The "strange magic" of JFK Jr.

That posing, offering himself up as beefcake -- it's exactly what he spent years trying not to do. It was as if he was saying, oh forget it -- if this is what you want, this is what I'll give you.

Yes, something was definitely going wrong. I've always been troubled by his relationship with Carolyn Bessette, whom I saw as the equivalent of the very annoying Linda Eastman in the Paul McCartney saga. In both cases, you have an outgoing, warm, pretty boy who takes into his life an often petulant, very private woman who is introverted to the point of neurosis. Some peculiar power thing was going on in the Kennedy relationship -- with Carolyn probably the psychologically stronger one. But what was with all that extreme, self-maiming plucking of the eyebrows? She was looking more and more like a bug-eyed pupa. It was as if she were in reverse evolution. One would hope that the wife of a man like JFK Jr., would extend him outward and broaden him, but she may have paralyzed him, locking him into a superficial social elite.

And that wedding, OK, where they went to this secret but luxurious Georgia retreat and had the effrontery to marry in a tiny, historic African church while she was wearing a slip dress that was nothing but a plain piece of draped cloth that cost an obscene amount -- [about] $38,000. The disconnect between the price of that dress and the site of that wedding seems to me to express all the hypocrisy of Kennedy politics. Which is: We're one of you; we take the part of the common man; we speak for African-Americans and Latinos and the poor and dispossessed -- while we hide our lavish lifestyle and trust funds from the public eye.

The Kennedys want it both ways. They want their exclusive life, and they want the pretense that they speak for the people. But of course that's the hypocrisy of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party that we're now going to be examining with the potential senatorial candidacy of Hillary Clinton in New York. It's long overdue -- a real shakedown that exposes the arrogance and insularity of the lifestyle not only of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party but of their media cohorts. And it was really exposed this past weekend when ABC's Diane Sawyer, for example, couldn't get to work for two days because she was such an intimate of John Kennedy's.

And then that pompous windbag, Christiane Amanpour of CNN and CBS, putting herself out there to reminisce pointlessly about her big friendship with JFK, going all the way back to schooldays when they were sharing a house in Providence -- something she's carefully avoided revealing since she's been masquerading as a serious journalist and woman of the world, even after she married that shallow, 10th-rate JFK Jr. imitator, Assistant Secretary of State James Rubin. So there's been a lot of outings this week of major media figures. One reason they were all in such shock over this accident was that it occurred right off the edge of their play-land.

Right, everyone flies over there; everyone knows that route.

And now the spotlight of the world's media is on the grotesquely affluent lifestyle of the American major media. The point is, JFK Jr. comfortably inhabited that world, and all the people on the street who feel that he was "just like us" --

Don't kid yourself.

Exactly. I echo your eloquent phrase. Don't kid yourself!

I'm an Irish Catholic, but I've often wanted to be Italian. My favorite aunt is Sicilian, and when she lost her husband, my favorite uncle, when I was 10, the Sicilians wailed. They were beside themselves with grief. But the Irish barely cried. And I felt deeply that they were right and we were wrong. And I think the same thing when I watch the way the Kennedys grieve.

That's very interesting. Italians make death a common part of everyday life. It was one of the strongest features of my upbringing: Small children were always taken to funerals. On the morning of burial, you file past the open coffin and kiss the corpse. And Italians are constantly visiting the cemetery to tidy up the graves. There's a grisly realism about the facts of death --

That integrates it --

Yes, that integrates it with life itself. It descends from the ancient paganism of the Mediterranean world. It's all about fertility and extinction -- Mother Nature as the womb and the tomb. Once you get into the genteel middle class, of course, you edit out the brute facts of both sex and death. For example, the funeral service in New York City is being called "a celebration of the lives" of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. This is the latest New Age jargon. Now you're not commemorating or marking or mourning someone's death or meditating soberly on their passing. Oh, no, you're going to be focusing on their lives -- anything to avoid the actual fact --

The fact of loss and grief.

And the gruesome physicality of corpses, OK? Working-class people in my background used to say, "Old man Pizzutti kicked the bucket!" But the more you move into the middle class, you're saying --

He passed.

Or he went to his final reward or eternal rest. You do anything to deny the horrors of death. In fact, we're in a time right now when sentimental angel fetishes are expanding and when people are less and less willing to confront the physical corruption and finality of death. Like this new vogue in spiritualists, who claim to put you in touch with the hovering spirits of your parents or relatives, who never really died.

You never have to say goodbye.

They just hang around. They loiter. They're all loitering! They never were absorbed into Mother Nature. So I think this terrible accident -- the plumbing of the watery depths to try to recover the mangled bodies before the carrion fish and parasites got them -- is a real metaphysical lesson to everyone. Those three people are gone -- utterly annihilated by their encounter with nature. All that's left is to treat their remains in a formal and dignified manner, which is part of the great pagan ritualism that has come down into the Roman Catholic Church and that gives closure. The huge heritage of rituals helps organize and exorcise intense emotions via a choreographic kind of design. We troop into a place, focus our thoughts, dispose of the remains and then troop back in a processional manner. The old rituals are of enormous import in people's lives, and small children should always be included.

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