Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Uncle Teddy: One Great Honky


Honky month continues.

We love Uncle Teddy. Love the guy. It’s a bitch that he’s dead. He was a great man and a damned good Honky.

The Mary Jo thing, yeah. This sucked too. He would have likely gotten a DUI manslaughter charge, had Chappaquidic fallen in the modern day. Anyone who has spent 24 hours in jail on a DUI charge can relate to the horror. Anyone who has lost someone to drunk driving, multiply it by a million.

But for the grace of God go I, as they say.

The Kopechne family are likely not mourning, to be sure. And if there are some folk pissed at me for saying that, well, hey, deal with it. It has to be said today of all days, and none of these so-called news hucksters are saying it, nor covering this angle. Alcohol has many faces and that’s one of them. Some people have “the gene”, as the Irish called it back in the day.

The political bullshit in this country which seems to prevent news people from mentioning the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of Chappaquidic today is only one more example of what’s tearing us apart. So I’ll say it.

Same goes for the Michael Jackson thing. Lest we forget he thought sleeping with eight-year-olds was okey dokey and, any child who has been molested by an adult can tell you, a grown man who needs to sleep with eight-year-olds, just doesn’t have it together, head-wise. Chris Rock is correct.

Back to Teddy, who we can now thank for one more good deed, getting Michael Jackson and all his weirdness, off the front page.
“We are all possessed with the belief we are all called to a better country and a newer world,” he said just a year ago.
These people can sling that stuff like no one on earth, can’t they? Better said “cahn’t they?” Between the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, (and Teddy was both) they have been at it for more than a thousand years, seriously.

This "better" Irish gene, appealing to the better angels of our nature, as Teddy and his brother Bobby would have said, perhaps found the pinnacle of expression with Uncle Teddy himself. We all got to watch that flourish, all his life, which is very cool indeed.

I won’t natter on here about his career, things he has said, folks he helped. People more qualified than I, are all over it, all over the internet, today. I will say he was not only loved here in the states where everyone saw his pain at his brothers’ passing, and other family tragedies, but in Ireland as well, where they adore the man and his family.

There’s a tiny little pub out on the end of the Dingle Peninsula. Summer 2007, my son and I went in there for a cup of joe and a look at map. I don’t drink these days, because I don’t want to end up with something horrific on my conscience like a Chappaquidic, and I know that’s where I’m headed if I don’t watch out.

It’s a daily deal. I’m not a step guy, but I remember. I think of Teddy, as well as a local cat here in Florida named Billy Lane who is serving six years for DUI manslaughter.
But for His grace…as they say.

Anyway, this pub, located in the village of An Fheothanach, where they don’t even speak English, has a picture of Senators Ted Kennedy, and Chris Dodd on the wall, signed by the both of them. There they are arm-in-arm with the staff and so on. It’s been hanging there since the 1980s, I think.

These folks didn’t say a word to my son and I when we were there, because, hey, we don’t speak Irish, we were obviously American, and both apparently are frowned upon after dark, out on the misty end of the peninsula.

But the locals obviously had a hell of time with Uncle Teddy when he was there, and that’s saying something.

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