Popping The Obama Bubble

Now that the Kennedy's have formally anointed Obama with the legend of Camelot we have to wonder if he deserves it, or, if "it" is really anything at all. Firstly, JKF gained mythic proportions only by being assassinated. Before that, he became President by the tiniest of margins; in fact, on the day of his assassination he was in Dallas, not as a legend, but as a struggling politician shoring up his sagging political fortunes there in anticipation of his next difficult election.

Since Kennedy's death we have learned that his personal life, and the national security implication of it, was horrendous; in fact, infinitely more horrendous than the personal life of Bill Clinton, who was, let's not forget, impeached for comparitively benign behavior! Kennedy was so bad that the press, even the opposition press, could not report it because it was deemed too injurious to the well recognized foundational values of American social life that were, apparently, held in great contempt by Kennedy. One of the Kennedy past times, for example, was to hold women under water during extramarital sex so that their panic would heighten his orgasmic pleasure. Nowadays, liberals are so apoplectic about water boarding when for Kennedy it was no big deal, even in the White House?

In the end though our President is the symbol of America, the embodiment of our highest dreams and aspirations, and a reflection of our best selves, or so we like to think. When Kennedy was killed a part of America, then, was killed with him and so to this day we are inclined to keep him as a legend or at least as a member of the family. We do this despite a short, marginal Presidency during which very little was accomplished, except perhaps for the precipitation of the Cuban missile crisis which nearly ended the world in nuclear war because Kennedy had uttered a few wimpy Obamasque statements in Austria that did not incite fear or respect in Khrushchev, in the slightest. If maintaining the legend means overlooking the amazing hypocrisy of his personal life and his political life, we do it to protect him, and at the same time, ourselves.

Additionally, and as importantly, Kennedy and his wife were Hollywood pretty. We know what awe that inexplicably inspires in many Americans. The rare combination of Washington power and Hollywood pretty proved too much for America to resist, at least when clouded over by the wake of an assassination. Will the Obama family really excite us this way in the end? It seems unlikely. We should all be thankful that the embarrassingly, anti-democratic, and Hannah Montana quality of Obama's political campaign can't possibly last. It is no wonder Europeans hold us in contempt for our extreme and odd celebrity worshipping, especially when freedom and individual liberty are supposedly such a part of our character.

When America aspired to great personal values, Kennedy's values had to be kept secret. Today, we have given up on personal values. There are no secrets to be kept. We pass out condoms in the schools knowing that we are too weak or too human to even have standards. Our new standard by default is: Que Sera Sera. We no longer melioristicially create our culture, we merely respond to contingent genetic variables over which we have no control. The obvious downside: a 50% divorce rate, 1.3 million abortions a year, 2.4 million in prison, Hip-Hop culture, failing schools, and 30% of kids in poverty does not disparage or even discou