Kennedy - 46 Years

The 1967 Look Magazines - a four-part series by William Manchester that preceded his book Death of a President are totally absorbing - especially the old ads for Pall Malls and the 1967 Plymouth Fury.  I've been too busy reading them to note the passage of the anniversary Sunday.  Esquire draws a connection with today's hateful rhetoric.

The Kennedy in the "news" was JFK's nephew, Rhode Island Congressman Patrick.  He was not yet born when the President died.  He's been barred from communion for being pro-choice.  

 I'm heading for Kennedy country today - Thanksgiving in Providence - and read Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates in preparation.  The New York Times called it "a pop history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony" like that's a bad thing.

This new book mixes jiggers of various weak liquors — paraphrase, topical one-liners, blogger tics — and ends up tasting kind of festive but bad, like Long Island iced tea.

I heartily disagree and thought it was a delicious cocktail. 

From the Christian Science Monitor:

Why should we be interested in Protestants who fled Charles I during the Great Migration? Because “the country I live in is haunted by the Puritans’ vision of themselves as God’s chosen people, as a beacon of righteousness that all others are to admire,” Vowell writes.

What Vowell finds worrisome is that we have lost the Puritans’ humility and fear of God, which kept their egotism and delusions of grandeur in check.  Even more troubling, we have also lost their respect for learning.  Vowell asserts that the United States has veered away from the original bookishness of the Bay Colony in favor of the anti-intellectual, more emotional religion now practiced in America.

She writes, “The United States is often called a Puritan nation.  Well, here is one way in which it emphatically is not: Puritan lives were overwhelmingly, fantastically literary.  Their singleminded obsession with one book, the Bible, made words the center of their lives – not land, not money, not power, not fun. I swear on Peter Stuyvesant’s peg leg that the country that became the U.S. bears a closer family resemblance to the devil-may-care merchants of New Amsterdam than it does to Boston’s communitarian English majors.”