Hotair’s Greenroom has an excellent post on Ted Kennedy’s death in context with the Democrats collectivist agenda.
The meme floated by the Left over the past few days, that Kopechne’s death was a reasonable price to pay for Ted Kennedy’s wonderful political career, is a brutally candid expression of the principle that even an individual’s right to live is negotiable – a commodity to be measured against the “needs of the many,” which the Left believes were far better served by Kennedy’s politics than Kopechne’s insignificant little life. The striking thing about the two most infamous expressions of this opinion, by Melissa Lafsky and Joyce Carol Oates, is how breezy they are. They don’t caution the reader to brace himself for an outrageous, controversial assertion, which the author plans to defend. Both Lafsky and Oates are rather wistful in tone. They don’t understand why anyone wouldn’t think Kopechne’s life for Kennedy’s legislative agenda was a sweet trade, the deal of the century for America. As Mark Steyn puts it, the Left doesn’t see why we should dwell on the bit players in the epic saga of Ted Kennedy’s life.
The easy-going tone of most of the Kennedy coverage struck me. I didn’t know why until I read this article.
Collectivism is inherently dehumanizing, no matter how benevolent the intentions of the collectivist, because it’s completely incompatible with the notion of unalienable rights. The belief that Kopechne’s life was more valuable than any legislation Ted Kennedy could ever pass, which leads conservatives to denounce the Lasky and Oates pieces as disgusting, is a belief the collectivist can never accept. For one thing, it would do an awful lot of damage to the pro-choice movement. For another, it would lead to uncomfortable questions about other inalienable rights, such as the right to own property. Progressive taxation, the beating heart of modern liberalism, is based on the notion that a millionaire does not have the same property rights as a pauper. You can’t “spread the wealth around” without accepting that the “needs” of those who serve as the bread trump the rights of those who provide the peanut butter.
Which is the big lie of liberalism. There is no big happy collective, just a big happy state spreading misery as equally as possible.
Collectivism always becomes ugly and brutal. Frankly, every collectivist society before ours became openly murderous. There is no gentle way to deal with the human remainder from every equation the State designs. Liberals criticize capitalism by saying it doesn’t make adequate provisions for taking care of everyone. Neither does liberalism – it only pretends otherwise. Collective politics requires compulsion, which in turn requires the death of compassion for the inconvenient individual.
A noble society owed Mary Jo Kopechne a measure of undying anger over her death, and should have denied any position of high honor to the man who never repented for his part in it. A truly wise society should work forward, from the inherent rights of the individual, to fair and just laws that respect those rights. Collectivism works backward, from a desired outcome to the elaborate political theories necessary to justify it… and like any other massive vehicle being driven in reverse, it sometimes runs people down.
Or drowns them in a fit of drunken road-rage, whichever you prefer.
Reading the adulation over Ted and the lack of anger on the left for his sins says a lot about the them and a lot about the Kennedys in general. America’s finest political family relished its own hubris to the point its own power and wealth couldn’t shield them from their own irresponsibility – be it the affairs, the drugs or the bad deals. Obama may picture Kennedy as the saint, most Americans know better – about Kennedy and collectivism, which is it’s a big lie.
There is no kumbayah, there is a few pulling the levers over the many. Adherence to the collectivism religion washes away all sins, which is why a smoking President can make declarations about health care, Yale grad-school kids are free to run car companies, tax cheats are put in charge of tax policy and criminals are set free while babies are aborted. The means justify the ends.
The town hall crowds have this figured out. I figured it a while ago. I worked at a logistics company during my first stint of college when John Kennedy Jr’s plane disappeared forever in an Atlantic Ocean fog. It happened my company was responsible for transporting one of the parts on John John’s plane from the manufacturer to the assembler. (To give you a big hint, it spins around in circles and makes whooshing sounds, kind of like Eric on a post-Maker’s Mark bender.)
A day or so after the “tragedy” we get a call of panic from the manufacturer. “The FAA and the FBI are on their way! They are tearing the place apart!” Strange, since during my years at this place we had shipped thousands of propellers, there had been thousands of airplane crashes, killing thousands of people, and this was the first time the FAA had chosen to search the place. – what was different this time?
Thankfully one of my cohorts came prepared. When the FAA showed up, he greeted them wearing his “Dead Kennedy’s” t-shirt, which didn’t amuse them too much and angered most of the female office staff, but reminded me why stoners always have the best sense of humor. After an hour or so of doing nothing they left. By then, it was properly surmised that John John in his customary Kennedy arrogance thought he could fly through a storm without the proper training and didn’t read the horizon right on his dash and took a wet nap – more proof that all the money, all the power and the right politics won’t take care of you if you don’t take care of yourself.
How nice it would have been, if everyone had the same governmental service as the Kennedys. Those other plane crash victims didn’t get full-frontal investigative power from the FBI or FAA. They didn’t get squat. They didn’t get full service of a Navy cruiser to hold a funeral service either.
Which is the real lesson of the Kennedys, the Gores, the Dicaprios and the rest who preach from their mansions and private planes about responsible environmental living and giving back. Kennedy was their greatest champion, if these people believed in champions. His greatest accomplishment – limiting our liberty. Let him rest, and hopefully now so can the rest of us.
So, you can’t have blood for oil, but you can have blood for politics?
