Kennedy's car just after the fatal shot 

                        (credit: Abraham Zapruder, via Wikimedia Commons) 

A Thoughtful Day

Today is a deeply thoughtful day for anyone over 65, almost anywhere on earth. Why do I say so?

On this day sixty years ago, American president John Kennedy was shot dead.

For younger followers of this space, you might consider where you were, whom you were with, and what you were doing on September 11, 2001. That day is called a “landmark” day because everyone over 25 can answer those questions. That day changed everything. But for those of us who are a bit older, November 22, 1963, changed the world even more.

He was only one guy. His supposed assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was shot and killed in the basement of the Dallas Police Department two days later. The guy who shot Oswald was a long-time Mafia associate who was dying of cancer. In a metaphor then, I’ll say the whole event stunk like old fish guts. It still stinks. Too many people who were there were certain one of the shots – probably the fatal one – came from in front of Kennedy’s car. Oswald was positioned way behind it. And there are so many other inconsistencies in the “official” version of what happened that day.

There is film footage of the actual shooting on YouTube if you want to see for yourself. Abraham Zapruder, a citizen of Dallas, was filming the motorcade. He sold his film to the publishers of Time magazine who showed it to the world.

I’m not a conspiracy nut, but I do – like many people all over the world – think there had to be a conspiracy behind those events. If you’re under 65 and you find yourself interested in the controversy, Oliver Stone made a documentary in 2021 on the improbability of the Warren Commission findings. JFK Revisited. It’s on Crave now. The vital scene from Zapruder’s footage is in Stone’s film.   

But why for us old guys was it such a terrible day. Many more died in 9/11. Why does one man’s assassination loom over those who recall?

Because so many good things ended, and so many other bad ones began.

I read a variety of stuff. I’m 74, and no, I’m not senile. Not even a little. I don’t read endlessly about that day or, more generally, about JFK’s life, actions, and words. But, yes, I’ve read about 20 books on that man and that day. Over 60 years, not that many.

Kennedy would have kept the U.S. out of the Vietnam War. I’m as sure of it as one can be about any hypothetical. He was working to do so even then, in 1963. He would have worked more effectively to fix America’s race problem. More than what was later done without him? Yes.

He would have reformed the financial system, likely ended the Federal Reserve.

He would not have gotten “played” for a sucker by the CIA again. The Bay of Pigs fiasco had finished him with trusting that agency. By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he also no longer trusted generals. Too many warmongers among them. He’d seen war. Up close. And he knew the buck stopped with him.

He was in charge by late ‘63, he was learning fast, and he was a decent man.

I could go on and on.

Did we learn anything from it? The US got into a lot of foreign wars after that date and supported a lot of corrupt foreign leaders. The civil rights misery goes on, though it is improving slowly. The financial system is beset by ills every few years. Right wing economists claim they’re full of wisdom when markets are booming. The profits are due to their skills which are far beyond the intelligence of the rest of us. But they hide when markets crash. The few still around say no one could have foreseen this latest crash. Successes are due to clever financiers. Failures are beyond human control. Hypocrisy never troubles greed.

Yes, JFK’s father was maybe the worst stock market manipulator ever. But JFK grew out of his father’s influence before he even got to the White House.

Yes, he was promiscuous. So were Thomas Jefferson, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, etc. The list is nearly endless. Catherine of Russia and Elizabeth I of England were promiscuous if anyone wants to begin false comparisons. Leaders often are. Male, female, good or bad. It has nothing to do with their job.

But he was handsome, funny, and brave. (Read PT 109). And so smart. He might even have brought us world peace. I know I was hoping. Nukes haunted us more in those times. But he and Soviet leader Khruschev had begun to really talk.

And I have to describe the larger context. America bankrolled Japan and most of Europe and many other smaller nations in those days. She forgave her biggest enemies, Germany and Japan, and turned them into friends. What nation in history had ever done that? JFK was all the best parts of America for us then.

I was 14, a smart kid, and a prolific reader so, yes, I really did know all of this.

Doug Cameron lives near the school, close enough to go home for lunch. He is standing in the south-east entrance of Hardisty Junior High, telling a circle of hushed teenagers what’s on the radio and tv.  Then, uproar takes over.

