Lobotomy Dynasty

If the CNN series, The Kennedys, is speaking true, then the children of Joseph and Rose Kennedy were lobotomized puppets imprinted to live their father’s life for him. Joseph wanted to be president, disgraced himself as a Hitler appeaser, then retrenched and bequeathed his aim to his sons Joseph Jr. then Jack. Growing up, the nine children were posters, billboards of “success.” The small children had to be, at the dinner table, world savvy and “articulate,” and in the possibility they were ever asked to give a speech – instructed Rose – had to have something “appropriate” to say at the ready. And somehow there was a sense of death in them, or the chemistry of it. Jack, always sickly and in pain and consigned to a clerical job, was pushed into the military by his father, then launched himself into a physically torturous and near-suicidal appointment – commander of a PT boat. He screwed up, got some and almost all of his crew killed, was no hero, but his father spun the press to make him look like one. U.S. Navy lieutenant and first son Joseph Jr., poignantly aggrieved that he was not the star, sought a way to family glory. He was killed in an especially dangerous mission. Earlier, oldest daughter Rosemary was forced by her father to have a lobotomy because she had “learning disabilities” – was not the performance intellectual the family required. The operation made her a vegetable, and she remained hospitalized for the rest of her life. “Kick,” another sister, married outside the family religion; soon after, her husband was killed in battle. She then consorted with a married Earl, leading her mother to threaten to disown her. On a flight to the French Riviera, they and two crew were killed when their plane crashed into a mountain: The Earl had demanded that the pilot fly in turbulent weather.

All the family photos and movies you see in the first episode are of these smiling, dapper and fun children of Camelot, with patriarch grinning like Power in the background.

Maybe there is an internal feeling of death and dying if you have to buy in to not owning your own life, and if you have to barrel forward along the precipice of the highest peaks, and if your inoculated purposes are un-Self, humanity-wide.* President Kennedy, pushed into his first political fight by his father, who practically paid for the election, was plagued with an auto-immune disorder and other infirmities that may have been psychosomatic: caused by stress and buried, denied tragedy. The narrator noted that Kennedy had always had a fatalistic sense and talked about death a lot – before he was thirty.

Psychology is always the river running beneath, whether you are “happy,” or making millions, or winning elections and the presidency, or winning the American Dream. Smiles and success don’t tell the truth: The deep river does.

If only we weren’t such a goddamned surfacy species.

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* Wikipedia entry, “Kennedy family”: “The descendants of Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. and Rose Kennedy include six members of the United States House of Representatives or Senate, one of whom became president of the United States; as well as two U.S. ambassadors, a lieutenant governor, three state legislators (one of whom went on to the U.S. House of Representatives), and one mayor.”