Today we remember the fiftieth anniversary of the JFK assassination, as if I need to remind you. This event, and what it meant then as well as it's significance for us now now has been analyzed, not simply over the last several months, but for years. I approach the observance with more than a touch of ambivalence. This was obviously a great tragedy, and even though I wasn't around for the assassination, it still seemed to cast a shadow over my childhood. It was a key experience in the lives of all the adults in my life growing up, and of two of my older brothers, one of whom, as a five year old saw Lee Harvey Oswald shot on national television. It was a key reference point for my priests, teachers, and in the media. For many their lives seemed almost subliminally divided between Pre-Assassination and Post-Assassination. On the other hand this was still not my experience. I didn't lose my innocence (heck, I wasn't even born), and I'm sure the country didn't either. Remember, the Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered in June and four little girls, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair, were killed when their church was bombed by racists in Birmingham, Alabama in September. There were already 16,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, up from 900 three years earlier, and we had gone eyeball to eyeball with the Soviet Union over missiles in Cuba, barley avoiding a nuclear confrontation, in October 1962. I'm sure the historians out there can think of other things to mention, but I think you get my point; anyone who thought that the United States lost it's collective innocence on November 22, 1963 wasn't paying attention.
What gets lost in all the JFK anniversary talk is that two other people, less powerful, less famous to be sure but just as consequential, died the same day. The Christian apologist C.S. Lewis died in England, and visionary British author Aldous Huxley died in Los Angeles. There is no doubt that the murder of a sitting president would be the number one news story on any given day, and be the event most remembered in following years. But I am not the first to note that the other two gentlemen who met their Maker that day fifty yeas ago have had as much, if not a greater influence over society over the decades since their deaths.
Aldous Huxley is best known for his 1932 novel Brave New World. In it he tells the story of a future, dystopian society with a difference. Most stories about future societies depict a great regression or disintegration of the social order (think of the H.G. Welles film Things to Come, from the same era), or else a society ruled by a harsh dictatorship (like in George Orwell's 1984). In Huxley's story we have the perfect society: population levels strictly controlled by the state; there are no live births anymore, all people are conceived and incubated in a "hatchery." The family has been abolished. Sexual promiscuity is the norm and monogamy a perversion. Pills are dispensed, what we would call today anti-depressants, served up like candy. People are genetically engineered to fit into strict social classes and conditioned to accept their lot without questioning. Medical technology has stopped the aging process as we understand it. People live to about sixty in state of suspended young adulthood, and then die alone and unmourned. Society is organized around consumption of goods and pleasure, conformity and class stability. Only a few at the very top of social pyramid understand how contrived and unnatural the whole social order is and crush who ever disrupts the balance, no matter how slight.
Later in life Huxley warned about the dangers of governmental over organization. These highly centralized governments could use technology like television for propaganda purposes. The use of mood or mind altering drugs could become prevalent that relieve short term ills but eventually kill the person physically and morally. Overpopulation could cause social instability that leads to an overly powerful central state as a remedy. I don't agree with this last point, but his other "prophesies" have been frighteningly accurate, as far as I can see.
C.S. Lewis was an Oxford Don who spent his early adulthood as a atheist, converting to Christianity after experiencing what Fulton Sheen might have called a Divine invasion. But Lewis didn't give in to Grace quickly. By his own admission his was a reluctant conversion, but once he did turn to Christ he put his energies and talents at the service of Christian apologetics. Like his friend J.R.R. Tolkien he used story and legend as a vehicle to evangelize the culture. He also wrote essays and made radio presentations, using logic and persuasion to show the reasonableness of faith. His, in a way, was a perfect standpoint to start from since he knew the atheist position intimately and could answer it from the inside.
While his non fiction essays like Mere Christianity and Surprised by Joy still enjoy a loyal if relatively small readership, his fictional series The Chronicles of Narnia continue to capture the popular imagination. What Lewis and Tolkien show is that story, myth, and the arts in general are powerful ways of evangelizing the culture and bringing the message of Christ to those who might not read theological essays or attend lectures.
Yes, we lost three important people fifty years ago today. I have not said much about the third and most well known of them, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. This is because I believe that in spite of his fame JFK is the most mysterious of the three. His life and death have been shrouded over the last half century in its own peculiar myth; well crafted and fiercely protected by his family, colleagues and large parts of the news and entertainment media. He has become a blank screen on which both friends and critics project their own hopes, fears and aspirations. Undeniably photogenic and charismatic, he was the first TV ready president. His murder was the moment when television came of age as the conduit of a common experience for the American people. In spite of all the film and photos we have of him getting a handle on the man is elusive. There are so many contrary images of him fighting to emerge from the official Camelot Legend that endures, even if few people really believe in it anymore.
Personally, I'm not sure that his thousand days in office were as consequential as the effects of the violent way his life ended. It seems people speak more of what he might have done if he had lived as opposed to what he accomplished in office. Would the Civil Rights Act of 1964 have passed? Some in the civil rights movement before the assassination were unsure, and Malcolm X, who was highly skeptical of the Kennedy record to that point wasn't holding his breath. That August's March on Washington was in large part a response to what was seen as inactivity by the administration on civil rights issues. If Kennedy had lived would the Great Society programs have been enacted? One of his great fights with the Congress was over his plan to cut income tax rates, an issue still unresolved at the time of his murder. There were even questions about whether JFK would be renominated by his party for a second term. And lest we forget the question that usually dominates the "what if JFK had lived" conversation: would the U.S. role in Vietnam have escalated the way it did under Lyndon Johnson? All these questions are unanswerable, as are the ones surrounding a possible assassination plot. What we are left with is an image, a memory and a legend. I write this not as a reflection on JFK the man, but on the media that helped create the Camelot myth and the culture that continues to foster it.
We mourn JFK because he was a symbol of youth and vitality in the service of a greater good, cut down unjustly, before he could fulfill his promise. Huxley gives us a warning about putting our faith in well concocted images and trading our freedom for a bit of passing comfort and security. Lewis teaches us the power of myth as a conveyer of a deeper truth.
Eternal Rest Grant unto Them, O Lord, And Let Perpetual Light Shine Upon Them. May Their Souls and all the Souls of the Faithful Departed Through the Mercy of God, Rest In Peace. AMEN
No comments:
Post a Comment