Pictures of the Pain

Pat Oliphant isn't generally known for sensitivity, but he has come up with one of the few JFK Assassination Anniversary cartoons that seem content to remember the moment.

Yes, a fairy tale. But as true as anything else being said, and truer than most of what's out there.

Maybe you had to be there, and fewer than a third of us were.

I sometimes play a mental game of chronological equivalence. That is, I was 13 that day, and for me to talk to a 13-year-old today about that event would have been like my grandfather talking to me then about something that had happened in 1913, a few years before he went off to World War I.

I enjoyed my grandfather's "when I was your age" stories, but they certainly seemed like ancient history or, more precisely, like make-believe, so remote and foreign to my existence that they might just as well have involved dragons and unicorns for all that they resembled my life and my experience.

My grandfather once remarked that he'd had a fortunate slice of history to live through: He could remember when he saw his first horseless carriage, and he had lived to see man walk on the moon. Anybody who makes it past a half century gets to see a lot, and technology does move faster now than it did in the 17th or 18th century, but I think he was right in thinking his slice was pretty impressive.

He didn't tell nearly as many stories about the old days as he might have, however, because he thought it would make him into one of those old windbags who natters on about things nobody cares about, and I'm getting to an age where I sympathize with his point of view.

Still, it's frustrating to hear the young'uns talk about things with such breezy assurance of what it all meant. As my mother once said of the Second World War, "You have to remember that, at the time, we didn't know who was going to win."

And I think the usual cock-suredness of youth has been exacerbated by a change between 1963 and 2013, from being willing to view things through the prism of Camelot to a viewpoint in which moles and pimples not only exist but are a famous person's most important features.

One of my best unsung bons-mots was delivered during the Lewinsky scandal, at a journalist's roundtable at the Freedom Forum in New York.

Then-editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, Robert Bartley, said, of the Diem Coup, "There is no way to prove this, but I suspect that there is a connection between that decision and the character of a president who had an aberrant sex life."

I responded that, "where I come from, wanting to have sex with Marilyn Monroe is not considered aberrant."

It got a laugh, but it was a throwaway. The point was that it can hardly be surprising that men with a lust for power sufficient to reach the White House might have some other strong lusts as well and that, while a lot of people respond with public horror, they actually aren't that shocked or genuinely horrified.

At the time, knowing that Jack was cheating on Jackie would certainly have been devastating. It was an era where people felt Nelson Rockefeller's divorce would keep him from ever being elected.

Except that it didn't.

Still, those a bit older than I was were heavily invested in the glory of the young, handsome Kennedy clan, playing touch football and walking on the beach. The humor in Vaughn Meader's "First Family" albums was affectionate, not biting.

 

It was a long time ago, and plenty of older people were uncomfortable even with that gentle ribbing, most likely the same old-timers who would have been more angry with the reporters than shocked at Babe Ruth if his drinking habits had appeared on the sports page.

There is, however, a difference between not wanting to know and not wanting to have your nose rubbed in it.

The urge to tear down our idols goes back to Suetonius's snarky "Lives of the Caesars," which seems heavier on gossip and rumors than verified history.

I suspect that, had Kennedy lived through his first and presumed second term, the whole "Camelot" myth would never have emerged, and the chants in the street would have been, "Hey, hey, JFK, how many kids did you kill today?"

But that's a game of what-if, and the Caligula treatment, the Presidential Pervert mythology, has only been applied by those -- like the WSJ -- with extreme viewpoints to promote.

The fact is, Oswald made his shots and the Camelot motif was established and I guess you had to be there.

Jeff Stahler is right: It's a conspiracy, or at least a common goal. I've mentioned this before, but a few months prior to the first anniversary of the Trade Center attacks, my boss, the circulation director, was asked by corporate HQ to detail his plans for duplicating the 9/12 single copy sales we'd seen in the wake of the disaster.

My wiseass comment to him was that we could rent a couple of planes, but the reality is that all the "commemoration" and "a nation mourns" and "lest we forget" business, for 9/11 or D-Day or JFK, is simply an attempt to keep those profits rolling in.

I suppose you could do a nice Camelot piece and attract all the people who aren't quite sure that Kennedy wasn't married to Audrey Hepburn, but know that he was certainly married to some sort of pretty, skinny, stylish brunette, and who remember, or fancy that they remember, Caroline riding Macaroni on the White House lawn.

But you sell more to the iconoclasts who prefer to tear down idols and like to know stuff that the average person doesn't, like who really killed Kennedy.

Camelot or coverup, it's all mythology, and we do love mythology.

Phil Ochs had that pegged years ago, when he wrote this ode to our fallen leader.

 

Comments

[Mary in Ohio]

Today's Arlo & Janis pretty much cuts to the chase.