“I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has the “freeborn mind”. But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticise its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology. Read Montaigne; that’s the voice of a man with his legs under his own table, eating the mutton and turnips raised on his own land. Who will talk like that when the State is everyone’s schoolmaster and employer? Admittedly, when a man was untamed, such liberty belonged only to the few. I know. Hence the horrible suspicion that our only choice is between societies with few freemen and societies with none.
“[...] We must give full weight to Sir Charles’s reminder that millions in the East are still half starved. To these my fears would seem very unimportant. A hungry man thinks about food, not freedom. We must give full weight to the claim that nothing but science, and science globally applied, and therefore unprecedented Government controls, can produce full bellies and medical care for the whole human race: nothing, in short, but a world Welfare State. It is a full admission of these truths which impresses upon me the extreme peril of humanity at present.
“We have on the one hand a desperate need; hunger, sickness and the dread of war. We have, on the other, the conception of something that might meet it; omnicompetent global technocracy. Are not these the ideal opportunity for enslavement? This is how it has entered before; a desperate need (real or apparent) in the one party, a power (real or apparent) to relieve it, in the other. In the ancient world individuals have sold themselves as slaves in order to eat. So in society. Here is a witch-doctor who can save us from the sorcerers — a war-lord who can save us from the barbarians — a Church who can save us from Hell. Give them what they ask, give ourselves to them bound and blindfold, if only they will! Perhaps the terrible bargain will be made again. We cannot blame men for making it. We can hardly wish them not to. Yet we can hardly bear that they should.”
–C.S. Lewis
The Left has never had a problem with adulation of mass murderers (think Che Guevara and Castro and Mao and Lenin…). So why is anyone surprised that they can’t get all upset about a simple manslaughter case? If you can rationalize away the deaths of millions, you can do the same for a nobody.
Exposing my ignorance here (nothing new)
Could someone tell me why that young woman could not have lived and he still have his career? Seems to me that her dying didn’t propel him into greatness and that he could have made sure she lived and still been a
sorry SOBsaintly Senator, but without the mark of death.See, Tracy, it’s reasoning like this that keeps you out of the Ivy League schools. You need to take a few remedial courses in moral equivalence. Don’t forget; some people who called themselves Americans did bad stuff to native Americans and slaves a long time ago, and a U.S. soldier once did something bad to an innocent villager in Viet Nam, so nothing you say or think has any merit anyway.
It is possible that Kennedy could have his career and Kopechne her life, but I would bet that most of the apologists believe that Kennedy’s intentions with Miss Kopechne were less than honorable. I certainly have a hard time believing that he just wanted to help her get to the last ferry off of the island.
So the best they got to defend themselves is that Kopechne had to die because we otherwise would have found out worse about him and his career would have been over? Really?? I don’t know why I’m shocked but I am.
I would have one quibble with the analysis. Those who in power who advocate for collectivism are rarely true believers. Yes, you sometimes have your Trotskys, but then the Lenins and Stalins usually take care of them. So it is more about them collecting and keeping power than about the ideals of collectivism.
Great essay, JohnFN.
Comedian Larry Miller (who should be blogging at Big Hollywood) has a great bit where he talks about how Americans view “grand schemes.”
It goes something like:
Americans don’t really like ideas, because they lead to ideology. Once you’ve got that, then all these ideologues sprout up and before you know it, people are goose-stepping down the street.
The quintessential American objection is: “Hey! What’s the big idea?”
Mike,
I wrote about this before, but when I worked in Europe there would invariably be a point in a long, difficult project where I was working nights and weekends and making my European counterparts do the same (they don’t like to work more than 30 odd hours a week, although, when they are at work they work hard) and we’d be up against a hurdle and I would urge us to forge ahead and one of them would become frustrated and blurt out, “You Americans! You think everything is possible!” To them, this was a great insult, yet I always took it as a compliment.
Strange, Europeans like big ideas (socialism, communism, genocide, liberte, fraternite, egalite, Der Ring des Nibelungen…) but are skeptical of big, real stuff. Americans like big, real stuff (going to the moon, D-Day, nuclear fission, mass produced automobiles, Raquel Welch, Super Big Gulps…), but are skeptical of big ideas.
Rufus,
There is a simple explanation for that. Most big ideas are lacking important details while most big feats come from combining many small ideas.
My sister the social worker was at a conference a couple of weeks ago where the topic of health care reform arose. There was a Scandinavian present, who could not understand why President Obama didn’t just tell us all what to do about it.
And that Scandanavian is the perfect example of why Europe is failing. What an idiot. God they don’t understand the United States do they? COmpletely friggen baffled. Why do I give Europe a bad time? Mike’s example is why. Idiots.
Mrs. Firefly and I get the same thing from her German relatives. They have no interest in even listening to our reasoning. It’s, “Well, of course this is better.” Why is it better? I think they use the Associative Principle; Europeans have socialized medicine. Europeans are better than Americans, ipso facto, socialized medicine is better.
Oh, and:
“You Americans! You think everything is possible!”
…is a wonderful thing to have said about you.
Us. They said it to me, but they meant you too, Mike.
Its Romans v. Greeks again. Greeks liked big ideas and Romans liked big stuff. Its Greek Stoicism v. the Colleseum.
Stephanie,
That’s a very interesting theory. Like me, I think when asked to list the great, Engineering societies of our world most folks would list the Egyptians (maybe), the Romans and the Germans.
JohnFN, this is most likely the best thing I have read all day!