Why the change? How did Michael Kennedy go from minor media memo to front-page mega-event?
Because Michael Kennedy was a child molester.
That’s it. That is the only difference between the Michael Kennedy of New Year’s Eve 1996 and the man whose funeral aired live this week.
One year ago, he was a Kennedy, one of the ten surviving children of RFK. One year ago, he was head of a nonprofit corporation providing heating fuel to poor people.
And one year ago, Michael Kennedy was the “extraordinarily effective” campaign manager now eulogized by Democratic hack Mary Anne Marsh, who gushed: “He won every race he ever managed, which is more than most people can say in this business.” Not to speak ill of the dead, but getting Kennedys elected in Massachusetts is about as impressive as getting rednecks elected in South Carolina.
And Michael Kennedy’s campaign record was not without blemish. In August, his brother Joe Kennedy withdrew from the Massachusetts governor’s race, in part because campaign manager Michael was caught helping the baby-sitter with some of the more hands-on portions of her biology homework.
In the world of Democratic political consultants, nailing your fourteen-year-old neighbor may or may not be as tacky as hiring a toe-sucking prostitute, but even Dick Morris’ clients weren’t driven out of public service.
Regardless, none of these accomplishments, real or imagined, was significant enough to generate a mini tidal wave of media reaction. Michael Kennedy was on your TV screen for an entire week because—and only because—he seduced a child, because there were political consequences to that seduction and because he died while the story was still hot.
This heat may well be genuine. Besides the generic Kennedy fame, there is a resonance to any tale in which women are treated shabbily by a Kennedy—though given their track record, the baby-sitter should count herself lucky she made it home alive.
And it would be unrealistic to deny the cultural chord struck when a young, handsome Kennedy is felled in his prime. This chord turned to a choir when the image of touch football was added (though I have to put football on skis at the same level of stupidity as skeet shooting in the round).
Regardless, it is the case that the pre-statutory-rape Michael Kennedy was a man of ability and accomplishment; his business successes and eleemosynary efforts would have made for a glowing eulogy and perhaps even allowed him to slip by St. Peter unnoticed.
But they would never have gotten him on Larry King Live.
This is the only “big news” of the tragically dumb death of Michael Kennedy—that in today’s America, a lifetime of accomplishment is worth less than a moment of infamy. The era of accomplishment—of Edison, Ford, Eisenhower and, yes, Kennedy (Joe junior and JFK, that is)—has been utterly usurped by the cult of celebrity, focusing on the Dianas, the Oprahs, the O.J.s and the current crop of second-rate Kennedys with their oafish activities.
In the America of Bill Clinton, the coin of the realm is celebrity, period. News directors have no interest in the notion that one story is, in and of itself, important or trivial. These former newsmen are in the entertainment industry, and if ten million overweight women in trailer parks will stay up late to watch Princess Di’s hairdresser give Richard Simmons a perm, then Dan Rather had better grab his comb, because he’ll be broadcasting live from Ye Olde Beauty Shoppe during sweeps week.
Successful businessmen who start churches in Africa, provide warm homes for the poor and raise money for AIDS patients are not news. Kennedys who abuse drugs and sleep with underage girls are. And on slow holiday weekends, they make the front page.
Thank God for Racism
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March 1998
I read all these dead white men and I’m tired of it. I think there is so much racism in this country because we don’t understand each other.
—San Francisco high school senior Duc Nim
Thank God for racism.
Reading the papers, I once again see how much Americans count on racism, real or imagined, to solve life’s little problems. From the endemic failure of our state-run school system to the personal failures of incompetent individuals, racism is the grease that keeps our society running . . . in place.
Take, for example, the recent front-page brouhaha in Allendale County, South Carolina.
Allendale County has the kind of school system that makes the old Soviet Union look efficient and market-friendly. Residents there are more likely to have dropped out of high school before finishing the ninth grade than are residents of any other county in South Carolina. According to the newspaper The State, “Allendale’s students are performing so badly that the state recently declared the school district impaired. Last spring, when 33 of Allendale’s brightest students took Advanced Placement exams to earn college credit for their high school work, not one passed.”
Then came the onslaught of media coverage, reporting that Allendale County’s school system is a racial powder keg with a burning fuse: A black school board member pulls a knife on one of his white counterparts; he is removed from office, which sparks protests from black residents. A white principal suspends a black student for leading a school assembly in the singing of the black national anthem; student walkouts and accusations of racism force the principal to resign.
Thus we see the immense power of the insidious forces of racism in South Carolina: Racial tension drove a school-board member and a principal out of their jobs in the Allendale school system at a time when the school’s own lousy performance could not.
Years of academic failure and wasted resources were taken in stride by the folks of Allendale. No protests, no student marches, no shouts of “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Why do our test scores blow?” But the minute a white principal punishes a black student for breaking the rules (school policy prohibits racially divisive symbols such as the Confederate flag, the black national anthem and Strom Thurmond), suddenly the community is mobilized for change.
