I’ll admit to being of an age that enables my most vivid memories of Senator Edward Kennedy to be those of his 1980 presidential campaign. I suppose that is because presidential politics tends to focus the mind, particularly during times of upheaval and uncertainty, which 1980 most certainly was. My late brother Mark, who passed away late that same year, took a keen interest in the campaign – he’d been a strong Kennedy supporter from his youngest days and particularly so with Robert Kennedy’s 1968 run for the Democratic presidential nomination. Mark, Matt (my Big Green compatriot) and I supported the younger Kennedy against Carter for many of the same reasons I have had for backing  the more left-leaning candidates in that party since working on the McGovern campaign as a pre-teenager. But there was also that Kennedy symbolism, the notion that they represented in the minds of so many a kind of liberal ideal and inside-the-system activism strong enough to attract people who might otherwise take their place on the barricades. As far to the left as we were, we could always manage to give a Kennedy the benefit of the doubt.

Ah, the idealism of youth. Lord knows many times that faith was unwarranted. JFK was, from my personal political vantage point, a marginal president at best, and a positive disaster with respect to many of the major issues of his day. A committed cold warrior, he implemented policies that devastated South Vietnam and kept much of Latin America under the jackboot of military dictatorship, while feeding the military-industrial monster at home. His and McNamara’s policy on Vietnam was particularly craven, setting that nation up for the even greater disaster that was to come under Johnson. That’s Jack. Robert was, in some ways, a more committed cold warrior in the early days. He did seem to evolve with the decade of the sixties, becoming more a voice for civil rights and against the Indochinese war his brother helped ignite. Still, his position on the war was hardly one of pacifism, particularly in the crucial period between 1965 and 1967. Review a few of his speeches, like the one he made at St. Lawrence University in 1966, and you’ll see what I mean.  

On balance, I think Ted made the greatest contribution. He ended up embodying to a certain extent the war skepticism many associated, somewhat inaccurately, with his brothers. I’m thinking particularly of Ted’s vocal opposition to the Iraq war – actually, both Iraq wars – which put him ahead of nearly every political figure who took the podium to eulogize him at his memorial celebration in Boston’s JFK Library. In that way, and in a number of different ways over the course of his 47 years in the Senate, he amassed a record of accomplishment that makes him the head of his family, in my book. Yes, it’s a flawed legacy, one that reflects positions with which I disagree, but he took that Kennedy myth and made it into something tangible. That in itself is worth remembering. Sadly, his best efforts and ours thus far have not been sufficient to save the lives of the more than forty American service people who’ve died in Afghanistan this month alone. 

Tell you what – let’s remember him by ending these stupid wars… like, yesterday.

luv u,

jp

I saw in our local newspaper this week that a bridge will be named for one of the guys from this area who was killed in Iraq. Understandable gesture, to be sure, and I hope it brings some measure of solace to his family. If it does, they should dedicate a bridge to every one of the more than 4,300 sacrificed needlessly in that seemingly endless war. I doubt we have enough bridges to name for all the Iraqis who’ve died as a result of the 2003 invasion. (I don’t know – are there a million bridges in America?) Whenever I hear about these dedications, monuments, memorials to war dead, I can’t help but think of that eulogy Marc Antony delivered in Julius Caesar: “I come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him.”  We always hear about how they died “protecting our freedoms,” when really they died because of our ignorance as a nation and our inability to stop this travesty from happening.

This has nothing to do with how soldiers and their families feel about the war and how it has affected them. They are the only ones at war in this country right now – the rest of us are living in peacetime. And when our political leaders climb over one another to ascribing a noble cause to the crime that is the Iraq war, they are merely praising themselves at the expense of the fallen. The war that they started, on our behalf, is still ruining lives day after day, month after month, year after bloody year. Seems like I’ve been seeing that succession of faces at the end of the PBS News Hour each week for as long as I’ve been alive, each one making me feel more ashamed of my failure to have prevented this grievous loss. We should all feel that shame, every one of us who is not in jeopardy of being deployed, who merely sees this war as a tiresome cable show that has gone on a bit too long. And like Antony, we should use our outrage to seek justice and accountability – but most importantly, an end to the killing.

Will this happen in America? I’m growing more than a bit pessimistic. The vast, vast majority of us are too separated from the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan. At most, we wag a sign in the air outside our congressman’s office, or we shake our head at the news, but without the prospect of conscription threatening ourselves and/or our children, there will be no fire in the belly. That is something our political class and our military have long since worked out. They’ve long since adopted the imperial formula for endless war – a foreign legion made up of volunteers, supplemented by mercenaries. And they name bridges after those sacrificed on the alter of our stupidity. So perhaps we need a different kind of monument, one dedicated to those persistent killers that live within us: ignorance and apathy. That’s it – dedicate a bridge to our own foolishness. Or chisel Dubya’s face into Rushmore so that we’ll remember who talked us into this travesty. Anything to memorialize the historic, disastrous mistake we’ve made, so that there’s some small chance we won’t repeat it.

Then again, there’s still the war to remind us.

luv u,

jp