Parables Still True Internationally

THE ABSURD TIMES

A few parables from Guttenburg, by Schopenhauer, that still hold.



> A FEW PARABLES.
>
>
> In a field of ripening corn I came to a place which had been trampled
> down by some ruthless foot; and as I glanced amongst the countless
> stalks, every one of them alike, standing there so erect and bearing
> the full weight of the ear, I saw a multitude of different flowers,
> red and blue and violet. How pretty they looked as they grew there so
> naturally with their little foliage! But, thought I, they are quite
> useless; they bear no fruit; they are mere weeds, suffered to remain
> only because there is no getting rid of them. And yet, but for these
> flowers, there would be nothing to charm the eye in that wilderness
> of stalks. They are emblematic of poetry and art, which, in civic
> life--so severe, but still useful and not without its fruit--play the
> same part as flowers in the corn.
>
> * * * * *
>
> There are some really beautifully landscapes in the world, but the
> human figures in them are poor, and you had not better look at them.
>
> * * * * *
>
> The fly should be used as the symbol of impertinence and audacity; for
> whilst all other animals shun man more than anything else, and run
> away even before he comes near them, the fly lights upon his very
> nose.
>
> * * * * *
>
> Two Chinamen traveling in Europe went to the theatre for the first
> time. One of them did nothing but study the machinery, and he
> succeeded in finding out how it was worked. The other tried to get at
> the meaning of the piece in spite of his ignorance of the language.
> Here you have the Astronomer and the Philosopher.
>
> * * * * *
>
> Wisdom which is only theoretical and never put into practice, is like
> a double rose; its color and perfume are delightful, but it withers
> away and leaves no seed.
>
> No rose without a thorn. Yes, but many a thorn without a rose.
>
> * * * * *
>
> A wide-spreading apple-tree stood in full bloom, and behind it a
> straight fir raised its dark and tapering head. _Look at the thousands
> of gay blossoms which cover me everywhere_, said the apple-tree; _what
> have you to show in comparison? Dark-green needles! That is true_,
> replied the fir, _but when winter comes, you will be bared of your
> glory; and I shall be as I am now_.
>
> * * * * *
>
> Once, as I was botanizing under an oak, I found amongst a number
> of other plants of similar height one that was dark in color, with
> tightly closed leaves and a stalk that was very straight and stiff.
> When I touched it, it said to me in firm tones: _Let me alone; I am
> not for your collection, like these plants to which Nature has given
> only a single year of life. I am a little oak_.
>
> So it is with a man whose influence is to last for hundreds of years.
> As a child, as a youth, often even as a full-grown man, nay, his whole
> life long, he goes about among his fellows, looking like them and
> seemingly as unimportant. But let him alone; he will not die. Time
> will come and bring those who know how to value him.
>
> * * * * *
>
> The man who goes up in a balloon does not feel as though he were
> ascending; he only sees the earth sinking deeper under him.
>
> There is a mystery which only those will understand who feel the truth
> of it.
>
> * * * * *
>
> Your estimation of a man's size will be affected by the distance at
> which you stand from him, but in two entirely opposite ways according
> as it is his physical or his mental stature that you are considering.
> The one will seem smaller, the farther off you move; the other,
> greater.
>
> * * * * *
>
> Nature covers all her works with a varnish of beauty, like the tender
> bloom that is breathed, as it were, on the surface of a peach or a
> plum. Painters and poets lay themselves out to take off this varnish,
> to store it up, and give it us to be enjoyed at our leisure. We drink
> deep of this beauty long before we enter upon life itself; and when
> afterwards we come to see the works of Nature for ourselves, the
> varnish is gone: the artists have used it up and we have enjoyed it in
> advance. Thus it is that the world so often appears harsh and devoid
> of charm, nay, actually repulsive. It were better to leave us to
> discover the varnish for ourselves. This would mean that we should
> not enjoy it all at once and in large quantities; we should have no
> finished pictures, no perfect poems; but we should look at all things
> in that genial and pleasing light in which even now a child of Nature
> sometimes sees them--some one who has not anticipated his aesthetic
> pleasures by the help of art, or taken the charms of life too early.
>
> * * * * *
>
> The Cathedral in Mayence is so shut in by the houses that are built
> round about it, that there is no one spot from which you can see it
> as a whole. This is symbolic of everything great or beautiful in the
> world. It ought to exist for its own sake alone, but before very long
> it is misused to serve alien ends. People come from all directions
> wanting to find in it support and maintenance for themselves; they
> stand in the way and spoil its effect. To be sure, there is nothing
> surprising in this, for in a world of need and imperfection everything
> is seized upon which can be used to satisfy want. Nothing is exempt
> from this service, no, not even those very things which arise only
> when need and want are for a moment lost sight of--the beautiful and
> the true, sought for their own sakes.
>
> This is especially illustrated and corroborated in the case of
> institutions--whether great or small, wealthy or poor, founded, no
> matter in what century or in what land, to maintain and advance human
> knowledge, and generally to afford help to those intellectual efforts
> which ennoble the race. Wherever these institutions may be, it is not
> long before people sneak up to them under the pretence of wishing to
> further those special ends, while they are really led on by the desire
> to secure the emoluments which have been left for their furtherance,
> and thus to satisfy certain coarse and brutal instincts of their own.
> Thus it is that we come to have so many charlatans in every branch
> of knowledge. The charlatan takes very different shapes according
> to circumstances; but at bottom he is a man who cares nothing about
> knowledge for its own sake, and only strives to gain the semblance
> of it that he may use it for his own personal ends, which are always
> selfish and material.
>
> * * * * *
>
> Every hero is a Samson. The strong man succumbs to the intrigues of
> the weak and the many; and if in the end he loses all patience he
> crushes both them and himself. Or he is like Gulliver at Lilliput,
> overwhelmed by an enormous number of little men.
>
> * * * * *
>
> A mother gave her children Aesop's fables to read, in the hope of
> educating and improving their minds; but they very soon brought the
> book back, and the eldest, wise beyond his years, delivered himself as
> follows: _This is no book for us; it's much too childish and stupid.
> You can't make us believe that foxes and wolves and ravens are able to
> talk; we've got beyond stories of that kind_!
>
> In these young hopefuls you have the enlightened Rationalists of the
> future.
>
> * * * * *
>
> A number of porcupines huddled together for warmth on a cold day in
> winter; but, as they began to prick one another with their quills,
> they were obliged to disperse. However the cold drove them together
> again, when just the same thing happened. At last, after many turns of
> huddling and dispersing, they discovered that they would be best off
> by remaining at a little distance from one another. In the same way
> the need of society drives the human porcupines together, only to be
> mutually repelled by the many prickly and disagreeable qualities of
> their nature. The moderate distance which they at last discover to be
> the only tolerable condition of intercourse, is the code of politeness
> and fine manners; and those who transgress it are roughly told--in
> the English phrase--_to keep their distance_. By this arrangement the
> mutual need of warmth is only very moderately satisfied; but then
> people do not get pricked. A man who has some heat in himself prefers
> to remain outside, where he will neither prick other people nor get
> pricked himself.
>

