A Resurrected Fear

Just as layers of ash and rubble from the fallen Trojan empire may be built up into a chronologically ordered “mountain,” so, too, can individual and collective experiences be stacked up in our minds. And for those of us, dear friends, of the fifty-plus generation, the bottom layer of that pile is often quite forgotten – or possibly suppressed. The archaeologists examining our brains and spirits (psychiatrists) will gladly rummage around in there if we wish them to (and are willing to pay them to do so), usually with not much in the way of results. But once in a while, something happens that suddenly lays bare one of those buried layers and makes it accessible to us.

While watching television just a few days ago, I was shocked to see the new U.S. President and best hope for the world, Barack Obama, as he finished a visit somewhere, got into his Jeep, and simply drove off. No bodyguards, not a single policeman visible anywhere. What foolishness! A sudden feeling of fear gripped me, and with it once more the memory of the day when John F. Kennedy died. I was eleven years old. Our (very first) television set was on all through the night. Never before had I ever seen my parents and grandparents so stunned. For the first time in my quite sheltered life I was – indirectly – confronted by political violence. And now, that creeping fear has again taken control of my being.

JFK – I didn’t really understand this until later – was the first great hope of the Western world. The first Yank who with his charm and his unwavering commitment to democracy gave wings to even the cold hearts of a hardened World War II generation of Germans. And the first President of the United States to assure African-Americans, immigrant Latinos, and Native Americans that they were all equal citizens of one united country.

And something else came back to me: the song “New York 1963 – America 1968,” written by Eric Burdon, a white blues musician who immigrated from Newcastle and was one of the first exponents of the Beat Generation to work exclusively with black musicians of the group War, among others. In that song, he recounted the shocked condition of an entire nation after the November, 1963 assassination and he sang of the hopes that were buried with Kennedy: “Another ending of a new beginning!” Many people wept after the shots were fired, go the lyrics of this long, mournful blues number, which ends with several blacks expressing their own personal feelings that the races had again been separated. Burdon laments that while some wept, others grinned as Kennedy was laid to rest, and in the South the Klan again burned crosses.

Americans of the fifty-plus generation all know exactly where they were and what they were doing when the fatal shots were fired. Lou Reed, then 21-years old and later front man of the legendary rock group, Velvet Undeground, was sitting in a bar when a reporter interrupted programming to announce that Kennedy had been assassinated. “The President is dead, he’s been shot twice in the head, and nobody knows by whom!” Shocked, everyone ran outside into the street, Reed sang in “The Day John Kennedy Died” on his great album “The Blue Mask.”

Now 45 years have slipped by and it’s certain that history repeats itself only as farce. But people sometimes die even in farces. Every morning, not only in America and not just singly, an armed and dangerous lunatic awakens. As the world’s best hope, Obama is Kennedy thrice over. His death would be, once again, a national – even an international – mega-catastrophe, a relapse into barbarity and a conclusive triumph of evil. So: protect Obama unceasingly and everywhere!!! We, the fifty-plus generation, don’t want to hear that sad 1963 song ever again: “And when I got to America, I say it blew my mind.”