Ted Kennedy Looked Great in a Suit, but What Did He Actually Do for You?

The death of Ted Kennedy at age 77 has spawned any number of paeans to his memory this morning, as the world wakes up to the news. Already today I've seen numerous allusions to his great achievements during a lengthy Senate career. I've noticed one thing all these memorials have in common: no specifics, no facts, and no details. This suggest one thing to me: People don't really care about the facts, they're still, 40 years after the fact, seduced by the wholly implausible and entirely fictitious image of John F. Kennedy's imperial presidency. The stylish, beautiful, but complicit wife and the hidden sexual encounters in the White House swimming pool represent the gulf between fact and fiction wherein lies the American Dream.

When I think of what Ted Kennedy meant to me personally, I can think of nothing specific. He did provide right-wing commentators with decades of ammunition, which they used to paint all progressives in a muddy wash tainted by the sluggish waters beneath that fatal bridge at Chappaquiddick, which alone may have set back such initiatives as universal health care by decades. I'm pretty sure I recall the first Clinton administration promising to deliver just that plum to the American people, yet here we are, almost a generation later, with the Town Hall meetings being overrun and sidetracked by well-orchestrated fear-mongering, even as the rest of the world has moved on years ago.

The Canadian system, for instance, may not be perfect, but it does provide health care. The Cuban system, hampered by the legacy of Kennedy-era embargoes and ostracization from the "free world," still manages to take care of the needs of its citizens.

Here, meanwhile, I've watched people with good jobs die because they had to decide whether to fork out hundreds of dollars a month for insurance or buy overpriced houses.

I don't recall exactly what Ted Kennedy said in the 90s about health coverage for all, but I'm pretty sure he promised us something. The graveyards of America are lined with the bodies of those who probably believed that promise, which, oddly enough, was not kept.

I think the answer is pretty clear: our insurance and pharmaceutical industries are immense, thriving dinosaurs which have, if not the entire government, at least the parts that matter, securely in their pockets.

The exact role played by Ted Kennedy in all this is far from clear. But the Kennedy legacy, beginning with Honey Fitz and Papa Joe, and perfected, amplified and sanctified during the "Camelot" era, has either not helped or stood squarely in the path of progress.

Our other big problems, specifically the widening gulf between ultra-rich and working poor, and the sub-prime mortgage debacle which arose from our obsession with superficial trappings at the expense of infrastructure and responsible financial practices, are the natural result of a nation willingly living out a hallucinatory fantasy. The fact is you can't live beyond your means, whether you're a homeowner or a nation, and any attempt to do so inevitably leads to disaster. You need proof? Read you newspaper before it goes bankrupt.

If Massachusetts voters had seen this light twenty or thirty years ago and put someone in his Senate seat capable of voting independently, we might have made some progress. But that, my friends, is just a fantasy.