The Holiday Renamed

THE ABSURD TIMES

   

Mark Twain


    There have been many suggestions about Thanksgiving in the last few days.  Some have rightly pointed out that it is national screw the Indians day. 

Others rapturously remember happy times from their childhood.

Actually, both are true, but there is no need to accept the pseudo-religious nonsense nor to accept the traditional myths.  It is a great time to have a holiday, but the name needs to be changed.

Well, it is an exclusively United States holiday and nothing better represents the best that this country has to offer than mark Twain, whose birthday falls about the same time. 

So, we need to simply change the name to Twainsthanking day, read aloud some of his essays, and then eat ourselves into a stupor to celebrate the fact that we have nothing to offer in the way of culture to the world.

Meanwhile, below is an example of what is the worst in this country.  Have you heard that they held a food-drive for Wal-mart employees who were too poor to buy dinner during this time?  Now how absurd do things have to get before we wake up and refuse to allow any more attacks on FDRs reforms?

MONDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2013

Over 110 Arrested as Record Black Friday Protests Challenge Wal-Mart, Major Retailers on Low Wages

At least 111 people were arrested on Black Friday in a series of protests and acts of civil disobedience targeting Wal-Mart and other big-box retailers. In St. Paul, Minnesota, 26 protesters were arrested when they blocked traffic while demanding better wages for janitors and retail employees. In Illinois, 10 people were issued citations at a protest near a Wal-Mart in Chicago. Video posted online showed nine people being arrested at a protest outside a Wal-Mart store in Alexandria, Virginia. At Wal-Mart protests in California, 15 people were arrested in Roseville, 10 arrested in Ontario, and five arrested in San Leandro. Organizers said actions took place at 1,500 Wal-Mart locations across the country, up from about 400 locations last year. Meanwhile, fast-food workers have announced plans to hold a one-day strike in 100 cities on Thursday as part of a campaign to win a $15-an-hour wage. We discuss the labor protests with Josh Eidelson, staff reporter at Salon.com.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: At least 111 people were arrested Black Friday in a series of protests and acts of civil disobedience targeting Wal-Mart and other big-box retailers. In St. Paul, Minnesota, 26 protesters were arrested when they blocked traffic while demanding better wages for janitors and retail employees; in Illinois, 10 people issued citations at a protest near a Wal-Mart in Chicago. Video posted online showed nine people being arrested at a protest outside a Wal-Mart store in Alexandria, Virginia.

