House of Eratosthenes

Mike Todd at Waving or Drowning wants to give the recently departed Sen. Ted Kennedy a decent send-off. That is certainly his right. I have neither the time nor the inclination, to deny him that right. Part of the reason I’m so dis-inclined to interfere with the expression of one’s innermost thoughts that run so contrary to my own, is this: I’m not like Ted. I understand people are different, and life would be boring if they were not. Kennedy never really was at ease with that. Some of his “greatest” speeches were inspired by his resentment against people and organizations who thought about life in non-Ted-like ways.

But another consequence of me being not-like-Ted, is that I am occasionally curious about things. I notice things are out of place, and when I notice things are out of place I don’t think it is a cause for celebration and drinking, but rather a cause for learning. Mr. Todd’s silly, hagiographic farewell (hat tip: Rick) is a cause for the rest of us to learn something about ourselves if ever there was one.

Just look at it from a thirty-thousand foot level:

Paragraph One comments “I admire people who don’t hide from their brokenness” in the course of building up to the statement “my heroes tend to be imperfect.” Okay, the object of the exercise is to say something positive about Ted. Mike’s managed to squeek out a negative and make it look like a positive; Teddy didn’t try to hide the negative. A couple months back, some homeless guy waltzed into my girlfriend’s store and shattered a bunch of bottles of booze so that he could be sent back to jail — the cops said, alright. You know, he didn’t try to hide his brokenness either. So that jailbird bum is on the same level as Ted? According to you, Mike, he’s managed to match the Senator’s most appealing quality.

Paragraph Two winds up with “Some are describing him as the greatest Senator in history, and I don’t think that is a stretch.” People who can’t admit to what they’re trying to say, even to themselves, write like this quite often. To say “Ted Kennedy was the greatest Senator in history” would be out of the question. Too active; too much responsibility being taken. For a few years now I’ve been noticing this about Mr. Todd, and Rick has occasionally commented on it too. He doesn’t really say things, especially in response to being challenged. He just goes through paragraph after paragraph implying things. In the zoology of writers, he is a decidedly non-skeletal, gastropodic slimy mollusk of a being.

Todd then tells the story of the Senator “accepting,” in 1983, membership in the Moral Majority and then “requesting” the opportunity to give a speech. Todd and myself agree on what is the most notable part of that speech:

I am an American and a Catholic; I love my country and treasure my faith. But I do not assume that my conception of patriotism or policy is invariably correct–or that my conviction about religion should command any greater respect than any other faith in this pluralistic society. I believe there surely is such a thing as truth, but who among us can claim a monopoly on it?

Four years later, Sen. Kennedy made himself “great” in the minds of his fans and lackeys once again, during the confirmation proceedings of failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. Sen. Kennedy rejected everything meaningful about his speech four years earlier. Sen. Kennedy — let’s see, we can just go through the list, can’t we? — assumed that his conception of patriotism was invariably correct, and that his conception of policy was invariably correct. He was steadfast in claiming his conviction about religion-versus-state issues should command greater respect than anybody else’s conviction about the same thing; he was certainly consistent on that from womb-to-tomb.

And absolutely, positively, during the Bork nomination and at many other times, Sen. Kennedy knew there surely was such a thing as truth, and he himself claimed a monopoly on saying what exactly it was —

Mr. Bork should also be rejected by the Senate because he stands for an extremist view of the Constitution and the role of the Supreme Court that would have placed him outside the mainstream of American constitutional jurisprudence in the 1960s, let alone the 1980s. He opposed the Public Accommodations Civil Rights Act of 1964. He opposed the one-man one-vote decision of the Supreme Court the same year. He has said that the First Amendment applies only to political speech, not literature or works of art or scientific expression.

Under the twin pressures of academic rejection and the prospect of Senate rejection, Mr. Bork subsequently retracted the most neanderthal of these views on civil rights and the first amendment. But his mind-set is no less ominous today.

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.

America is a better and freer nation than Robert Bork thinks. Yet in the current delicate balance of the Supreme Court, his rigid ideology will tip the scales of justice against the kind of country America is and ought to be.

The damage that President Reagan will do through this nomination, if it is not rejected by the Senate, could live on far beyond the end of his presidential term. President Reagan is still our President. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate, and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and on the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice.

In light of the 1987 Bork speech, Mike Todd’s words seem even more risible than usual when he says, in reference to the 1983 speech, “[it] is yet another piece in the puzzle of [the] ‘unity’ theme that seems to be hammering me lately.”

Mr. Todd, I think I have found the last piece of that puzzle for you. People like Ted Kennedy, do, after all, leave large gaping holes behind when they depart, suitable for causing an utter collapse of the flimy structure built on top. It is their vision of the world and how it should work; it requires their leadership in order to make sense. Their ramshackle, inconsistent, quivering, whimsical, vacillating leadership. It would make much more sense, of course, to champion the cause of unity all the time. It would also make much more sense to demonize and derogate those same concepts all the time. Or, if one is committed to being a fair-weather friend to unity, to tack back and forth in the interest of the Constitution and the country…rather than to get a few more licks in against the Moral Majority and against Republicans.

But of course, it’s really just about attacking people isn’t it? That’s why you can’t go into any great detail about what made Sen. Kennedy great. Kennedy was great because he shared enemies with you and had brilliantly refined the fine art of inflicting damage on that enemy — by holding it to standards of behavior while rejecting any standards for his own behavior.

