Some Days in the Life - July 21, 1999
Today, of course, they actually found the wreckage, and a body they could definitively say was his. They didn't find either of the bodies of his fellow passengers (one of whom was his wife, of course). I fully expect the conspiracy theories to start until they do find those bodies.
Besides class (where I got assessed by the Dean of Summer School, which was pretty sad because it was one of my weaker class periods), Mason and I took a couple of hours down to Boston, to meet with Kate at Logan Airport. Kate actually had two interviews yesterday in the Boston area, and enough time after the second for us to meet her at the airport, drive to the North End, eat, drive her back and drive back ourselves. Almost a pity, as Mason would have liked to see some of my old Bostonian stomping grounds, and I have a number of friends in the Boston area who I haven't seen (depending on the person) for 6-14 years now. When I make it through these classes and take time off, a day trip to Boston (hopefully including seeing Ernestine, Robin, Andy, Andrea and others during it) will have to be on the agenda. Along with a longer period of time in Ithaca than I'm going to spend this month, and time in Maine. One week is going to go by awfully fast.
The trip down was amazingly uneventful. Usually when you're going southbound on 93 into Boston, you get caught on the bridge by huge traffic jams, from Storrow Drive through the center of town, past the Logan exit and beyond. Especially at 4, which is when we actually hit the place. However, Mason and I lucked out, and the traffic jam didn't hit until we were at the Haymarket exit, and the very next exit was Logan Airport. So, off the highway, through the Callahan Tunnel and over to the Alamo rent-a-car location to pick Kate up and save her from people who thought she was soliciting.
She wasn't, I would add. But she had a sense of humor about it.
Mason discovered as we drove back in that Kate and I are enthusiastic when we talk to each other. Especially about WCW Wrestling, which Mason does not follow, and Kate and I do. He was patient with us as we discussed Sting "the Franchise" and Eddie Gurrereo. We then went to Circle Pizza in the North End and had dinner.
I'd forgotten how much fun the North End is. For those unfamiliar with Boston, the cradle of culture in America, the North End is the Italian neighborhood. And it is a neighborhood. Men shouted across the street to each other. Good natured insults filled the air. Our waitress at Circle Pizza commented on our order and chatted us up for a while. It was very interconnected, everywhere you looked.
I had an odd feeling through much of it, while enjoying it. We walked down the street and got Gillato, which I just misspelled, and read the signs advertising the Grand Religious Feasts and seeing where Frank Sinatra had eaten and the like, when it hit me.
It felt like I was in Disneyworld, wandering through "Disney's Little Italy Neighborhood," where people were walking around pretending to be Italian and American. It felt very much like this.
But it was real.
This frightened me a little. Not because of the North End. Not at all because of them. It's a genuinely happy place, at least when we were wandering Hanover street. It was a strongly connected community. But the fact that I believed, in my heart, that such places only existed in theme parts and were fake scared me. There should be more neighborhoods like that one in the world. I shouldn't feel like they're anything unusual. I shouldn't associate them with prefabricated simulations designed to be 'homespun.'
But I'm a cynical member of Generation X. There are days this is rubbed in my face pretty strongly.
Sad, but what can you do?
Kate got dropped off with plenty of time, despite our having to wait what felt like nine years to go through the metal detector. People ahead of us had a couple of tons of luggage too large to even go through the X-Ray machine, much less be carried onto the plane, all loudly demanding that they were told it was carry-on by the ticket counter. I hate people who lie. Especially when they're bad at it.
I set off the metal detector. Apparently with my suspenders (which I wear with those pants, generally under my shirt, because those pants tend to fall off me otherwise). However, the wand seemed to be set off by my butt. Not my wallet. My butt.
Kate absently asked me about my metal butt. I refrained from comment. I suggest you do the same.
Driving out wasn't bad, though the beautiful sunset we were driving into blinded me half the time. And then home, and I started my computer and promptly passed out and stayed there until midnightish. I was up briefly, then I crawled into bed and hovered in half sleep. I fell all the way asleep at one point because I had a very evocative nightmare about thousands of insects swarming out from under my bed and surrounding it, so I went and slept on the couch instead, watching the Game Show channel. I saw bits of Extreme Gong (which was about as good as the old Gong Show was, except not as endearing and without Jamie Farr. You apparently dial in on a 900 number and vote Gong or Not Gong to humiliate people) and Throat and Neck, which is an interactive telephone game show where people call in and play video games to verbal abuse, controlling the games with their touch tone phones. The one human, "Becca," was a literally barely dressed redhead they made breast and ass jokes about. I was 90% asleep when I saw bits of it, and yet I was awake enough to decide Western Civilization had failed and that by rights a comet should smack into the planet and blast us back to the stone age.
