I hope, now, that you will also not mind a few additional comments:
1).When I was a teenager, I ran into an acquaintance who was terribly excited because she was going to an Elvis Presley concert. Since she was my age, I was taken aback, figuring that Elvis was mostly a nostalgia act, and having no idea that there remained this undercurrent of adulation for him among any substantial segment of the population. Several years later, Elvis died, and there was this mass outpouring, giving me notice of a significance to a large segment of the population that I had had no idea of. I still passed it off as temporary, due to the shock. It is twenty years later, and the King is firmly, and indisputably, imbedded as a cultural icon. It turns out that there are cultural phenomenon that do not register in the usual organs of information, at least until they are unignorable, and that they often have some deep significance that cannot be speculated upon with any confidence until they have been played out;
2).The difficulty with assessing the ultimate significance of these things has, in part, to do with the dynamic of cultural transmittal. The big events, like deaths, are unfinished business. Their ultimate impact will depend upon the books that are written, the memorials established, the clubs organized, and so forth. Much of this activity is not foreordained;
3).Nevertheless, one can make the general observation that those celebrities with staying power have a symbolic resonance that is greater than many of their contemporaries. After all, Elvis represented the brash beginning of rock and roll, the rise of youth culture in the post- War era, the melding of black and white folk styles into a sound with broad marketability, the controversy over sexual freedom, the longing for respectability and acceptance of the lower classes, and so forth. He summed up a cultural moment for a lot of people, and that was informally passed on to my friend;
4).In the same way, we know that the Kennedy Administration represented a sort of emergence from the anxieties of the Depression and War, and a new confidence in the capacity of the United States to lead, and that many people felt as if the turmoil of the '60s directly emanated from the assassination. Kennedy might have been a fairly mediocre president, but he was a dandy symbol, and his death confirmed his place in history, by its importance as a national trauma. John- John was the heir. He was the little boy who saluted his father as he was interred in Arlington National Cemetery, he was as much an image of the thing as the caisson or the living flame. After JFK, Robert profited from the desire of a number of people to get it back, Camelot, the sense of promise, before everything started going wrong, and then he was assassinated. Martin Luther King Jr., who represented for many the best hope of national renewal over the issue of race, also was shot. '68 was a terrible year, and we were all afraid, even those of us barely in puberty, but aware of the sense of turmoil and unease around us. It is against this background that one must judge the absurd immunity that has settled over someone like Teddy, who, if he were an ordinary politician would have been sunk by scandal long ago. There were those who wanted him to take on the mantle, but he was too tainted, and his candidacy in '80 could get no traction. John- John was the heir, if anyone could redeem the promise, he could! And now, he too is dead.... |