This is the final nail in the coffin on Todd’s eulogy for the Senator. It doesn’t suffer damage because I disagree with it personally; it suffers damage because it disagrees with itself. It is an apt illustration of Thing I Know #265: “You can’t be better than everyone else when you’re trying to be like everyone else.” This is the internal contradiction that ultimately robs it of any structural strength, and destroys it from within. For all this great urgency to salute Ted Kennedy with this giant-among-mortals theme, it seems so few among his fans can really follow through on it. Todd himself availed himself of the perfect opportunity, oozing his gastropod form within a slug’s antenna of calling him, but not actually calling him, “the greatest Senator in history.” He can’t quite bring himself to bubble out the superlative. What’s the problem, Mike?

The problem is with — to borrow a phrase from the departed Senator from the famous “Bork” speech — a glaring inconsistency with Ted Kennedy’s America.

Ted Kennedy was not known for his respect for the concept of individual achievement, and here and there are some bits of evidence to suggest he was quite antagonistic toward such a thing. Praising the New England Patriots, he read into the Congressional record “At a time when our entire country is banding together and facing down individualism, the Patriots set a wonderful example, showing us all what is possible when we work together, believe in each other, and sacrifice for the greater good.” [emphasis mine] Now, think on that for just a minute or two. If you want to go to a country that faces down individualism and where life is all about sacrificing for the greater good, why, there are scores and scores of places around the world where you can go. But that wasn’t good enough for Ted; he wanted the United States to be transformed into just another filthy collectivist socialist mudpuddle. He said so. He specifically identified the very concept of the individual as an inimical force, one to be engaged and defeated.

Doctor Zero made a brilliant point about this last week:

This is why the death of Mary Jo Kopechne doesn’t trouble liberal intellectuals all that much. In fact, they think you’re a bit childish and primitive for being obsessed with it.

The meme floated by the Left over the past few days, that Kopechne’s death was a reasonable price to pay for Ted Kennedy’s wonderful political career, is a brutally candid expression of the principle that even an individual’s right to live is negotiable — a commodity to be measured against the “needs of the many,” which the Left believes were far better served by Kennedy’s politics than Kopechne’s insignificant little life. The striking thing about the two most infamous expressions of this opinion, by Melissa Lafsky and Joyce Carol Oates, is how breezy they are. They don’t caution the reader to brace himself for an outrageous, controversial assertion, which the author plans to defend. Both Lafsky and Oates are rather wistful in tone. They don’t understand why anyone wouldn’t think Kopechne’s life for Kennedy’s legislative agenda was a sweet trade, the deal of the century for America.

If it’s fair to presume some things about the idol, based on the demonstrated priorities of those who worship it — and I think, in this case, it is — we are ready to re-write the Bork speech because know some things about Ted Kennedy’s America.

Ted Kennedy’s America is one in which the value of all individual attributes and possessions, including human life itself, is negotiable.

It is a culture in which unity is the primary collectivist asset, the prize to be jealously guarded by us all…until a leader of some stature tells us it is not, and then we are to turn on it and tear it asunder. Unity is good when it helps democrats and hurts Republicans, but it’s bad when it helps Republicans or hurts democrats.

It is a business environment in which, if any one individual manages to do more than his part to make life better for the rest of us, and receives payment in kind — no way can that story be concluded just yet. The dirty bastard must not have been taxed enough! Unless, that is, his last name is Kennedy.

It is an economy in which it is terribly important to us all how high the minimum wage is going to be this year…since so few of us make any more than that.

It is a nation in which leaders join hands, reaching across the aisle, overcoming their differences to write legislation together and the partisan divide should finally be healed. For just a certain amount of time. And then, as soon as the Republican can’t do anything to help the democrat, the democrat should be ready, willing and able to give blistering scolding speeches about “George Bush’s Vietnam.” The pattern remains; it’s a strategic mindset, one that exists to inflict damage on the enemy. Like a slug devouring your strawberry patch, it pretends not to be non-destructive, by moving slowly.

It is a place where we all ask ourselves what we can sacrifice for the greater good, while people sufficiently fortunate to carry the name “Kennedy” respond with the Not-In-My-Back-Yard protest “But don’t you realize — that’s where I sail!”

It’s all so clear, Mike. You’re being whacked upside the head repeatedly with this unity theme. How much less traumatic the experience would be for you, if you could show some consistency about it. But you can’t, being a slimy mollusk who lacks a skeleton, and so your heroes are the ones who similarly cannot be consistent about it. They, like you, pulsate, vibrate, meander back and forth: Oh, now we’re all to pick out an individual from among us, and worship him. Whoopsie, no today’s a different day, and now individualism doesn’t matter and is to be frowned-upon. Oh, today we’re all going to help each other out. Whoopsie, no, the most wonderful among us are the ones who inflict the greatest sum of damage upon that guy over there.

From what I see, what little that defines this mindset has to do with valuing destruction over creation. Someone destroys something or inflicts damage on something, it’s time to idolize the person who is the destroyer. But if nothing is destroyed, and the only way anyone has set himself apart from the rest is by creating something, suddenly that’s when we’re back to our war against the individual. Maybe you could confirm that for me, since Sen. Kennedy isn’t around to do it anymore.

But that’s not really necessary. I was privileged to watch the Senator for a good long time, and that pattern always remained consistent. Invidual contributions important when individuals destroy things; individual contributions toxic and resented, when individuals were creating things. That’s the Kennedy pattern. No wonder you can’t bring yourself to call him history’s greatest Senator, even though you so clearly want to. What an uncomfortable, tortured existence you must be living out, you little slug.

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Hero Among MollusksMonday, September 7th, 2009

Hero Among Mollusks
Monday, September 7th, 2009