Ted Kennedy Jr. gave a warm and touching sendoff to his late father at the funeral Mass today. There were many highly emotional moments, but the part that I liked most was his quoting his father’s line, “I don’t mind not being president. I just mind that someone else is.” There is, of course, a great deal of stagecraft in such a line, intended to communicate a certain level of humility to audiences and win their trust. But there is also a measure of rueful self-awareness, from which the wit helpfully draws some of the sting. (I admit I have a great deal of affection for Irish blarney, an affection such as it is possible only for non-Irish people to have; the Irish — including many of my own friends in Boston — tend to be skeptical of and even hostile toward it.) I just happened on a true masterpiece of this genre of self-deprecation, via Wikipedia.Victor Mature, a prominent movie star of the 1950s, applied for membership in a country club, only to be told the club didn’t accept actors. He responded: “Have you seen my work?”

Self-deprecation is a way we can all deal with failure while preserving our dignity. Kennedy’s failures — and failings — have been much discussed: We all know that Teddy Kennedy had personal weaknesses, that he failed in his ambition to be president, and, saddest of all, that he was responsible for a car accident 40 years ago in which a promising young woman was killed. May he now rest in the arms of a loving Father, in Whose embrace there is no need for the emotional self-protection strategies we make such desperate use of in our fallen world. R.I.P.