November 22nd, 1963 is the date on which America went from optimism to cynicism. It turned a generation that had rebuilt the world after WWII, an energetic, entrepreneurial wave of triumphant survivors of that planet wide horror, into a middle aged, security seeking, pallid wave of followers, shadow people, living in Malvina Reynold’s Little Boxes. These were people who didn’t understand what was wrong with their children or where the country was going. It was the beginning of what we are experiencing now. It was the seed that has produced the rotten fruit, which we are now, forced to harvest.
It’s been 50 years since Kennedy was shot and still those of us who experienced that awful day are dismayed by the memory. Kennedy was not the perfect president, far from it, but he was, more than any other, the president for his time. None of us who lived it, will ever forget Camelot but it was Ken Burns, who brilliantly pointed out that Kennedy’s time was not really Camelot, it was Brigadoon, a fleeting, evanescent moment that is more dream than reality.
Would the world be better today if Kennedy had lived? Maybe, maybe not, most certainly it would have been different. His early death has gifted a mantle of specialty to his time but also ended a sense that we would somehow triumph over whatever we faced as a nation.
Lyndon Johnson, who many still contend was involved in his death, actually, successfully finished many of his most important projects.
People forget that when Kennedy was killed he was on the verge of making the greatest mistake in our history to that time. It would divide our country as nothing had since the Civil War. It was left to Johnson and finally Nixon to preside over the stupidity of Vietnam. Had he lived it would have been Kennedy, but who knows how he would have handled or avoided it. Based on his negative reaction to the demand by the CIA and many parts of the military that he invade Cuba after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, many believe that, despite the urgings of Robert McNamara, he would have pulled back from Vietnam. But who really knows.
One of the most important aspects of the whole tragedy was the after effect of the transition to Johnson and how it affirmed to the whole country the solid base, on which our nation was built. The flawless transition to a new president showed the nation and the world that we were a society that was built on firmer soil than the life of one man, and that the nation would survive no matter what happened to anyone. The constitution had held firm.
Many have questioned whether Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole killer of Kennedy, maybe more conjecture than evidence has been considered over the years but that’s because it is so hard to accept that a nothing like Oswald could be responsible for so much anguish. It seems as if it almost has to be a huge conspiracy of important figures to have done so much damage to the psyche of our country.
Bob Schieffer, in a touching close of his program, Face the Nation, on November 17th, said that we will never understand why Oswald did it. Unfortunately we will also never understand if Oswald did it.
I have never thought of myself as a conspiracy theorist but seeing the way the military industrial complex and the intelligence community, have reacted to the 911 catastrophe and all that followed, it’s hard to believe that they had no hand in the murder of a president who was turning toward peace in the world. As I have stated previously, the ultimate goal of any government agency is first and foremost, the extension of the power of that agency and only secondarily the health of the nation. The revelations of first, Chelsea Manning and later Edward Snowden, have shown us that our military, industrial and security monoliths are the enemies of peace as much as any terrorist organization in the world.
Terrorists fight for religious, nationalistic and revenge goals while the above named agencies and corporations do it for power and profit. The end game of all, however, is chaos and the victory of either will only create more of the same. The military, industrial and security complexes in Kennedy’s time wanted war with Cuba, Vietnam and an extension of the cold war with Russia. They want war with Iran, an involvement in Syria, continued tension in the Middle East, local wars in Africa and trouble with Korea and China in Southeast Asia now. Why, because that is what they need to extend their grip on power and profits.
Why do we have a million men at arms stationed around the world in nations where there is no conflict? Why the hell do we have troops in Italy and Germany? Do we fear pasta riots or beer wars? Why are we building tanks that will never be used or planes that will never fly correctly?
Even as I write this, our government is finishing construction on a $36 million Regional Command military headquarters in Helmand, Afghanistan. Why are we constructing a 64,000 square foot facility in a country that we have already announced we are leaving and why are we throwing away that kind of money when children don’t have enough to eat here in the US? Why, because there are corporate entities that will make huge profits from its construction and the hell with the hungry kids here. Major General James M. Richardson has conducted inquiries into this atrocity and found it appropriate. I wonder whose Xmas list he heads. Although many other senior officers, have railed against the construction of this complete waste of American money, none would go on record. This is a testament to the power of the corporations and the money they use to bribe their way through congress and the military.
Why are we intruding on the privacy of millions in the mostly vain hope of finding some small morsel of intelligence that will, for the most part, never be acted on? Why has our president allowed himself to be bullied into signing a bill that takes away our citizen’s right of habeas corpus and why is our military now allowed to arrest civilians on American soil and hold them without charge or trial, indefinitely?
None of the above questions can be answered in any way that is satisfactory to constitutionally grounded Americans. The war mongers among us, just as did those that surrounded Kennedy, have been busy since 911 eroding our rights as Americans by using the flimsy excuse that they are protecting us; in the case of Kennedy from the communist threat and now from the threat of terrorism. In both cases they have used fear and cowardice to support their goals. I don’t know about you, but I will take my chance with the terrorists before I will give up my rights and freedoms to the Orwellian power brokers in our government and in our corporate structure.
If we want to keep the freedoms and the rights that have established this country as the one shinning light in the world, then we have to fight for what we want. That fight must be fought at the ballot box and in the form of demonstration. An organization called, The Occupy Movement tried it a couple of years ago but they were met with mostly apathy from the public, were very pointedly ignored by the corporate press and experienced a determined push by civil authority to beat them back even before they had done much of anything. Attention paid to that movement, mostly by local security organizations was far out of proportion to their rather small demonstrations and the civil rights of the members of Occupy were repeatedly violated by ill-trained, brutish police and a biased judiciary much as their predecessors had been during civil rights and anti-war demonstrations of much larger size during the Kennedy and post Kennedy eras. This is fact. I was there in both cases.
We cannot be deluded by these Orwellian monsters that seem set on turning the United States into a military dictatorship. They are not all evil but they are all wrong. Their path to security is not a path to freedom and the American way of democracy. It is the path to slavery and the Orwellian vision. It amazes me how millions of our citizens flock to the movie, Hunger Games, now for the second time, recognizing the intrinsic evil in the seemingly good intentions of the film nations leadership, without seeing the parallel to our own governmental agencies and corporate institutions that for profit and power are leading us down the same road to the same conclusion.
Or as Reinhold Niebuhr put it a few decades ago: “The preservation of a democratic civilization requires the wisdom of the serpent and the harmlessness of the dove. The children of light must be armed with the wisdom of the children of darkness but remain free from their malice. They must know the power of self-interest in human society without giving it moral justification. They must have this wisdom in order that they may beguile, deflect, harness and restrain self-interest, individual and collective, for the sake of the community.”
Hope to alive when this happens.
I hope you are too.