The Cynic Express(ed) 3.05: Alas, Icarus!

     A New England legend holds that the whippoorwills can tell when someone is going to die. They surround the house at dusk and make their eerie and eldritch calls in the night, rising to a crescendo when the resident passes. The legend further holds that the devilish birds try to capture the soul of the deceased as it flies the body. If they catch the soul, they shriek and whirl and play gleefully until the morning. If they do not, they gradually pipe down and stop.

     With the twenty-four hour rubberneck-a-thon provided by the media, I can only guess that they have successfully latched onto the soul of John F. Kennedy, Jr., as he plunged into the sea. Like a blustery, wet nor'easter, CNN, the network news, the Times, the Posts, and the Boston Globe have latched onto every aspect of the man's life and blown it up onto a big screen and tried to wrench his existence into a myth. This simple personal tragedy is a legend that will stand for all time, some archetypal representation of our era. Yep.

     The Boston Globe spent several column inches, presumably on their front page, to tell me how John F. Kennedy, Jr., was an everyman icon. If you're going to build a myth, you might as well lay a strong foundation, something like this solid slab of fiction. Sure, buddy, let me tell you about the people I know. Everyman, or at least the cumulative experience that comes from working both with different strata of people and working in public positions that have daily contact with everyone, including those above and below the average that exemplifies Everyman, does not have a personal plane. Not even one of those little bourgeois Pipers instead of Gulfstream IVs.

     Everyman does not start a slick magazine based in New York City. I suppose someone looking at it through the funny lens of having a deadline to meet and copy to fluff with eloquent waxings might see it differently. After all, lots of people send out mass produced letters at Christmas time, and it is the same, right? After all, Christmas letters are probably more profitable.

     Besides that, few of the everymen that I have known have come from a wealthy family, dated models, or has been voted sexiest man alive by People magazine. Few will. I'm not ruling it out for me, though.

     When I die, my family will not be able to charter with a mere phone call a U.S. Navy vessel for the funeral. Not even a little one like the U.S.S. Briscoe, and not even if it's only a day away and going to sea anyway. But me and the everymen I know are not the stuff of legend, like Pecos John, who I here also once caught a cab and made it to La Guardia from Manhattan in twenty minutes. Manhattan, Illinois. Hey, I like to drive nails into the ground floor of a myth, too.

     So now that John-John, as John F. Kennedy, Jr., was known--if I am called Bri-Bri as I near forty, I will be annoyed--has not heeded the advice of pilots who advise against flying VFR at night over the ocean and has gotten water on his wax-and-feather wings, the myth builders and wool puller-overs in our society take their last shot to apotheosize the man as the sum of all their dreams and make us watch their narcissistic vicarous longings as his life flashes before our eyes.

     Maybe I am cynical, but I think I'll flip over to the Cartoon Network now and watch some old Jabber Jaw reruns instead. Talk about a myth for our era--how about a shark that sounds like Curly?