Of sentiment and service

BY JOE BENNETT

OPINION: It's been a bad week for the letter K. First Kennedy died, the lion of the Senate, then Kashin; the elephant of Auckland. There is no reason to suppose, however, that the two events are related.

Both lives got a celebratory farewell. I don't know which celebration was the odder. I do know which I would rather have attended.

Kashin drew 18,000 to Auckland Zoo to say goodbye, but they didn't get to see Kashin being buried, presumably because it required a front-end loader. The business would have lacked dignity.

A more practical way to dispose of Kashin's remains, and a carbon-neutral one, would have been to saw her into chunks and toss her to other inmates. She could have kept the big cats and the pythons going for months.

But to do that would have upset, I would imagine, a fair proportion of the 18,000. We flee, instinctively, the reality of death, and embrace the comfort of sentiment.

So we got a TV reporter telling us that Kashin loved food, water, children and painting, though not necessarily in that order. How anyone knows that an elephant loves something, I don't know, but I am not here to quibble. She made a nice story.

Kashin reached 40, which is apparently below par for an elephant. I read somewhere that because elephants have no natural predators they would plod on for ever were it not for their teeth. Elephants apparently get only six sets of teeth. Once the sixth set has ground to stubs, it's curtains for Jumbo.

But it wasn't teeth that did for Kashin. It was a vet, who gave her a lethal injection to spare her from the chronic pain of abscesses, arthritis and a skin complaint. I can't help wondering whether these ailments might have had something to do with her living in cool captivity rather than a hot jungle. But anyway rest her big bones.

Edward Kennedy was not buried by front-end loader. He was twice as long on Earth as Kashin and it is doubtful that he gave as much pleasure to children, but he got a far more lavish farewell.

On a fittingly rainy day the great and the good gathered in a Boston cathedral to say toodle- pip. The place was awash with ex-presidents, black umbrellas and white teeth. And everyone exhibited the American propensity for saying sonorous things with apparent sincerity.

Now I am aware that it is a universal habit to say nothing ill of the dead. But Americans seem to believe nice things more readily than other nations do. It may lie at the heart of their success.

Just about the only thing I know about Kennedy is the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne, which he failed to report to police for nine hours because, well, he just forgot. Understandably this didn't get much air time at the funeral.

The word that did get air time, and a lot of it, was service. He had given service to the people. The speakers spoke of political service as though it was a cloak of virginal integrity. It's hard to do that without irony, but they managed it.

We can't. We know that election night winners don't grin and holler solely because they believe they can now serve.

We know that saints are rare. We know that self is hard to erase. We know that the human beast is frail and corruptible, and the American constitution acknowledges it too. No president may hold office for more than two terms.

But America still seems able to speak as though innocent of that knowledge. Even though they got rid of a president for fibbing thirty years ago and should have got rid of another one 10 years ago for the same reason, and even though every senator pushes parochial barrows in order to get himself re-elected, and even though Washington abounds in lobbyists whose work must have some effect otherwise they wouldn't be there, and even though the CIA is and always has been up to its neck in murky deeds, and even though we know rather more about the Kennedy clan that is consistent with any suggestion of philanthropy or altruism, yet still they spoke of the purity of service.

I can't explain why. But there may have been a hint in those attending the funeral. The cathedral was thick with actors. Jack Nicholson was there. As was Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Actors make a living from pretending, from faking it. It is one of the odder features of the modern world that they are venerated.

And it is odder still that they are trusted, especially in the United States. Voters gave Schwarzenegger California, and Ronald Reagan the White House. It seems that it is nicer to believe than to know. Easier too.

And maybe, on reflection, there wasn't that much difference between the two farewell beanos.

- © Fairfax NZ News