Tracy and Teddy and The Boston Globe

September 23, 2009

Filed in: The Home Front, The Middle Ages, The Way We Live Now

A couple of weeks ago, I did something I haven’t done for ages and ages – sat down and read The Boston Globe from cover to cover.

It was a dark Saturday morning, pouring rain from the edge of some tropical depression or another (Bill? Dennis?) that was passing by. Ted Kennedy had already had his private ceremony at the Kennedy Library, but was awaiting his Big Day (funeral in Boston, burial in D.C., tens of thousands of people lining the streets etc.).

It’s funny, but it really took those two things together – the outpouring of unexpectedly snark-free emotion for Teddy, and my reading about it all the old-fashioned way, at a kitchen table with a cup (okay, multiple cups) of coffee and a newspaper spread before me—that triggered some revelations.

In the right company, I have joked that my politics are “somewhere left of Ted Kennedy’s,” but it’s truer to say my politics are Ted Kennedy’s. He first went to the Senate the year after I was born. So barring the three years of my life that I was a registered voter in New Hampshire, Kennedy was my senator for my entire life.

I never loved or admired him, because of Chappaquiddick, but that kind of conscious emotion was beside the point – if you grew up in or around Boston in the ‘60s or ‘70s or ‘80s or ‘90s, his politics and policies were part of the collective DNA of the time and place, and your personal feelings about the man were both beneath and beside the point.

We were a Globe family (your other choice was the Boston Herald, which was and still is read back-to-front by people who want its sports coverage and couldn’t care less about the news). Growing up, I read at least some part of the Globe every single day as I killed time at our kitchen table, waiting for something – dinner, a ride some place, a friend to call, my so-called life to begin.

And all that time, Ted Kennedy’s politics were indistinguishable from the Globe’s. Oh, it hated on the man plenty, in waves that came and went depending upon what scandal was surfacing, but hated him in a jealous younger-brother kind of way that brooked no larger arguments.

The Globe could dump on Kennedy because he was theirs, he was ours. It was clear, even to a teenager carelessly paging through the front section on her way to the comics and concert reviews, that Kennedy defined New England, and the Globe was the voice of New England, and therefore Kennedy’s voice.

So, yeah, reading the coverage of Kennedy’s memorial cover-to-cover, and later watching it on television, I realized that nearly everything I believe in politically—public education, health care, support for the working-class and the poor and immigrants, and even more, the larger belief that the government has a moral responsibility to try and make life better for people – all of that came from Kennedy and from the Globe.

Now Kennedy’s dead, and the Globe is nearly so – certainly it’s lost that unifying editorial voice that can champion his, or any, causes. It’s hard to think what and who will stand up with that singular vision and voice in the age of Internet snark.