Kevin Myers, a provocative columnist for the Irish Independent, has stirred up a hornet’s nest in Ireland with a piece slamming the late Senator Edward Kennedy for drunken, “oafish” behavior and calling “Irish-America” infantile and revolting. His piece is entitled Kennedys Were Leaders of the Most Nauseating and Sentimental of any Ethnic Minority in U.S.
A sample of Myers’s purple prose: “The Irish-America I’m talking about is composed of a series of grotesque and infantilised east-coast communities of maudlin, tone-deaf necrophiliacs who bawl songs celebrating murder in a far-off land which most of them have never visited, not least because the plane door has not been made which can accommodate their huge rectums.”
Myers’s article is the most extreme of a series of European obituaries and assessments of Kennedy that highlight his failings as much as his achievements and are not nearly as glowing and effusive about “Camelot” as their American counterparts.
In The Guardian, a left-wing London daily, the obituary contains an unsentimental account of Kennedy’s life, with plenty of focus on his faults and flaws, including his cheating at Harvard, his high alcohol consumption, and his reputed “bizarre sexual behavior.” The pattern of the Kennedy clan was “to win any struggle it undertook without bothering too much about the means,” The Guardian writes.
In The Daily Telegraph, a conservative British daily, Anne Applebaum also explores the flaws and contradictions of Kennedy’s life. She describes how an American journalist explained to her that “Ted Kennedy was always utterly incoherent. If you wanted to know what he was doing, you had to ask his aides.” She adds that the late senator’s failings caused “even the most hagiographic of the past few days’ obituaries” in the United States to adopt a hedging tone, even in The New York Times, a liberal U.S. daily.
Damian Thompson, Blogs Editor of the Telegraph Media Group, attacks a tribute in The Boston Globe by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown as a “nauseating eulogy,” which is an insult to the British victims of a terrorist organization [the Irish Republican Army] to which Kennedy offered moral support over many long years. Thompson chides Kennedy for his silence during the IRA terror campaign of the 1970s, “when he didn’t utter a word of condemnation that might upset the Boston Irish machine that indirectly helped pay for those nail bombs.”
The award of an honorary knighthood to Kennedy by Gordon Brown’s government in March, 2009, marked a low point in the history of the honors system, Thompson writes. “It was a Brownite stunt that caused scandal in all Britain’s main parties.”
Two further points:
