The misanthrope's corner.

Miss King is the author of The Florence King Reader and other books.

IWISH it were 1959 again. Not for the creamy complexion and svelte figure I had then, but because it was the last year of my pre-Kennedy life, before I had ever heard of them.

Nobody I knew had ever heard of them. Old Joe's stormy prewar ambassadorship rang a faint bell with my parents but they didn't make the connection until the 1960 campaign. Ethnic Northerners remembered JFK with pride from the Veepstakes of 1956, but we were not, to put it mildly, ethnic Northerners. We didn't even know he was Irish; my English father thought of the name as Scottish thanks to an old British military march called "Sir Alexander Kennedy." As for my mother, she didn't even know about Boston. The first time she heard JFK's voice she said, "He's got guts to go into politics with a speech defect like that."

O Time, cease in your headlong flight, make me pre-Kennedy just for tonight! Those were the days. Golden days, before America got moving again. Palmy days, when the tough went back to bed when the going got tough. Halcyon days, when getting mad trumped getting even. Salad days, when no adult had more than 32 teeth. Bliss it was to be alive when Camelot meant Tennyson, compound meant syntax, tragedy meant Oedipus, and curse meant time-of-the-month.

Some will say the Roosevelts were just as bad, but I was around then, too, and I disagree. Unlike Joe Kennedy, FDR did not shove his children down our throats. On the contrary, he downplayed them, did little to grease their paths, and seemed unperturbed by the mounting evidence that they would not amount to much.

Americans subconsciously picked up on his detachment and reflected it in our own attitudes toward his children. We learned their upper-class nicknames and kept up with their traffic tickets, divorces, and madcap entrepreneurial schemes, but we did not idealize them. We never thought of them as a "dynasty," not even when Franklin Jr. won what turned out to be a single term in Congress, and the idea of one Roosevelt scion picking up the torch dropped by another would have inspired a sheaf of jokes with Elliott as the punch line (he used it as collateral to start the Dropped Torch Dude Ranch, etc.). As objects of obsession the Roosevelts were, as usual, not up to snuff, and we knew it.

It might be argued that some Kennedy-style push would have made winners of them, but this skirts the larger question of the assault the Kennedys mounted on America's accepted definition of greatness and achievement.

In his introduction to The Education of Henry Adams, James Truslow Adams wrote:

By the time the line reached Henry, the accumulated weight of great abilities and great offices had become crushing in a democracy. In no other American family, and in few anywhere, have ability and service been so conspicuous generation after generation without a break. In an aristocracy such a family would have been given a title, and have become a continuing entity as a family in the political and social life of the country. In a democracy there could be no such scaffolding built. The members of each generation would have to stand or fall by their own abilities . . .

In other words, merit and merit alone is the American way of greatness. FDR accepted it when he let his children sink or swim, and we the public accepted it when we declined to make a fetish of them.

By contrast, Joe Kennedy rejected it and built a privileged scaffolding for his sons, instilling in them an appreciation for the ancient perquisites of primogeniture, carte blanche, noblesse oblige, le roi le veult, l'etat c'est moi, and -- the Kennedy favorite -- droit du seigneur.

The privileged scaffolding is now occupied by the third generation, wearers of the Order of Celebrity, a media knighthood whose motto, "Famous for Being Famous," was painted over with "Public Service" as needed. Whenever a Kennedy 3 was hit by scandal, the claque industry trotted out the whole thundering herd of human-rights activists and makers of documentary "films" to prove that the torch was still being passed, but the strain was evident. Kennedy 3 was top-heavy with gilded losers; running a charity oil company and founding a university in Angola sounded like something Elliott Roosevelt would do. The claque needed a punchier explanation for our endless Kennedy worship, and Michael Kennedy gave them one on New Year's Eve.

THE explanation would intrigue James Truslow Adams, whose family had the opposite problem in later generations. Analyzing why America stopped worshiping Adamses, he wrote: "They had little respect for the mind or opinions of the common man. They always got their own light from their own guiding stars and not from the will-o'-the-wisps of the marsh of 'public opinion."'

The Adamses thrived in an early America of limited suffrage when the remnants of Old World hierarchy were still in place, but as egalitarianism took root their aloof personalities, their introverted habits, and their general "differentness" sank them like a stone. "A certain failure had become noticeable by the time of Henry's father, [who] had not become President . . . the failure in adjustment to environment had begun."

Michael Kennedy's death made pundits think hard about environmental adjustment. Newsweek's Jonathan Alter was rendered breathless by the Kennedy genius for it. The clan is "a mirror of America," "a metaphor for the American Century"; they have an "uncanny connection to the times," each generation has "absorbed the Zeitgeist," and Michael's death is "entirely in context."

In context of what? "If judged by its tabloid throw-weight, the dynasty is alive and well and yielding the racy and heart-wrenching stories so in tune with the times."

It's come to this. We not only identify with a man who died doing what Daffy Duck did in a thousand cartoons, but we call it a tragedy and blame it on a curse.

Kennedys 'R' Us, Adamses 'R'nt.