_______________ DECONSTRUCTING THE KENNEDYS BY CAMILLE PAGLIA (01/06/98)

For some time now I have marveled at the solipsistic, pseudo-intellectual mediocrity with which Camille Paglia fills her columns. She never fails to top herself, and her recent rant about the Kennedys is no exception. Indeed, I was actually amazed that Salon accepted that screed for publication. Strip away Paglia's ivory tower references and five-dollar words and what you're left with is a gossipy, hair salon bimbo. For example, there is the reference to the Kennedys as a dynasty. While I'll admit that Paglia is not the first to embrace this canard, allow me to state once and for all that dynasties are ruling entities, more often than not familial, that generally last for generations. JFK was shot dead after just three years in office, and RFK was killed before he could even get into office in the first place. Are we then to presume that the sum of evidence for this ludicrous assertion is the career of Teddy?! Good God! Paglia's viciousness is soon evident as she proceeds to tear into Michael Kennedy for -- heaven forbid -- "kill[ing] himself, virtually instantaneously, in front of his children." Aside from her attack of adverbitis, Paglia manages to foam right over simple logic. If Kennedy had committed actual suicide in front of his family, either by shooting or hanging himself, then I could concur. What he did in fact do in front of his family was have a tragic -- and possibly avoidable -- accident. Aside from such logic-lacking, there is Paglia's callous disregard for the family's grief and the plain truth. First she refers to the family's kneeling and praying around the prone Kennedy as "like an eerie fusion of the blood-drenched sand of the pagan Colosseum with a public-square Christmas creche." Really? Excuse me for being outré, but what it actually seemed like was a strong -- and strongly religious -- family praying for the life of one of their own. Next we have this nonsense: "But most of us are learning for the first time about the arrogant transplantation of that game [touch football] to public ski slopes, where other people were clearly endangered. This behavior ... is utterly contemptible." What is even more contemptible is twisting the truth to score a cheap shot. The fact is that the entire Kennedy clan present that evening waited until the slopes were clear before starting their game. From this we go to -- well, to the Land of Loony Gossip Linkage, to be quite frank. What, precisely, do Soon Yi and Woody Allen and Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford have to do with the death of Michael Kennedy?? He sat on Gifford's lap on his father's funeral train? Kathie Lee ran into his mother the night of his death? OK, so what?? And what of this: "What you rightly call the 'decline' of the Kennedys began to be obvious decades ago. For example, John Kennedy was killed in a limousine, while Robert Kennedy was assassinated in a kitchen." And Martin Luther King Jr. was shot on the balcony of a cheap motel, and your point is? If it's what I think it is, let me assure you that Robert Kennedy was on his way to a limousine when he was killed in the kitchen. Finally, we have Paglia's strange inconsistencies and ignorance. In criticizing the Kennedys' touch football games, she points out that Jackie -- described as an "arts oriented" woman who "hated" them -- broke her ankle the first time she tried to join in the fun. Whatever happened to the strong woman ideal, Ms. Paglia? Judging from most of your writings over the years, you should be upbraiding Jackie for being so ... feminine. But of course here it suits your purposes, just as ignoring Robert Kennedy's well-documented personal conversion after the death of his brother allows you to dismiss him as "exaggerated" and a "weasel cloaking himself in the banner of the poor." It is my sincere wish that someday soon Dame Paglia will be sent where she belongs: the margins of our culture. People as vicious, intellectually dishonest and just plain silly as she should not be taken seriously. I wonder, why does Salon? -- Rob Anderson Your decision to let Camille Paglia run the memory of a dead man into the ground is inexcusable. I am speaking of her rantings about the Kennedys and, specifically, Michael Kennedy. She sets herself up as judge of character, forgetting all too easily that every family in America has some embarrassments, etc.; we're just not in the spotlight. Ms. Paglia's rhetoric is as tiresome to me as the Kennedys are to her. It's very easy to judge the dead, they cannot defend themselves. -- Kerry Flaherty Indianapolis Your critics of Camille Paglia bluster diffusely because of Camille's observation on the decline of the Kennedys as seen in the drop in grandeur from the back seat of a limo to a steamy restaurant kitchen. But Camille, who is primarily an art critic, views life itself as an artwork. So her comments were insightful. Just imagine that the Kennedy saga were a pop novel -- totally fiction -- and that a critic had written about the author's use of death scenes as evocative of the workings of fate. Perfectly reasonable. -- John W. Harlan Houston SALON | Jan. 14, 1998

R E C E N T L Y+| TRUCKIN' DOWN TO DEADLAND, INC. BY SARAH VOWELL

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