LITTLE ROCK — YOU COULD forgive friends and family for getting a little carried away when a politician dies. (A wise rabbi once told us that people shouldn't be held responsible for what they say at weddings and funerals.) You could even forgive the Boston Globe for gushing when a favorite son proves mortal. But one obituary after Ted Kennedy's death caught our eye like a cinder.
To quote the Washington Post-yes, the esteemed Washington Post:
"Kennedy served in the Senate through five of the most dramatic decades of the nation's history. . . ."
Really? Which decade wasn't dramatic?
Were the 1960s more dramatic than the 1860s? The late unpleasantness would seem to qualify as dramatic. And deadly. It was a close-run thing whether this nation would survive that decade.
The 1970s gave us Watergate and some dramatically bad fashions, bad music and a bad administration or two. But were the 1970s more dramatic than the 1790s, when the Republic itself took form underits then new Constitution? There were giants in the Earth in those days.
Shall we go into the 1930s and '40s, the years of the Great Depression and the greatest World War? Some decades are much too dramatic for comfort.
Whether it's the Redcoats' burning the White House in the War of 1812 or just Chicago burning in 1871, whether it's the murder of 3,000 innocents on these shores on September 11th, 2001, or the loss of 2,400 Americans in a sneak attack on a Hawaiian base on December 7th, 1941, whether it's the Panic of 1837 or the Panic of 2008-9, American history suffers from no lack of dramatic decades. Even the ones we now think of as ho-hum weren't. Take, for excellent example, the 1950s. It wasn't really just Happy Days, what with the space race heating up, The Bomb looming over all, the Army-McCarthy hearings, and, oh yeah, the Korean War.
Ted Kennedy served through five of the most dramatic decades in this nation's history?
A little perspective, please.
Editorial, Pages 12 on 08/27/2009