Sunday, November 22, 2009

Darkness at Noon


46 years and counting . . .

Unlike the circumstances surrounding "9/11" -- an event which made an already vicious, criminal, stupid, and narcissistic nation even more vicious, criminal, stupid, and narcissistic -- November 22nd, 1963 really did change everything. It broke the country's heart; and it destroyed for good all faith in our Empire as a just and open one. As I wrote in a post about David Talbot's necessary book Brothers:
Forty years later, what is left on a popular or establishment level of grace, complexity, self-deprecation, hatred of the rich and big business, a refusal to demonize others and puff ourselves up, the assumption that people are basically good, and the idea that society and government must be judged by the way the weakest and most vulnerable among us are taken care of?

The answer is: nothing. There is nothing left of that. And that is why the sense of doom and sorrow one takes from "Brothers" will be long lasting. The worst of our history murdered the best and got away with it. Scott free. Not only did they get away with it, they've created the sort of society diametrically opposed to everything JFK and RFK stood for: a country where the least human and most nakedly aggressive dominate everything. This was the newer world others' sought. Born from the gore of Dealey Plaza, they've achieved it.
Yet we dream. And we hope. (Two most human longings brilliantly and ruthlessly exploited by conman Barack Obama in '07 and '08.) John F. Kennedy often spoke about his own dreams and hopes for a better America, and never so eloquently as his tribute to Robert Frost at Amherst College, October 26th, 1963.