A radio channel is on the p.a. I can barely hear it. Other kids are yelling, crying. I start trying classroom doors. Teachers were supposed to lock their rooms at lunch, but a lab is open. I step in. Walter Cronkite tells me President Kennedy is dead. It’s confirmed. I stand very still as something inside me crashes. Tears begin to roll down my face. For a decent man and his wife and kids and the U.S. to the south of me, but even more, at 14, I know it’s the end of innocence for us. It’s the end of believing that sometimes the good guys can win.

A t.v. personality named Dick Clark probably said it best. Someday, we would laugh again. But we would never be young again. For millions of us, the distrust and despair of the modern world began on that day. JFK is dead.

                                          Congressman John F. Kennedy (1947)

                    (credit: US Chamber of Commerce, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

                       

                                                      Renee Zellweger

                    (credit: Berlin_Film_Festival_2009, via Wikimedia Commons) 

                                              The Women’s War

I’ve long thought that the idea that all the men of the world should apologize to all the women of the world was silly. I know it was a quote I read somewhere. I can’t find it right now. But I don’t have to look very far to disprove it. I find immoral women in my world, ones who hurt on purpose with no regrets; hurt each other, their men, and their kids. Even become right wing politicians. But there are just as many men as anyone can see. Or some become left wing politicians who learn moral judgement, while unlearning forgiveness.

We are a fallen species, Christianity says. All down here in the mud. And there’s lots of evidence supporting that belief too, for those who wish to promulgate it. But I get weary of the endless recriminations aimed by everyone at everyone. Moral high ground maneuvers. Books on them fill our society. Achieving …what?

For persons of conscience then, is the answer to withdraw from society? Find total humility? Contemplate the mystery of the universe? Meditate hourly? Not for me. I can’t study my navel while my grandchildren’s world goes to ruin.

So I speak up. And as an individual male, not a representative of patriarchy or any other ideology, I sometimes make a mistake and realize I’ve made a mistake and apologize. As one male. Not a representative of any system. Take my lumps. Move on. I keep trying for a life of engagement with my world and its problems because to do otherwise would make me a piece of unwanted tissue in my own eyes. A social skin tag.

So today, I’ll begin from that. And apologize to most of the women of my world.

I repeat that I can’t blanket apologize for patriarchy. I didn’t make it. I work to change it. I want out of it as much as any woman I’ve ever known.

And we do well to remind ourselves that some women don’t. We should never forget Phyllis Schlafly; her adherents number in the millions. They’re out there. Fifty-six percent of white women voters in the U.S. voted for Trump in 2016. I think the explanation is that they grew up in patriarchy. They know how to play its game. They will not let it go easily. The power of cultural conditioning can, as Shakespeare says, shove by justice.

But I do apologize to the women in my life whom I did not properly understand for a long time. Many of them don’t give primacy to the issues of politics and war in their lives. I long believed they should. I see now why they don’t.  

I’ve had circular arguments with some of the women in my life on this subject for a long time. One can’t – I’ve long argued – just ignore politics, and sometimes, the failure of politics which is war. If you don’t deal with war, it will come to deal with you.

But that is not the end of this argument. I thought it was. It’s not.

The brutal truth that old soldiers won’t tell is that they didn’t just see terrible things, they did terrible things. Brutal, horrible things. With their own hands.

But women have hard truths of their own that they don’t want to tell. Especially many of the ones who are still serious contenders in the Make-up Games.

 The women’s main hard truth goes something like this:

“If I and my children and my old mom are driven to the extreme sometime in your hypothetical future …for food and medicine and some temporary security, I’d trade the main thing I have to trade. I know I would. You know what that thing is. And if that hurts your feelings, too bad. When my kids begin to starve, your feelings won’t be on my mind. In fact, that victor with his clean uniform and shiny rifle and full rations pack is going to look pretty good.”

I know now that the women don’t like to say such a truth out loud for a reason similar to the one that silences soldiers who have seen war up close. They don’t want to see the look in your eyes change. The ideal die. 

It's true that some women don’t understand war for what it is. But many do. Older ones who’ve seen its effects on their men, and young ones who are just smart or who have lived by war. Most don’t want to kill anyone. So, if desperate times should come, they know what they would do for the survival of their kids.

