AMERICA, OUR SON AND GEM, LOST!

Character is decried in our moment. We make sport excoriating vice in every figure of our national public life. Then by haughty caprice, Fortune steals from us one fine, beloved, elegant, and entwined in our hearts. Our jewel sinks into the sea - belated arms reach to grasp back the shinning thing. But it slips so silent into a silent, sounding sea which won’t give back, keeping in its clean waters our lost treasure. In losing a jewel its value is brought to us: The moment is most poignant. In a country of shallow character, the loss of JFK. Jr. we now see in our sad travail was the loss of nobility.

What is character? Of all things, something marked by nobility, since the noble is the acme of fine character. To have nobility is to enjoy an accolade, to have excellence of excellences. Of who can we give this accolade, so dangerous in democratic elan when even the notion is suffused with entitlement, the elite, privilege, breeding, the long virtues of aristocracy? Though one be favored by the gods, or the fates, we still venture to give the accolade in Truth. Truth is due even to those favored, those of Camelot.

What then proves out JFK, Jr’s nobility? His friends fill the record, inscribe the public scroll, provide the moving finger, and testimony: A friend, a nice person, self-aware, reflective, who was his own person in a world feeding personhood to celebrity and its own numerous calling, a husband to another lovely and fine, an honest, caring man, funny, creative, wedded to a project bringing an earnest spirit of fashion and play to the driest and most corrosive of public matters - political life. A man who tried and tried and when needed tried again and succeeded - an American, definitively.

Testimony by friends is hardly the whole of it. For there is the man himself. Sublime in his poise, smoothly elegant in graceful responses to incessant inquiry, well-spoken. Thoughtful.

Thirdly ennobling, no less the mother’s son and was there ever a better teacher of elegance than Jackie? No, and this son honored his mother by daily act. He imbibed an aesthetics in his style of life true to her hope for his creativity, bearing, and commitment. We loved him, baby in her arms, salute at her grieved biding, and then we loved him again, his lips to kiss her coffin adieu.

Finally, History too, its bounty and its aching caprice, make nobility where there may have been mere virtue. Here was a man born and reared hand-in-hand with the vagaries of Dynasty’s incessant pressures. He held his head admist it and proved out the manner of good living, if good living be shared with celebrity and eminence. That model for our living cannot be begrudged. No fulminator against privilege would so much wish himself subject to History’s crude ways as Fortune rolled JFK Jr's life in its maw-ish paws.

The public record by his friends, his own graceful bearing, his mother’s lessons, History - So much was his soul touched with what is genuine and lovely. Our peer proved the antithesis for cynical and corroded selves. We see the man whole and good now that we see him no more.

The shinning sea sparkling, glittering, swallows our lovely gem. A son as the Sun, a prince. Sometimes it has been said, only the good die young. But there was one so good, that though he dies young, we feel assured. We say that had he died old, yes he would have still been good; so then, still young. Young John John, always Young, an American son, our gem.

July, 1999