JFK

Posted on November 22, 2005 in Citizenship Memory

JFK. His assassination — forty two years ago today — was my first consciousness of a federal government. My mother and I were in a post office on Arrowhead in San Bernardino, back in the days when San Bernardino was a real city and not a warehouse for the ostracized. The word came up from the back. The president had been shot in Dallas. We rushed home to watch the news. The day after Thanksgiving, we watched the funeral. John John saluted his father’s passing. My mother was impressed.

I later learned that some people held parties to celebrate the assassination. In another country, they would have been marched out for execution. If they had been liberals in our current age, they would have been put on television and hectored for disloyalty. That they went unnoticed and unberated planted the durian tree of our age.

The country and the world mourned him. The United States put him on the half dollar. Post offices printed millions of stamps in multiple currencies honoring him, some of them in Eastern Europe. To say his name indicated reverence, for the country and the goodness it could produce. LBJ pushed for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in JFK’s name and got what he wanted. A vast national altar collected our memories and our aspirations. The martyr’s death provoked a wave of reform, reform that began from the People. Empowerment became the word of the day and that was the real legacy, I think, of the Sixties. The power to change communities. The power to change state governments. The power to press our government to end a stupid war in Indochina.

His brother Bobby ran for president. The popular will for his election overwhelmingly swept the primaries. He came to San Bernardino and my brother went to see him, shirt sleeves and all. California shouted its joy with each pull of the lever, each punch of the card on that election day. We went to sleep seeing RFK well ahead, certain of victory. In the morning, my brother went out to get the paper and came back in crying.

His death plus the death of Martin Luther King marked, I think, the end of the confidence which could have changed this nation for the better. It was then that we the People lost our confidence in the system. And the moment when the wRong began to kill off our symbols. The country entered the sustained period of black mania that lasts unto this day.

Then the Republican smear machine printed and forged its own currency. The sex slander was honed on their rigorous autopsy of the sex life of JFK. Marilyn Monroe. How many others? They picked up the cry of the anti-nuclear movement — that JFK had nearly killed us in the Cuban Missile Crisis and insisted we needed more warheads and more bombs. They blamed him for starting the Vietnam War while, at the same time, insisting that we must go on and on fighting it.

They even said that John-John’s salute was staged.

Eventually, they elected a series of extremists to the presidency: Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and the man who stole the White House twice, George W. Bush, identified by many as the worst president in our country’s history. Where JFK made allies, GWB makes enemies. And the scandal sheets which made too much of a fib about a blow job do nothing about say next to nothing about the antics of this prince-frog of a president.

Over the years, many have speculated about why JFK died and who did it. Against all expert opinion, conspiracy buffs ignore scientists and the evidence of the Zapruder film to insist that there was a plot. All this speculation, I think, prevents us from thinking of JFK’s real legacy — empowerment. Perhaps the credit is owed to Lyndon B. Johnson who created and manipulated the legend of the fallen leader, but the memory of JFK brought us out of our private lives and into the agora where we learned to have a say in our government. People who had not voted before, voted. They formed community associations to press for better service. They lifted public consciousness and leader accountability to new heights. In the years that followed Camelot, America became heady on citizen participation.

Then Martin died. And Bobby. Compassionate-government-hater, income tax evader, and crackpot darling Ronald Reagan survived John Hinckley because of medical research funded by liberals. To this day, no one has taken a shot at George W. Bush. People say that there is no use electing a good man because they are going to shoot him anyways.

Big Media created a counter-legend. They worked very hard to desecrate the presidency of Bill Clinton with their relentless coverage of the Whitewater hoax. They could not do it. So their cronies in big business just fixed two elections so that there would not be another JFK in Al Gore or John Kerry. And We the People, who have forgotten our days of power, let them do it.

On this day forty two years ago, a lone assassin killed the President. The vile and the cruel — the forebears of those who wage war in Iraq, give tax cuts to the rich, and cut back on social services — celebrated. Today, after many years of viscious obstruction of the democratic process, they rule. It will not be by a bullet that they will fall, but by the People growing tired of their subterfuges and lies, demanding their accountability, and building a new legend of virtue on their own commitment to civil liberties and justice.

The current crop of Republicans stands on the knees of midgets and the People know it.