What is this, the longest-playing soap opera in history? What is this, a lachrymose tale told around the American campfire to frighten the children into better behavior? Is this a myth of Greek proportions? Is this some punishment for hubris, for gifts of fortune that were not paid for with the right kind of sacrifices? Or are the Kennedy tragedies themselves sacrifices for something that we have all done or not done? “Curse,” the commentators were saying with a touch of irony in their voices so we would not think they were practitioners of voodoo, swirling bloody chickens over their heads in the newsroom, right off-camera. Does God love or hate the Kennedys? I ran up the list lip-synching with Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw and Wolf Blitzer: PT boat, leukemia, mental retardation, overdose, skiing accident, two assassinations, some life-threatening cancer, alcohol abuse, well-publicized adulteries, rape accusations and worse. The grief of Kennedy history washed over me and I imagined the Kennedy compound. The sadness of the wasted youth, his beautiful wife, the Icarus-like flight to a cousin’s wedding, the sun setting on the impersonal seas, the haze on the Vineyard, the inexperienced pilot, the horizon tilting and tilting, made me want to wail, hit something, protest. This seemed the last straw, the too-much of death and disaster. salute his father’s coffin and hide under his desk and run to his daddy on the runway of an anonymous airport. I listened to Coast Guard and Air Force spokespeople repeat themselves and, as if touching a sore place with my tongue, I watched J.F.K. Kennedy Jr.’s lost plane, I took my seat in front of CNN and watched the shots of Martha’s Vineyard and rocky beaches and marinas until my eyes began to smart. This religion reveals a hollowness, a Disneyland Mickey Mouse sordidness at our communal core.īut when the news came of John F. I think of all that as the rites of a false American religion, one that conveys sainthood on the famous and confuses good design with virtue, visibility with intimacy. I don’t grieve, not sincerely grieve, for people I don’t personally know, and I certainly don’t admire people for the good fortune of their birth or the clothes they wear or the shining places they take their vacations. Something democratic in me resists the lure of paparazzi-designated royalty. I have always sniffed at the hot-air-bloated emotion that follows in the wake of celebrity disaster or triumph. I’m not one of those who cried at the televised images of Princess Di’s funeral.