I woke up this morning in bed. I don't know when or how I went from the couch to the bed, but thankfully I had no more dreams of thousands of insects. Not fun.
We're going to call this "John F. Kennedy Junior and Getting Old," and it's in response to all the folks out there saying "so what? He was a Kennedy and now he's dead. Why is there so much news coverage."
Guys, if you're asking that question, the coverage isn't out there for you, okay? It's not out there for me either. I never even thought he was handsome. He looked like he'd never had enough sleep.
But he was the most eligible bachelor. He was the cultural icon. He was news whenever he dated, whenever he started a pop-culture magazine, whenever he did... well, anything at all. And he never earned a bit of it. And, if he'd wanted to go into Politics and become President, he'd probably have been a front-runner.
Why?
The Baby Boom, naturally.
After World War II, children started being born in droves. This persisted until a couple of years after Kennedy was killed. But most of them were children of the Fifties, and John F. Kennedy had represented the youth of America taking the reins of power from the aged cronies who came before. Remember, Eisenhower was Kennedy's predecessor -- Eisenhower who was a general in the second World War, which meant he was no spring chicken in the forties, much less the fifties. Eisenhower who was Republican values of the age personified, who was in many ways the Fifties personified.
And Kennedy, the youngest President ever, was the Sixties personified. He was the President of the Baby Boom, even though he wasn't born in the Baby Boom or raised in the Baby Boom. (William J. Clinton is the first Baby Boomer to be elected president, and he personifies the Baby Boom in more ways than I can count. But Kennedy was the one that had the mystique and mythology of the young taking up the burdens.)
Kennedy's finest hour, I am terribly sad to say, came with an Assassin's bullet. He has done far more good for the country as a Martyr than he had managed to do as a President, though he had his high points to be sure. Without Kennedy, the Civil Rights Movement would never have had the legitimacy that it did. Johnson would not have inherited a mandate and a mantle that made him capable of pushing so ambitious an agenda forward (whether you love or hate the Great Society, this remains true). He is an American Demigod, the bright point to Nixon's dark point in the late-middle century.
John F. Kennedy, Junior had nothing to do with all that. But he was there. That over-shown picture of a boy saluting his dead father's casket was more than a media highlight. It was the defining moment of a Baby Boomer child watching the President the entire Baby Boomer generation was in shock and mourning for be carried to the graveyard, never to return. It was the Youth of America, horror and grief stricken, being forced to admit that the man they had put their faith in was dead, and who knew what would happen next?
Well, I'm not a Baby Boomer. I missed it by several years. Technically, I'm Generation X. I'm a child not of Camelot but Watergate. Not of "Ask Not What Your Country Can Do for You" but of Ronald Reagan's Evil Empire rhetoric. The lessons my generation has learned is only the morally corrupt can give us a good economy, and anyone who would want to be president badly enough to be elected doesn't deserve to be president. And John F. Kennedy, Junior meant and means nothing to me.
But to the Baby Boomers... the symbol of them at their youth is dead, and let's face it. They're getting old. Their last tie to Camelot (no one seems to count Caroline, probably because she's not one for getting drunk and seducing twenty year olds) is gone. They have to face the fact that their noble destiny turned into the very thing the youth of today resents.
This is what's tragic to them. This is why MSNBC has Tom Brokaw on twenty four hours a day, repeating that Kennedy's down. It's not for John-John (what the Hell kind of name is that? John-Junior yes. But John-John?) It's for the audience. For the man who was eighteen when Kennedy died, and now is in his fifties and not getting any younger. It's for a Hell of a lot of people who are at best narcissistic in the whole.
It's for an entire generation with a lot more cultural identity than mine, I'll admit.
I don't understand it. I have no interest in watching it. But I empathize with it. Someday, someone or something will die that will just utterly epitomize my youth, and those who were young with me. (No clue who it will be, I'll add.) And when that happens, I'll be in shock, and I'll want notice given. And the television networks, who want to make me and my generation happy, will give it in droves.
And people twenty or thirty or forty years younger than I am will say "this is stupid. This isn't that big a deal. He didn't even do anything." And I'll resent them bitterly for it.
So, this too will pass, folks. In the meantime, watch Cartoon Network. They're doing fun commercials for the Powerpuff Girls, and no one's even mentioned Kennedy. And be patient.
My Mom on JFK,Jr. "Look -- he was our Princess Di."
I just hope this doesn't mean Elton John will sing.
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