In fact, if you want to see what ruthless looks like, kill one of the kids. Wounded American soldiers in Vietnam, lying helpless in a rice paddy, prayed that if they were found by the enemy, that enemy would be male. Then, there’d be a chance that they might be spared. With a female soldier, there was almost none.

Some of this view I learned from two women in my life, and I’ve gradually come to see that it is true, however deflating it may be to male self-esteem. And some of it, I learned from art. Cold Mountain, in particular. It was the defining work of three actors’ careers as far as I’m concerned: Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, and most especially, Renee Zellweger. She was just amazing.

But the point of the film, for me, was left to Kidman’s character, Ada Monroe. In voice over narration, at the end of the film, she says:

 

What we have lost will never be returned to us. The land will not heal - too much blood. All we can do is learn from the past and make peace with it.

 

That quote haunts me. The South, whatever its vices, suffered terribly in that war. But the South did go on.

This truth isn’t – as many male novelists in Romantic tones would have it – that the “land” goes on. The land doesn’t care. It’s the moms that go on.

                                                Nicole Kidman 

                                (credit: Georges Biard, via Wikimedia Commons) 

                                                   Benjamin Netanyahu  

                       (credit: U.S. State Department, via Wikimedia Commons) 

                             Small Town B.C. Characters: Hugh

When I was 14, for two weeks, I visited my aunt who was a nurse in a small, northern British Columbia town. She was a great nurse and she loved me. She never had kids of her own. And I did have fun with some of the neighbor kids.

But the thing I recall most vividly was visiting one of her friends in an even smaller town nearby. About 1963. My aunt talked almost the whole time with her friend. I talked to the woman’s husband who at that time would have been around 45. A truck driver on a local route. Not a long haul driver. Didn’t want to be. Trucking in the mountains in B.C. can be a scary business. What made him interesting to me, however, was when I got him talking about WWII. He’d been and had fought. Over two years. In Italy.

He'd had a few beers, and he had three more while we were there, and he knew he would very likely never see this yappy kid from Alberta again. He loosened up a bit. Or at least that’s what I recall now from that night.

I was – you could say – a nosy kid. I was curious to know how this war that had been so terrible ever got under way. And what did the guys who fought in it think afterward. To be clear, I hated and feared the whole idea of killing another young guy even then. The Vietnam madness had not started to wind up at that point, and even when it did, how many thousand Canadian young men went down to the U.S. to join the American forces is still unclear. (I did know two in later years. But this night was well before the Vietnam time.)

He talked about a few funny incidents in 1943, and he kept opening up a bit more and a bit more right up till we had to leave, at about 11. Near the end of our conversation, I let too much show, I guess. I told him I still didn’t really understand how the WWII madness had got started and most of all, why it had turned so ugly. The memories that he shared with this nosy kid had gotten more and more brutal as the night wore on, though he never actually described the things that he had done with his own hands. I’ve talked in depth to maybe 20 veterans who saw and did real combat over the years; they don’t tell the whole story. They don’t want to see the look in your eyes change. But with 6 or so beers in him, and a kid he had no stake in before him, Hughie got careless.

It's enough for me to say at this point that I realized a scary thing in the last 10 minutes before we left. I still think he was, and still would be, part of a 10% minority, but the truth began to show through.

“Of all the experiences a man can go through in a lifetime, none of them comes even close to being in combat. Every minute is a week when you are out there in the zone and you are trying to kill someone who is trying to kill you. It is such a feeling, such a high. Even the pleasures of your down time are almost as intense because you know, tomorrow you could be dead.”

You see he liked it. Even at 45, he would have gone again if the chance had come up again. Every experience since had been a stupid bore.

I’m paraphrasing his words, but they were pretty close to what I quoted above.

Robert Mitchum says much the same thing in his role as an American general in the mega-production “The Longest Day”. Actually, he says he thinks almost all men who go into combat have some of this madness in them. In fact, he says, until we face what we really are, we aren’t going to even start to solve this madness.

And I admit during the Vietnam days, I almost drove down to Montana and signed up for the U.S. Army. I had bought the Domino Theory. Ah, it was 1969 and I was still a teenager.

What does all of this have to do with my post today? You tell me. 

What do these two men have in common? 

                                                   Ismail Haniyeh 

(credit:   https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:03-03-2020_Ismail_Haniyeh.jpg  )