At the same time, there is something awful, and ominous,
about the assassination of so many public men in this country whose
charisma was a charisma of change. It almost looks as though some
perverse historical forces were conspiring to polarize the country by
removing those addressing themselves to some of its real problems.
It
is
true that in each case only one, or, at most, several people were
implicated. In a strictly logical sense, the whole nation has not been
directly involved; and those who argue that it is all the work of a
few nuts are technically right. But this is just a legalistic kind of
logic and is being fed us by people who want to prove that there
is nothing basically wrong, to lull us back into the past.
The one thing we do not need now is more rhetoric. Yet even
the death of Senator Kennedy
is
being used to escalate the production
of words, creating a sea of confusion and dissolving people's fears and
doubts into the homilies of the status. quo. All the political pieties
Senator Kennedy stood against in his life are being invoked to
memorialize his death.
Who knows what's coming?
William Phillips
