Camelot, Schmamelot.
Despite some of the headlines, what died this week was something that never actually was: The Kennedy Camelot, we now know, was largely myth, created in the wake of a president's assassination and offering a context in which to process so traumatic a national event.
But when Ted Kennedy died this week, it was as a man, not a myth. That is the price, or actually the gift, of living to be an old man rather than dying as a young one.
What he left behind was something more earthbound than lofty, more practical than poetic. And yet, given our current fractious politics, perhaps it is exactly what we need.
The deceptively simple ability to cross the aisle.
In the tide of tributes and personal reminiscences since the senator's death Tuesday night, among the most touching have been the ones from across the political aisle - a phrase that may need updating now that the aisle seems to have widened into a veritable canyon.
It shouldn't be so noteworthy, but sadly it is, that the standard bearer of Democratic liberalism had so many deep and abiding friendships with conservative Republicans.
Among those friends were Senate colleagues like John McCain and Orrin Hatch, who spoke at Kennedy's memorial service Friday night, and even, as Peggy Noonan wrote about in her Wall Street Journal column this week, Ronald Reagan.
That such political polar opposites had such a warm personal relationship is one of those things that initially seems surprising, but ultimately makes perfect sense. As Noonan characterized their meshing, "grace met grace."
Today, when the dominant mood of politics seems to be anger, the concept of grace seems quaint, naive even.
It's hard to imagine a less graceful political moment than now, although of course it is part of living in such hyper-aware, self-referential times to imagine that everything is the best or the worst that it has ever been.
But the fact that health care reform, a cause near and dear to Kennedy's heart, would become the battleground of a particularly vicious, take-no-prisoners political war makes his death seem even the greater loss.
Not that any one person, even one so skilled a legislator as Kennedy, could change the perfect-storm dynamic that we find ourselves in today. The usual pressures from industry and political groups, coupled with the beet-faced anger of the town hall protesters, have a chokehold on efforts to reform the health care system.
