Besides being the month of Thanksgiving, November is the month of the Dead Kennedy. It’s a time of remembering a day of blood and brains on a pink dress in Dallas, a portal into a black hole in the last half-century’s history.

For those of us born in and after the 1960s, who can’t literally recall the day of the assassination, the real figure from November 1963 haunting our childhood imaginations was a boy, our age, standing in short pants and saluting his father’s coffin.

John Kennedy Jr., who would have turned 52 this week, was our Kennedy. The beautiful man known as John John, who grew up cavorting on the Cape and Skorpios with Jackie O, discoing in New York with Mick and Bianca and Andy, was a symbol of sex and privilege, his elitism so gracefully carried. 

I met him on a few occasions when I wrote for his magazine George. His pet project was idealistic, and a bit ahead of its time. The magazine was first of all an extension of the Kennedy brand: substance, celebrity and just enough whimsy to appeal to those who had flipped the channel from the nightly news to MTV.

In person he was an easygoing thoroughbred, perfectly mannered, all varnished normalcy. Sitting beside him at lunch in a Washington bistro, you knew that he knew exactly which fork to use first, but he wasn’t going to make you feel bad for not unfolding the napkin properly, either.

Turning up at New York parties in the 1990s, he and his blond wife were luminous creatures, towering over everybody else, tall, sylphic and fair. Olympians.

In the 13 years since he died, I remember Kennedy whenever I exit the Franklin Street subway station by Bubby’s, the corner restaurant where the paps so often staked him out, across from the Tribeca loft he shared with his lovely, restless and unhappy bride until the day they died.

This month, though, I found myself thinking about him while driving west from the city at Thanksgiving, beneath the contrails of small jets and planes crisscrossing sky over Essex County Airport, the location from which he took off on a summer day in 1999.

Before the 2000 election and 9/11, that plane crash in the fog over the Cape was one of the tragic millennial plot twists. I’m not saying Kennedy would have been president or changed the course of history. But he was our generation’s Kennedy, possessed of that rare quality from another era called charm, who might have helped recharge the progressive politics that were his birthright. Maybe, just maybe, he would have shown the brutes in Washington how to be civil in an uncivilized age.

Our Kennedy was, like the rest of us, a self-indulgent underachiever, a little lost. He loved his Frisbee, and he flunked the bar exam a couple times. But his greatest underachievement was his untimely death. What he might have been—perhaps a senator or governor—we will never know.

JFK JR.’S DAD ENDURED A SECOND, reputational death with revelations about CIA plots and his seedy private life, the revolving door of women in and out of the White House, feeding the now-named sex addiction. The younger Kennedy didn’t want to see that. I wrote a book about one of the mistresses and I never wrote for his magazine or saw him again.

He protected his dad’s legend, surely, but the rest of us came to expect, if not to revel in, the failures of his storied clan, from the peccadilloes of Bobby and Teddy, to the lost souls of the next generation, the heroin addictions, the rape charges, the car crashes, and most recently, the divorce ending in suicide of Bobby Junior’s wife in Katonah.

As children of the 1960s, we grew up knowing better than to put our faith in great men and higher institutions—starting with Nixon's resignation, the Church committee naming the dirty deeds done in service of our free enterprise around the world, the coups and assassinations, drug experiments, the dirty wars.

Born at the end of the Baby Boom, we were cowed into learned helplessness by black ops and nuclear Armageddon and by easy drugs and cheap gas, too young to protest, too high to care. We partied because tomorrow might never come, pretty sure we were the final generation before nuclear Armageddon. We had no clue that a different sort of Armageddon was underway, slow, painless and invisible, until the streets of Detroit turned into apocalyptic movie sets and our ponds stopped freezing in winter.

In their book, That Used to Be Us, Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum lay out the statistical decline that’s occurred on our generation’s watch.

Thirty years ago, 10 percent of California’s general revenue fund went to higher education and 3 percent to prisons. Today nearly 11 percent goes to prisons and 8 percent to higher education.

The shameless abandonment of all communitarian impulse that lay behind the Reagan era wealth shift happened on our watch: the top 1 percent now holds 40 percent of the wealth. Twenty-five years ago, the top 12 percent held 33 percent of the wealth.

The truest measure of our generation’s decline is in the kids of a gutted middle class. The descendants of Greatest Generation are fat, diabetic, meth-addicted sloths who couldn’t make it through basic training if they were so inclined. “Seventy-five percent of young Americans, between the ages of 17 to 24,” Messrs. Friedman and Mandelbaum wrote, “are unable to enlist in the military today because they have failed to graduate from high school, have a criminal record or are physically unfit.”

The authors blame outside forces: globalization, the revolution in information technology, the nation’s chronic deficits and its pattern of energy consumption.

But we know better. We know that the decline started inside of us. Like Kennedy—our best and brightest—our own squandered potential comes from the don’t-give-a-shit decades of our extended youth, from the classes we cut in college to smoke dope and play Ultimate, from the planet we heated with the fumes from so many cross country road trips, and from the island of plastic in the Pacific we would make with our limitless intake of bottled water and supersized soda.

