Years of Poems and Spirits

Heard the news that Caroline Kennedy is going after Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat.

The Kennedy clan’s history is at the same time a tragedy and a mockery of American democracy. When Ted ran for his brother’s Senate seat at age 30, his opponent bitterly complained, “Sir, if your last name is anything but Kennedy, you would have been finished … Your credentials is a laughing stock.” (History Channel’s documentary on the Kennedys) As if to prove his opponent right, Ted won the election, committed several scandals–including one where someone got killed and another one got raped, grew a large brain tumor, but remained to this day the beloved chosen representative of the people of Massachusett.

And he is among the lucky Kennedys who survived the Natural Selection. In other words, several other Kennedys felt so certain that no man-made law could touch them that they challenged God but lost.

Yet year after year, a Kennedy is going to Washington.

Reminded me of what Shakespeare said about Julius Caesar (through the mouth of Cassius while trying to talk Brutus into killing the tyrant of the Republic):

Now, in the names of all the gods at once,
Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed,
That he is grown so great? Age, thou art shamed!
Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods!
When went there by an age, since the great flood,
But it was famed with more than with one man?
When could they say till now, that talk’d of Rome,
That her wide walls encompass’d but one man?
Now is it Rome indeed and room enough,
When there is in it but one only man.

I always liked David Brooks (ever since the Bobo book). Just read his column on NYT today, his basica idea: the GOP that used to live on ideas is now gone forever. Palin is just the latest figure in a movement that has fundamentally changed the character of the party:

Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. … What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole.

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.

I take no comfort in the demise of the Rockefeller Republicans. Whenever a viable opposition becomes an enemy, it posions not only politics but civic society too.

I don’t know what goes on in McCain’s mind right now: sure, he knows this is his last shot at the presidency. Sure, he feels he is more entitled to be the POTUS than Obama. But by degenerating the campaign into personal attacks–is that what he spent 5 years in prison for?

Two days in a row I have been reading news reports on the sickening anger among McCain supporters. WaPo had an article yesterday: “Anger Is Crowd’s Overarching Emotion at McCain Rally” and today Politico had a follow up. Reading them gave me shudders: there even have been cries of “kill him” at a recent rally.

The reports reminded me of what happened to JFK. Although he is now canonized as one the greatest Presidents, when he lived he was too hated by a whipped up crowd. So much so that after he was shot, before Lee Oswald was identified, the overwhelming public assumption was that he was killed by a Republic partisan. People flooded local Republican offices with angry mails and phone calls blaming them for the assassination (”Before the Storm“, a biography of Barry Goldwater).

Honestly, I start to fear for Obama’s life. I know it is a very dark thought but I can’t shake it off. American politics always has violence in its DNA. What is even worse is the self-denial in order to sustain the mirage of “a shining city on the hill”, as if the assassinations were just brief exceptions. I remember Benedict Anderson talked about that while building a collective imagination of a nation, there has been constant manipulation of memories of past violence.  And this is very true today. By not remembering the circumstance surrounding JFK’s assassination, the nation lives as if it has always been a tolerant and civil polity and that JFK was a tragic hero. In fact, JFK was a martyr and the nation didn’t become what it is today until after he is killed.

God helps us all.