The same is true across the state as well. South Carolina ranks at or near the bottom in every objective measure of educational performance. When polled, voters rank education as the most important issue facing our state, four times more important than taxes or crime.
But our public discourse rarely gets past the issue of race. Racists, on the left and right, claim that our state does poorly because we have so many black students. It’s a never-ending conflict, but who is the winner? Why, the idiots running the schools, of course!
Think about the teachers responsible for Allendale’s thirty-three “advanced placement” students who couldn’t pass a blood test. In a rational world, they would be out looking for work right now. But nobody is holding them responsible for the quality of their work. Instead, black parents blame illiterate students on the insidious effects of “the Man keeping us down,” while white parents, both liberal and conservative, write off their black neighbors as uneducable.
The same thing is happening at the national level, too. The same week that American high school kids tied with Cyprus for last place in math and science testing, the San Francisco school board was debating what the Associated Press called “strict quotas for non-white reading by San Francisco’s high school students.” The current reading list, with all that Shakespeare and Twain and stuff, is full of infamous “dead white males.”
The argument offered by self-proclaimed anti-racists is that little Johnny (or Juan or Chen) can’t understand Chaucer because Chaucer was a white guy. If Chaucer had been the Queen Latifah of the Middle Ages, American kids would be the literacy leaders of the free world, not the last-place losers they are today.
Does any rational person take this argument seriously? Of course not. But by deflecting the discourse toward race, the school boards managing our terrible schools are off the hook. Oakland has Ebonics, San Fran has “attack the Man,” and our kids have the reading skills of the Sri Lankan 4-H club. What would the NEA, the San Francisco school board and the South Carolina education department do without racism?
By the way, the kids have figured this stuff out. One West Coast student who demanded Shakespeare be replaced by Shaquille O’Neal said: “I’ll tell you what Chaucer means—it means subtitles required.”
Yep, that readin’ and writin’ stuff sure is hard!
The big joke in all of this is that racism serves precisely the same purposes for these kids once they escape our classrooms. In Allendale County, rednecks complain that the reason they are making $4.50 an hour shoveling manure is because affirmative action has taken all the good jobs—not because they can’t add past their fingers or read the joke section of Playboy without a tutor.
In the same county, a young black woman’s plight—traveling eighty miles a day to earn $5.75 an hour cleaning hotel rooms—is blamed on racism, not on the fact that she dropped out of high school when she was fifteen to have the first of two children out of wedlock.
If it weren’t for racism, these people would have to hold themselves responsible for their lives. Without racism, our schools and teachers would be blamed for failing our students. Without racism, all of us, white and black, would face the prospect that we are leading the lives we deserve.
So, on behalf of every American, I say, “Thank God for racism!” The alternative is too horrible to imagine.
The Will of the People
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April 1998
Forget the law. Forget the facts. The will of the people, Mr. Starr, the will of the people.
—William Ginsberg, attorney for Monica Lewinsky
Los Angeles, summer 2002—Legal observers and movie industry watchers emitted gasps of surprise and sighs of relief today when Hollywood megastar Leonardo DiCaprio walked out of his cell in the Los Angeles County Jail, a free man. News of the film star’s release sparked a rally on Wall Street, led by Warner Brothers stock, which rose an astonishing 235 percent on news that the jailed teen idol would soon return to the set of the long-awaited sequel Titanic III: Voyage of the Terminator.
A clearly relieved DiCaprio was greeted with hugs from co-stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and Kate Winslet as he left the Los Angeles County Courthouse where Judge Lance Ito (brought out of retirement for this high-profile case) had released him. Moments earlier, prosecutors had dropped the first-degree murder charges against him due to “a lack of public support for continued action.”
“Your honor, the people have spoken. We will abide by their wishes,” Los Angeles prosecutors told the judge, referring to recent polls indicating that nearly 73 percent of all Americans wanted the popular film star released regardless of his guilt or innocence.
The prosecutors’ decision caught many legal experts off guard, given the seemingly overwhelming evidence pointing toward DiCaprio. The victim was Los Angeles film critic Kenneth Turan, whose caustic criticism of the still-unfinished Titanic III and its cast appeared in print the morning of his death. Evidence included the infamous “bloody ship,” a cast-iron replica of the Titanic used to bludgeon Turan to death; videotape from parking lot surveillance cameras showing DiCaprio leaving the scene covered in what appeared to be blood; and DiCaprio’s own confession to his new girlfriend, Madonna, which she repeated in sworn testimony (Madonna and DiCaprio were married soon after her affidavit was released, in what some legal observers viewed as an attempt to prevent her from testifying against her new husband).
Despite the evidence, however, prosecutors were reluctant from the beginning to prosecute this case. One investigator told Variety: “I have a thirteen-year-old daughter who won’t even talk to me!”
