing the same sort of crusader instinct to the home front on things like racism and poverty. There was an age when people believed that you could literally do anything and everything – heal the sick, make the lame to walk and the blind to see, walk on the moon, make the poor at least moderately comfortable if not reasonably affluent, have black and white hold hands in harmony and drive the Reds out of the peace-loving nations of the world.
At some point, we ran up against our limitations as a country, and in too many ways and too many places, we somehow decided that if we can’t succeed, we shouldn’t even try. Ted Kennedy was a memento mori of those limits, but he was also something like the ghost of a guilty conscience – a reminder that there was a time when possibility was endless and America’s goals and dreams weren’t measured out in feasible expectations and half-loaves.
I wrote a few days ago that Ted Kennedy would probably have been gone from the Senate years ago had some sort of national health care passed. Something, anything – full-on NHS-style socialized medicine, national single-payer, some sort of pool-plus-mandate-plus-subsidy hybrid, anything, just as long as every American could see a doctor when they needed one without feeding their entire worldly livelihood into a chipper-shredder and going bankrupt. It’s probably just as well that the cancer got to him first, because seeing the dream deferred yet again after almost five decades of trying…well, watch your life’s work run on the rocks for fifty years and see how well you take it.
There’ll be time enough to grill later, but for now, house rules state that everybody gets a free pass across the river. Hopefully the boatman brought the Chivas.