"Behind every great fortune… there is a crime. "
Fate, if you believe in it, is a terrible thing. Connoisseurs of karma, the Law of Consequences, may have recalled the words of Honoré de Balzac last week as the Kennedy name was again scrawled across the world.
For the
Kennedy fame was tainted at its source, and it's hard not to see the sins of Joseph P. Kennedy [www.wcvb.com/wcvb/webmate/wcvb/page/wcvb/century4-htm] working themselves out in the troubled destinies of his descendants.
Fuelled by a mix of greed and genius, this blighted patriarch plunged into the Roaring Twenties with little regard for ethics or even the law. Banking or boot-legging, it was all the same to him.
As in Greek tragedy, he destroyed his own children. Embarrassed by the mild retardation of his sweet-natured daughter Rosemary, in 1941 he ordered her lobotomised, leaving her so handicapped that her father banished what remained of her to a home for the severely retarded and never saw her again.
Some have seen in his drive to install his son as president a form of revenge on society. Ironically, his bribing and bullying became such a political liability to the JFK presidency that he was ruthlessly sidelined, and shortly after the inauguration suffered a stroke so crippling that he was unable to savour his triumph.
Yet to the superstitious it seems that a strange doom is still at work in the dynasty. "At the beginning, Joe Kennedy gave hostages to fortune and it was his fate to watch them die, one by one… and this continues 30 years after his death," says Peter Collier, author of The Kennedys: An American Drama.
Edward Kennedy [www.senate.gov/~kennedy] was the first to voice it. "Does some evil curse hang over us?" he cried, as his own presidential ambitions crashed at Chappaquiddick bridge with the ambiguous end of Mary Jo Kopechne [www.clark.net/pub/cosmic/kopechn7.html].
For violent and mysterious death has become the stamp of the Kennedys
[http://politicalgraveyard.com/bio/kennedy.html#RIL19F6YY]. Even now, the FBI report on the Dallas assassination remains a sea of black censor's ink.
Edward himself had been critically injured in a 1964 plane crash and the Kennedy karma often seems to involve crashing, both literally and figuratively. Joe's eldest son, Joseph Jr, went down in 1944; four years later, so did daughter Kathleen. To some, there was a hint of inevitability in last week's news from Martha's Vineyard [www.mvy.com].
The Net has become the new theatre for public grief. In moments there was the same spontaneous upwelling of sorrow we first witnessed at the death of Princess Diana, as America mourned the passing of Camelot.
At America OnLine [www.aol.com], which hosts John F. Kennedy Jr's lifestyle magazine George [www.georgemag.com], tributes poured in at the rate of one a second, and up to 1500 people at a time crowded into any of the 100 chat-rooms AOL quickly set up.
The search for the downed Saratoga was followed online at www.everwonder.com/david/jfkjr [the Piper Aircraft website at www.newpiper.com, besieged by the morbid, also crashed]. And as hope died, the rites of the Web began.
Like the devotional shrines of the pagans, memorial sites sprang into being across the Net, small candles flickering in the darkness of cyberspace. Visit http://members.tripod.com/dieterdoneit/jfkjr.html for an example, or www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Academy/1222.
In 1988, People magazine
[http://pathfinder.com/people/web/index.html]
named John F Kennedy Jr "the sexiest man alive". He even posed, tastefully nude, for his own magazine. Yet I suspect that America will always remember him as 'John-John', the little boy with the brave salute as his father's catafalque rolled by.
To be beautiful and damned – the fate of the Kennedys - is a uniquely American conceit, a puritan belief that the damnation somehow resides in the beauty. As I studied the smiling faces of the dead
[www.boston.com/news/packages/jfkjr/images/gallery.htm] I was struck by how deeply the concept of karma [www.theosociety.org/pasadena/gdpmanu/karma/karm-hp.htm] has become planted in the American psyche. The instinctive reaction of the Web was not just sorrow that Kennedy had died, but that it was somehow appropriate he should.
Perhaps our own Shona Laing put it best:
"Wearing fame like a loaded gun
Tied up with a rosary
I'm glad I'm not a Kennedy… "
Comments: petersinclair@email.com
"Behind every great fortune… there is a crime. "
Fate, if you believe in it, is a terrible thing. Connoisseurs of karma, the Law of Consequences, may have recalled the words of Honoré de Balzac last week as the Kennedy name was again scrawled across the world.
For the
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.