Happy Thanksgiving! JFK was Assassinated Today.
I am thankful for friends and the love they share with me. That love of life, that love of living it, and that love of sharing the living and the loving. All that stuff. I had a wonderful Thanksgiving with friends at a larg, beautiful house in Silverlake. I roasted garlic. It’s too simple, too uncomplicated to prepare, unfairly easy for how delicious the end result becomes - almost in the same way that I derive unfair amounts of fun, raucous and bracing laughter, simply from sharing space and food with a few wonderful folks.
I am less than thankful that John Fitzgerald Kennedy, best President of the 2nd half of the 20th century, was assassinated on this day in 1963. This was the event, along with Vietnam, and Watergate, that destroyed my parents’ generation and still haunts us now. This was the core event that eliminated America’s trust of its government. We haven’t restored it, and worse we’ve engendered the kind of abuses we only dreamed of by virtue of expecting that kind of abuse to happen.
We’re still mulling over the specifics. “Back and the to the left.” So many blunders. So much stumbling around the truth. So many awful, downright evil fucks have inhabited that grand alabaster mansion that somehow means Freedom since that day. Since that day, we haven’t had a President that young, that progressive, that downright hopeful about the possibility of the America we had found ourselves in by the early 60s. There was so much fear, so much anger. This was threatening. People don’t profit when seeming superheroes put smiles on faces. You sell a lot less guns to happy people who feel secure and feel optimistic about their country and its leaders. Sure, Kennedy wasn’t a superhero. He couldn’t stop bullets. And he didn’t have that unflappable personal moral compass superheroes all supposedly share. But, not just “when in public” but when it counted, JFK’s nobility, compassion, and downright cutting intelligence dominated. He was more of those previous qualities - noble, compassionate, smart - than any leader of this country since. Clinton had the smarts and certainly the compassion, but not the nobility to stake out the progressive position on most subjects. Clinton was a different leader, of course, far more centrist. Kennedy dared to take the progressive (Democratic, as the Democratic Party in that day was a legitimate progressive institution and not a fucking farce) stance and try to eke out compromise, but only after first setting that tentpole in a bold position.
On November 22nd, 1963, freedom didn’t die. Freedom died on Inauguration Day 2000 (not 9/11, that was just the 3rd act “surprise twist” at the end of a very long script entitled Raping the Constitution and You in the Ass). What died in 1963 was the belief that More Freedom was on the way. That silly concept that Marching in The Street was doing us good, and by God the American President was supporting us, was on our side, was in favor of more freedom for Americans. Prosperity for all. And security for the world. Our belief in Peace was kaputski. It’s taken until today for me to fully see how much further we fell since. And Kennedy wouldn’t waste the phlegm to spit on George W. Bush and his ilk, that gigantic seeping black wound on this country and the pox upon Life, Liberty, and Happiness for which he stands.
To touch upon modern politics ever so briefly, I wish Barack Obama would return to his m.o. of the time before he announced his campaign. Funny. Hopeful. Grand in vision. He needed to flesh out more details, then, as he has yet to do now. I wish Obama would cut down on the fucking attacks! Already he’s let slip the dogs of political war on Hillary. This had to happen of course; this always does. The weak lion sees the strongest lion(ess) killing far more gazelles than her share, and the weak lion must wait for the lioness to slow - and then attack her - or he will face a cold, hungry winter. This is Obama, natch. But he won’t catch up to Hillary by attacking her. She has him beat on experience - this is a cold piece of shit for a fact, but it’s the damn truth. Obama isn’t here for the nitty gritty and the boring experience, he’s here because of his book title: HOPE. Audacity. Hope. Those are JFK watchwords (those and “fresh pussy”). Branches turning, and leaves spinning with them.
I am thankful that JFK existed. I wish he didn’t have to die. I really wonder where we’d be if he hadn’t. Where all this would or wouldn’t have gone. The USSR. China. Cuba. Does anyone still remember that we aren’t allowed to TRAVEL to CUBA? Does anyone realize how silly and positively ludicrous that is, how many families it needlessly tears apart? So many of the things that followed JFK’s assassination and the Death of the American Dream would be so much more hilarious if they had been fiction. The history since 1963, and especially since late 1999, has been political farce on the global geopolitical level. The advent of global climate change would’ve made Samuel Clemens stain his white pants laughing. The concept of a gigantic “corporation” that both manufactures a device that kills thousands of kids in one foreign country in one moment and a television set that simultaneously unites thousands in another country is just a marvelous and hilarious paradox. But truth destroys the humor of irony, the humor of paradox. Corporations don’t profit by humor. This is why the drug conglomerate that makes weight-loss drug “Alli” needs to advertise the fact that it literally makes you shit yourself thin. If they understood how hilariously awful that was, they would have to relegate it to being a gag gift to get only your most annoying relatives.
I am a product of such a country. I am not a product of the 1950’s, 1960’s, or the 1970’s, or any other time in this nation where expansion, consciousness, peace, and thought were encouraged. I am a product of that foul chronology when the world began to both shrink and expand exponentially, where technology replaced interaction, where body supplanted soul. Where Republicans fucked young male children in the middle of the street and all anyone did was point and laugh. Where people were imprisoned and tortured by the American government with no trials, ever.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it in several media before I’m done with this world, but these systems, these behaviors, these doldrums that govern our lives cannot last. “This too shall pass.” And with it, I hope that all that backwards, archaic, hopeless, thoughtless bullshit that makes this country the literal worst in the world will ride side-saddle with all the bullshitters on the road to Hell. That day, I’ll be a bit scared, but that fear will be tempered with my pride. I’m not proud to be an American, I’m not even thankful that I live here, but I am thankful that there have been people here with hearts that believed and still believe as I do: that there is More Freedom to be had, somewhere. Right now, most of us are stuck just wanting More Property. What I’m thankful and hopeful for is that sometimes humans realize that We can do better. In a way, I’m thankful that someday we won’t have a choice.