“This is the vindication my client has been seeking,” said DiCaprio’s attorney, William Ginsberg. “We knew the American people would never sit back and let these mad-dog prosecutors hound a beloved figure like DiCaprio for years on end. Someone needed to tell these prosecutors to get a life. Don’t they know that if shooting isn’t finished this summer, the film will never make a release date in time for the Oscars?”
Reaction to the prosecutors’ decision was split down ideological lines. Conservatives—clearly shaken by their increasing unpopularity—were relatively quiet. Former Republican vice presidential nominee Pat Buchanan denounced the action from his secret bunker somewhere in Utah: “There used to be something called the rule of law in this country. Now, these kids beat you to death, and if they can get a movie deal, they walk! DiCaprio—what is he, anyway, some kinda wop?”
DiCaprio supporters such as Geraldo Rivera and Larry King called the decision a triumph for democracy. “Our investigation revealed that many of the Los Angeles police officers were wearing the same style of uniform as the officers in the O.J. Simpson case. One of them had even met Mark Furhman. This was a witch hunt from the beginning,” Rivera said.
Some legal scholars have expressed concerns about the emerging legal theory of “popular nullification” first espoused by U.S. senator Hillary Rodham (former wife of President Clinton) in a 2001 appearance before the U.S. Supreme Court. In that case, all direct evidence of obstruction of justice—including taped conversations, documents and sworn testimony by more than a dozen witnesses—was set aside by Congress after what Speaker of the House Mary Bono jokingly referred to as the “Seventy Percent Amendment to the Constitution—when your approval ratings are that high, you can get away with murder. Hell, I’d kill someone for those numbers myself!”
DiCaprio carefully avoided any indication that he was gloating, expressing his condolences to the family of the movie critic “if, in fact, Mr. Turan was actually killed”—a veiled reference to the “vast anti-Hollywood conspiracy” theory floated by Titanic III’s producer, James Cameron, in a recent appearance on the Today show. DiCaprio also shook hands with some of the thousands of teenage girls who held vigil outside the county jail.
“You have proven that while you may not understand what goes on in a courtroom, you can still influence it. I love you all!” DiCaprio told the gathered throng, several of whom were clubbed violently to prevent them from reaching the smiling star.
When asked if she was bothered by the fact that DiCaprio had possibly committed murder but would not even be required to appear before a jury, one fan told reporters, “I mean, like, you know, like, people die and stuff, right? I mean, like, are you going to ruin, like, his entire career just because he maybe made one mistake? I mean, like, who’s going to make Titanic IV?”
“Some of the old-fashioned types may not like it, but the people run this country—with or without the law,” Ginsberg told attorneys as he lunched with his law partner, former U.S. president Bill Clinton, and the president’s fiancée, Playmate model Bambi Thumper. “Nobody’s perfect, and imperfect people can’t expect everyone to play by the rules, even when they make the rules, right, Mr. President?”
Clinton declined comment.
Meanwhile, DiCaprio announced that he would “get back to the job the people freed me to do—make another great box-office smash of a movie that will make everybody feel better about themselves.
“And I bet we’ll get pretty damn good reviews, too.”
What Do Women Want?
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March 1998
Clinton approval ratings among women have been in the high 60s and holding despite intense publicity about womanizing allegations.
—Pew Research Center pollster Andrew Kohut
This is what Susan B. Anthony marched for?
American women, who have only been voting for about seventy-five years, are by their own behavior casting doubt on the value of universal suffrage. After years of damaging, demeaning and now indisputable evidence that President Clinton is a shameless boor who couldn’t keep his pants on in a nunnery, America’s female voters remain his strongest supporters.
It could be that the president’s policies—defending partial-birth abortion, advocating school uniforms, restricting right turns on red lights—are of such vital interest to women that they must forgive him any oafish action, no matter how vile. If you are one of these women, I have a simple request: Please bu
rn your voter registration card immediately.
It is rare indeed to hear a woman base her defense of the president on his female-friendly accomplishments. This is because President Clinton has no accomplishments—feminist or otherwise—to champion. We all know the cost of the Clinton presidency: He has turned the office itself into a joke, corrupted the criminal justice system, shredded the rules of campaign financing, brought locker-room language to the nightly news and landed literally hundreds of people either in jail, in debt or in the unemployment line—most of them his one-time friends.
Sure, we all know what the Clinton presidency costs. The question is, what did we get for our money? Did we use a coupon, and is it too late to return it?
And if we’re doing a little comparison shopping, ladies, what is it you want from this president that is worth the price of silence in the face of his shamelessness? What policy has he successfully championed, what liberty has he tirelessly defended that is worth the cost we all agree he has inflicted upon our nation?
There are none. His greatest achievements, balancing the budget and reforming welfare, were policies he tirelessly opposed and repeatedly vetoed until the Republicans won the Congress. President Clinton taking credit for the Contract with America is like the airport baggage handler announcing he has successfully landed the plane.
Clinton & Me Page 9