Opposing Viewpoint

"I wish Stanley Baldwin no ill, but it would have been much better had he never lived..."

- Winston Churchill on Stanley Baldwin -

This isn't intended as a direct refutation of DC's point about how death should neutralize the villainy or herosim of our rulers. They are, after all, just people. The last breath should end any argument about their private lives. Whatever lessons we take away should concern the bigger morals of political power rather than the little morals of the man. But there is something more, for me, to take away from fifty years of Ted Kennedy. He wasn't my deceased contentious neighbor, fussing about the property line the very day the EMT's showed up to carry him away. Edward Kennedy was much more.

Besides the people themselves, the Kennedy myth was so massive and gravitational that it distorted everything that passed by it. So much of it simply wasn't true, beginning with JFK. You and I don't have that advantage, assuming we would even want it. Free societies are corrupted in big and little ways by prolonged adoration of ruling classes of any kind, proletarian or elite. Liberals, for instance, denied themselves in the range of things they were willing to overlook in Edward as long as his orthodoxies remained intact.

In his ways, Edward corroded the truth of many liberal decencies, and he slandered his conservative opponents in ways so vile and ludicrous that you wondered what lay in his heart and in his head. Some wag correctly described Ted as a "distillery of meanness". In this way he amplified all the worst qualities attributed to easy privilege and wealth, and made even his honest, practical, disputes with opponents into matters of the soul. The only ammunition he had on that field came from his infatuated troops on the left, and he dragged them down to his level. Nobody came out better for having fought with, or for, Edward Kennedy. As for his political victories, only time will tell if the price was right.