Fleeing Thoughts: The Big 3 and the Kennedys

-American automakers want our tax money. They haven't gotten their grubby, greedy mitts on it yet, but they will. The president-elect wants to give it to them, and Congress does too, it just wants them to beg for it in the proper fashion. Congressmen don't want to see the heads of the Big 3 flying to Washington in corporate jets to ask for for their multi-billion dollar bailout.

Listen, head dudes of the Big 3, I don't necessarily begrudge your flying private jets. You're important people and many times it's just quicker to get business done when you don't have to wait for a failing airline to get their jet in the air. But if you're going to beg me, the taxpayer who looks for cheap airline seats on the Internet on those rare occasions when I can afford to fly somewhere, for billions, don't come calling in a spiffy private plane. It just looks bad. It's bad public relations. You should have been smart enough to know that, but then again you are the chiefs of companies that are failures.

What should have happened is the heads of GM, Ford, and Chrysler, all pile in to a Buick Roadmaster to drive to Washington, DC.

Of course, the car might have broken down along the way and they would have had to ask for a bailout from a pay phone at a Stucky's in Pennsylvania.

-President Kennedy was assassinated 45 years ago on November 22.. The American public is still fascinated by the murder, and by the Kennedy family in general. Why? The wealth, the large family of good looking people with full heads of hair, the fact that they had a compound, "the Kennedy compound." (That's my aspiration, to someday have a compound.)

All those things make the Kennedy's interesting. But it's not just wealth, and power, that do the trick. The Bush family has those things, yet with the exception perhaps of George H.W., who has turned out to be a far better ex-president than he was a president, we are not all that interested in the Bushes.

The secret is in mortality and morbidity. People eat that stuff up. The Kennedy's had, and still have, a penchant for dying young in alluring ways: Joe, Jr in a plane explosion during World War II, JFK and RFK by assassin's bullets, and JFK, JR piloting his own plane to his doom, and that of his wife and sister-in-law as well. Rosemary, a sister of John, was mentally ill, and was lobotomized and institutionalized. And now, Ted Kennedy has a brain tumor. All captivating, National Enquirer kind of stuff. Sure, there was lots of sex, too, and no one turns away from that, but it's the mortality and the morbidity that give the Kennedy clan a Shakespearean air about them.

-How insane are we about the JFK assassination? Oh, pretty darn crazy. Look at this slideshow on the remembrance of that day in Dallas. The photos were taken by people gathered at the site of the assassination. The second photo is of a man with a t-shirt that graphs the trajectory of the bullet that killed Kennedy and wounded Texas governor John Connally. Now that's just nuts. I'm not sure I could wear that shirt in public. I might buy it just because it's so weirdly cool though. Still, it's a good example of how nuts people are. Me included.