I Get It Now

I get it now. I finally really get it. The "it" in question being why certain intelligent people consider John Kennedy to have been a great man.

I've always considered Kennedy to have been great in some regards, especially concerning his crippling illnesses and injuries which did not dissuade him from assuming awesome responsibilities and assuming great personal risks in service of his country.

From another perspective, he was a lecherous and debauched dilettante, but human beings are complicated like that.

I've written many times before about how the death cult surrounding JFK skews any objective appraisal of him. But it's not his fault he was assassinated; surely he would rather have lived than to ensure his perpetual popularity via martyrdom.

But the things JFK did have control over are what ought to define his legacy. And I've just rediscovered his civil rights speech from June 11, 1963.

And I've just realized how revolutionary it was, how much it meant to people of all types, and how it would be just as righteous had he lived to be 95 years old. In which case he would still be alive.

Kennedy gave this speech with less than 24 hours notice to the TV networks; it was not planned. It was not even written. When Kennedy saw people being killed in broad daylight because a black man tried to enroll in a college, he finally got it.

This was a man who could not possibly relate to blacks, but on this night he showed himself to be a man with a healthy moral limit. He gave this speech in spontaneity and anger. Or perhaps righteous indignation would be a better term.

When I watch this speech, I get it. I get why Nas says, on the Nigger album, "what do niggers do? we just / hang up pictures of Martin, JFK, and Jesus."

I understand now why when, 5 months after this speech, Kennedy had his head blown off of his body while sitting next to his wife in broad daylight in the Confederacy, people naturally assumed it was because of this speech. I get it.

If we can disenthrall ourselves from his murder, and imagine that we are watching this speech live, we can appreciate this man's greatness. This speech lost him millions of votes. He knew this. But he still gave it. I urge you to watch by clicking the link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS4Qw4lIckg

The Curse

One of the enduring ironies of the Vietnam War is that the Vietnamese seem to be more "over it" than the Americans, despite having suffered immeasurably more. I had two experiences last week that illustrated yet again to me how deep and destructive and divisive this legacy remains.

In my job as a history teacher, my colleagues and I naturally gather at lunch time to rap about the job, current events, and history. Well, some of us do. Lunch among history teachers is segregated by politics. I eat with the more reactionary crowd, which is due solely to the fact that they're more entertaining than the liberals.

One of the teacher's father is a Vietnam Vet. One of the other teachers (who dines elsewhere) has a poster of Ho Chi Minh on the wall of her classroom. This unfortunate congruence of events is a perfect microcosm of our bipolar Vietnam disorder.

The man whose father fought there is unable to acknowledge that his father was sent on a fool's errand (to be charitable). This is understandable to some extent, for when you have skin in the game it makes it a soul-crushing burden to admit that the game was crooked.

The woman who has a poster of Ho Chi Minh on her wall is unable to acknowledge that Ho was, among other things, a murderous tyrant by any measure. This is less understandable, as it relies on the infantile assumption that every fight is pure good versus pure evil. (The Americans were wrong, therefore Ho must have been supremely virtuous.)

At the very least, we can understand how sensitive an issue this is. What is the virtue of putting Ho's picture on the wall of a classroom? Even though American soldiers should have never been in Vietnam, it is at the very least extremely distasteful to idolize a man with so much American blood on his hands, especially for historically naive teenagers.

Also last week, I went to a bachelor party and spent about an hour talking to a Vietnam vet, "Sarge". In the course of our conversations, Sarge said many things.

He said we killed indiscriminately, but also that we fought with one hand tied behind our backs.

He said that our allies were barbarians, and also that our enemies were barbarians.

He implied that he played a part in murdering an incompetent American officer. "Let's just say 14 of us went into that jungle, and 13 of us came back...."

He said that he was spat on when he came home.

Some of these stories were surely true. Some were surely false or exaggerated. And we cannot assume which was which by virtue of identifying the contradictions, because the entire pathetic and tragic enterprise was a contradiction.

The spitting allegation is especially intriguing and a perfect illustration of our Vietnam psychosis. Human psychology tells us that people are fully capable of "remembering" things that never happened and of believing a lie so deeply that it loses its identity as a lie; a lie is only a lie if the liar believes he is lying.

These stories about how people "spit on us" when vets returned from Vietnam really gained traction in the 1980's. Why did it take so long for vets to "remember" these traumatic events? Well, because most of them surely never happened.

So what made these vets imagine that these things had happened? Rambo. And Born on the 4th of July. These movies featured scenes and/or allusions to vets being spit on and, lo and behold, thousands of vets began "remembering" that they had been spit on when they "got off the plane".

The fact that soldiers returing from the war were flown into military airports is but one indication of how unlikely these "memories" are.

Vietnam is such a deep psychological scar that there is not even an agreed-upon set of facts is at play. The psychosis is so deep that there are millions of Americans who will tell you with a straight face that America won the Vietnam War.

When someone writes a history of America in 100 years, it will be even clearer than it is now that Vietnam was the beginning of the end. Before Vietnam, huge swaths of Americans shared a consensus about certain truths and assumptions. There was a general trend of broadening and deepening material affluence and moral inclusion.

But after Vietnam, America became the country it is today, polarized, distressed, aggressive, a place where people can barely agree on what day of the week it is. And when we trace back the root of this discontent, we find ourselves where we were 40 years ago, walking aimlessly through an impenetrable jungle waiting for our demise.