Frank DiGiacomo, in a July 1999 obit for John Jr. he wrote in these pages, tried to describe what Junior’s death meant for his peers. Mr. DiGiacomo didn’t know that it was one dispiriting tragedy preceding so much worse—the imminent disastrous election of 2000 and the falling of the World Trade towers.

But he sensed something dark coming, as we all did.

“We’re all older now,” Mr. DiGiacomo wrote. “And somehow, New York’s 21st century seems a little colder and more distant knowing that John Kennedy—who was supposed to be in our future, who may be irreplaceable in our lives—is contained forever, back here with our youth, in his father’s century, the 20th.”

John John died just as he was getting his act together at age 38—belatedly, like the rest of us, getting less diffident, gaining hope, finding a purpose. He would have been gray around the temples by now and, who knows, maybe living up to his birthright and promise as another desperately needed, persuasive voice for progressive ideals in Albany or D.C.

We, his peers, forge into middle age and these troubled times that none of us foresaw or, it must be admitted, would or could have tried to prevent.

RIP this week then to our misspent youth, and to the very symbol of its lost promise, the boy saluting death, forever.

editorial@observer.com

Marimekko has officially arrived to the masses.

H&M, which opened its first New York City shop in 2000, began collaborating with high-end designers in 2004, in order to bring some cachet to its racks of cute and cheap clothing. (The thinking usually goes like this: That skirt you pick up in May might be falling apart by August, but if you only pay 19 bucks for it, who cares?) Each name-brand line led to a sudden shopping frenzy: Karl Lagerfeld’s entire stock sold out at some stores in an hour; lines around the block formed to snatch Stella McCartney’s stuff; same for Roberto Cavalli and even Madonna’s looks from last year.

Marimekko is a different kind of choice for the Swedish chain, a departure from the hot-but-too-expensive designs of Cavalli and Lagerfeld to the vintage-but-too-expensive looks of more classic designers. The Finnish company first got big when Jacqueline Kennedy bought eight Marimekko (which translates to “Mary’s Dress”) dresses to wear throughout the 1960 presidential campaign. After a brief period of near-extinction in the early ’90s, the signature Unikko poppy print—as recognizable to some as a Gucci stripe or a Louboutin red sole—started appearing again on everything from tea towels to expensive stationary. Thanks to stores like Anthropologie (which currently carries one juicy fruit-printed Marimekko dress for $178 and another for $158), which tapped into a girls-who-can’t-resist-a-brightly-colored-print-dress market, the company reported net sales last year of $116 million.

H&M’s new line is, sneakily, “A Tribute to Marimekko”, which means that the clothes and accessories are not exactly Marimekko. The store’s public relations manager Jennifer Uglialoro explained that “the idea came from designers in H&M’s women’s wear department who have long admired Marimekko’s patterns. … They have simply licensed their patterns to H&M.” In other words, H&M paid Marimekko to copy their prints, and then produced some cheap clothes of H&M’s design. Hey, we can live with that!

The 70-piece collection—more reasonably priced than the official collaborations that preceded it (a T-shirt with the distinctive black-and-white spiral was $19.90, dresses were under 50 bucks)—was whisked off racks at the Fifth Avenue and 18th Street H&M just three hours after going on sale. Anis, a 19-year-old design student at Parsons, had an armful of silky yellow and purple garments as she perused the racks of accessories (which including bangles, sunglass cases and hats). “I love Marimekko prints!” she squealed. A mother dressed in muted gray held up a pair of short-shorts in blinding fuchsia; her daughter had instructed her to pick things up for spring. The swimsuits, priced between $30 and $35, seemed to be the most popular items (H&M wouldn’t release numbers, but a tired-looking cashier reported “things are selling like crazy”).

“I’m so psyched about finding these,” said Claire Courtade, 25, holding up a pink-and-orange one-piece in one hand, and a black-and-white bikini in the other. “Aren’t they cute? I have a long torso and I usually have to shop at J. Crew.” Also in Ms. Courtade’s hand was a somewhat confusing item: a vintagey looking “romper” one-piece in red, black and white. The Observer had been looking at it for a very long time, trying to figure out where on earth one would wear such a thing. (This is true too of the somewhat too-’60’s printed pants, big button blouses and hard-to-wear-long slinky halter dresses). “I think it’s for sunbathing on your front porch?” said Ms. Courtade, a recent transplant from Austin (which, we assume, has more front porches than Manhattan). “Or, I don’t know … for wearing on your fire escape?” We skipped the romper (good luck, Claire!) in favor of a big orange, white and black print scarf ($24.90) and that aforementioned swirly black-and-white T-shirt. When they wear out at the end of summer—and they will!—we’ll check out H&M’s next designer coup: Comme des Garçons’ founder and head designer Rei Kawakubo will be doing a limited fall line.

svilkomerson@observer.com

One thing that did sort of stop us in our tracks was Carol Joynt's account of her trip to Beltway exurb Middleburg, Va., a one-time stomping ground of the Captiol's horsey set. At this place or that it was common to see Jackie Onassis or Nancy Reagan. But the best we can muster this holiday weekend is Linda Tripp, sitting behind the counter of her little shoppe, The Christmas Sleigh. Oh, dear.