House of Eratosthenes

Nevertheless, I have heard the words of those who said things like “the nation lost something that day” and “our innocence vanished overnight.” A bit melodramatic perhaps, but there is much evidence to support this. So much conflict came afterward. Conflict came before, certainly; but afterward, the chaos found all sorts of structural footholds, while the order lost so many footholds it previously had. Vietnam came afterward. The hippie movement came afterward. Militant feminism, with each “wave” more resentful and bursting with destructive energy than the previous, came afterward. Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals came afterward. The age of the serial killer came afterward. Weather Underground and similar terror groups came afterward. It was a tumultuous time, a time that does seem to manifest a lost innocence.

The generation that came after Kennedy’s assassination — my generation — grew up flooded, deluged, in a sea of nonsense that was new. Consider Oprah Winfrey’s “they just have to die” remark. That, to me, typifies the sixties-and-onward thinking. A bit too much fascination with improvement by attrition. Darwin’s survival-of-the-fittest, I guess that’s what they think they’re doing? The species “sharpens” through a process of destruction of parts of itself, like a pencil is sharpened by a process of disposal. Make the beautiful statue by removing every part of the block of marble that doesn’t look like a horse. Is that the thinking process? Because, looking over the results, they have not been indicators of success, or even of being on the right track. The destruction/disposal part, that’s working just dandy. The making things better by doing so…we just never quite seem to get there, do we?

The generation that comes to power after JFK’s demise, thinks big. Too big. Rather than feed a child, they want to “end famine and poverty.” Rather than find a diplomatic alternative to the latest war, they want to “end war.” Politicians on both sides fall prey to this thinking — although it seems only Republicans get nailed for it — with George W. Bush widely, and perhaps rightfully, lampooned for wanting to “end terrorism.” End, end, end. I’m guessing their perception must be, and I partly sympathize with this, that all (or most) bad things that happen are merely echoes of something that came before, and if we can just somehow bring it all to a stop, the tragic echoing will cease forever. Like making a species extinct, except it’s something bad going extinct, and that would be a good thing. End disease, end blight, end bigotry and racism, end war, end hate, end all sorts of things…that horrify us, but are part of life, and will endure as long as life endures. Even death is a part of life. But with this innocence-lost event now five decades past, the prevailing viewpoint has no time to understand that. It’s too busy ending things.

Ending life. Perhaps we all were assassinated on November 22, 1963, and were too busy to notice?

Oh, I’m sure it wasn’t that important. We did have agents of destruction infiltrating our government’s highest positions of power and trust before 1963. Venona makes that clear. Still, something has changed since then. Our sense of direction has gone all screwy. Back in Truman’s time, the soviet spies had to be kept secret, their complicity finally only confirmed some 45 years afterward. Can it be doubted that today, with the same situation, we’d merely have a drawn-out and confusing debate about whether it might be good to have soviet spies in the government? Of course that’s what would happen. We’d argue about it and blog about it and the Sunday morning talking-heads would kibitz about it, then the grumpy centrists would yammer away with some kind of nonsense about how “politicians on both sides can’t be trusted” and then the public-at-large would get bored and tune out. There wouldn’t be any need to keep secrets at all. Everyone would go back to playing Angry Birds, and whatever secrets the spies managed to steal, would somehow be the Tea Party’s fault.

We tend to think of a loss of innocence as having something to do with an acquisition of knowledge. There may be some truth to that. But, knowledge doesn’t do you any good if you can’t think straight.

Half a century is a long time to be strung out on psychotropic drugs. Maybe the best way to commemorate JFK’s fifty-year…uh…killversary?…would be to finally grow up, as a baby-boomer-infested nation. This generation has come to think highly of something called “self esteem,” and it can’t be doing self-esteem very much good for the boomer class to be so often caught thinking like infants, when they have age spots. Especially when they’ve been so busy telling the rest of us how & what to think. Creation is creation. Preservation is preservation. Destruction is destruction. Post-JFK, the biggest thing busted is that actually fixing something has gone out of style. We just hatched a new plan to get uninsured people insured; with the dust all settled, the situation is, people who were covered before, no longer are, and our miracle workers can’t answer any questions about it because they’re busy frantically fixing a busted web site.

We can have a legitimate debate about whether they’ll eventually succeed, reverse course, and accomplish what they set out to do. But we should not have a debate about whether or not this is indicative of something being broken, in our cultural sensibility about how to perceive, address, and solve problems. Something is cockeyed, jury’s not out on that folks. I cannot prove that what we lost, we must have lost on November 22, 1963. I admit this is a bit of speculation on my part and perhaps it’s a stretch. But it is a theory, and as a theory it has withstood the onslaught of all cumulative evidence. Whether or not that be the case — lost something, we have. Get it back, we can. Try to, we most certainly should.

“…somehow I just had to try! And if we don’t try, we don’t do. And if we don’t do, why are we here on this earth?”

Jesus am I sick of Kennedy hagiography. I always want to ask these “we lost our innocence” types to name one, just one, major policy initiative from his administration.

If Kennedy were running for office today, he’d be a warmongering right-wing extremist, and all the people wailing about “Camelot” would be slapping more “hate is not a family value!” stickers on their Priuses.
- Severian | 11/22/2013 @ 08:07

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Fiftieth AssassinaversaryFriday, November 22nd, 2013

Fiftieth Assassinaversary
Friday, November 22nd, 2013