Fifty years have passed since Kennedy’s assassination. We indulged in a great deal of nostalgia. We fancied more than our fair share of historical revision. JFK has become one of our saintly knights of a more persistent political legend.
You probably imagine that JFK was a great champion of freedom. You most likely have imagined that JFK was the great and sensitive leader that America’s best hopes had needed. You probably also imagine that there are ideological differences between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, and that Democrats are great champions of the People, that is, Jefferson’s We the People. I know that the parties are closer to this today than they were twenty years ago or fifty, but let’s not think that Obama and McCain represent diametric opposition, as if political parties anywhere could be set linearly in our spectral analysis of politics. I do not assume they are different, but we do make them out to be, our media turning all political analysis into linearly drawn, flat observations, or the packaging of observations because no one could look and see so two-dimensionally. But then marketing rules our campaigns, and Hollywood is our history book. What kind of understanding should we expect from a population educated by television and the internet?
You certainly think that JFK had a moral center because our media has impressed this on us. But then, if you believe this, you must also believe that he was not a security risk to the US all the time he could not keep his dick in his pants. JFK was a travesty as the leader of the greatest democracy in the world, himself an adroit Cold Warrior who certainly had it in mind to use all resources of the United States in combatting communism around the world, a commitment that lead to many of the greatest political blunders of our mid 20th century foreign policy. I do not want to paint JFK as the greatest blunderer in the history of the Oval Office, nor do I want to pigeon-hole him as the least effective Chief Executive on the foreign affairs’ front, but only in direct response to how saintly we have made him, how many times we look back to his presidency through rose-colored lenses. Camelot? Only if we do not examine or read closely the legends of Arthur and some of the more penetrating, profound and darker conclusions and interpretations we could make. But we do not read and when we do we do nothing more than superficially skim the pages, and this is America, the Broadway musical Camelot in the late fifties, and the film Camelot in the late sixties, are more in line with what we mean about JFK and his attempts to be presidential when we refer to his presidency and his White House as Camelot. How deluded can a people be–examine what we think and say about JFK.
It has never occurred to you that his most famous quote about not asking what your country should do for you but what you can do for country was a prophecy of a future America where government control through media manipulation will be paramount; where Congress and the Supreme Court will have sold the people down river at the behest of Wall Street; where the greed and corruption of the elite will be even greater than they were in JFK’s time; and where the rule of law will have become an inside joke on Capitol Hill and in the Oval Office and especially at the NSA. If you believe as I have delineated herein, then you also might not get that Obama is not a puppet of Goldman Sachs, and that it would be kind if I said he was Blankfein’s bitch. Of course, since so many rappers ranted about there being “a Nigger in the House,” when Obama was elected, I wonder why prison jargon offends so many when applied to Obama. Whenever comparisons are made between JFK and Barack Obama, I know I’m in store for a set of lies and media manipulation the likes we will continue to see for as long as we accept semi-literacy as sufficient for managing the affairs of a democracy, a de facto oligarchy.
The Falling Leaf Review 