PROTESTER: Nine community leaders, labor leaders, workers were just arrested as part of a civil disobedience to bring attention to the fact that Wal-Mart is not treating its workers right, that it’s not respecting it, that it’s not letting workers exist with dignity. And so, we wanted to make sure that they knew and that the workers know that there’s a large community behind them that supports them and that’s going to stick by them until we get right and respectful treatment, dignified work, good salaries.

AMY GOODMAN: Protests were also held across California. Fifteen people were arrested outside a Wal-Mart in Roseville, another 10 arrested in Ontario, California, five more people arrested outside a Wal-Mart in San Leandro. Organizers said actions took place at 1,500 Wal-Mart locations across the country, up from 400 last year. Meanwhile, fast-food workers have announced plans to hold a one-day strike in a hundred cities Thursday as part of a campaign to win a $15-an-hour wage.

To talk more about these labor protests, we’re joined by Josh Eidelson, staff reporter at Salon.com. His latest article, "Tens of Thousands Protest, Over 100 Arrested in Black Friday Challenge to Wal-Mart."

So, how significant were these protests?

JOSH EIDELSON: Well, by some measures, these were the largest protests we’ve seen against Wal-Mart, in that you had 1,500 stores involved; you had somewhat over a hundred people arrested; you had, certainly, once again, Wal-Mart put in an uncomfortable spotlight on what should be the happiest day of the year for the retailer. What isn’t clear is whether there were any more Wal-Mart employees involved than one year ago. And organizers made a strategic shift from last year focusing on strikes to this year putting in the spotlight civil disobedience. Many of the people in those civil disobediences were not Wal-Mart employees. And so, the fact that it’s not clear we saw any more than the 400-some workers who went on strike in 2012 involved in protest in 2013, I think, speaks to the challenges of organizing at Wal-Mart, particularly in the aftermath of the firing of 23 strikers by Wal-Mart in the period coming after a trip to Arkansas this summer.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about the NLRB decision that’s very significant for them.

JOSH EIDELSON: So, the National Labor Relations Board has announced that it’s ready to issue a complaint, roughly the equivalent of an indictment, against Wal-Mart for a number of allegations involving the company’s efforts to restrain people from going on strike. This includes everything from comments made to CNN by David Tovar, a Wal-Mart spokesperson who has since been promoted to vice president, who said that, "Depending on the circumstances, there could be consequences if you don’t come to work," to firings, other forms of retaliation, alleged retaliation, various kinds of discipline against workers who stood up. And these allegations have been made throughout the campaign. The alleged retaliation intensified earlier this year after this several-day trip to Arkansas, this protest at the shareholder convention. And in conversations with workers, those actions have had a real effect. And so, there is hope expressed, both by employees and by activists, that the labor board moving forward with these allegations will embolden workers to stand up to this alleged retaliation, but the labor board does not have a very successful history of averting or avenging actions by companies that try to squash workers organizing.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about OUR Walmart, the group affiliated with United Food and Commercial Workers.

JOSH EIDELSON: So, this is a group that has very close ties to the UFCW. It is not a union. It is not seeking collective bargaining. But it’s a group of workers who are demanding changes to scheduling, schedules that they say are erratic and insufficient; changes to wages, including a demand for a $25,000-a-year wage floor for full-time work; and an end to that retaliation, the right to organize and speak up, which is recognized under U.S. law not just for people who want a union, but for workers who want to engage in action collectively to change their conditions.

AMY GOODMAN: The amount of public subsidy for Wal-Mart workers because they make so little, how much does the public pay?

JOSH EIDELSON: So, depending on what one counts, there was a study that was released by congressional Democrats looking at Wisconsin that estimated that Wal-Mart workers at one store used nearly a million dollars in public assistance. And this speaks to—while there are questions about what kind of language makes sense to use—I think sometimes the language that people use to talk about this really reinforces some of the anti-welfare sentiment that people have—it is clear that the fact that our largest employer, which is owned by our wealthiest family, is a company whose employees, in tremendous numbers, depend on our very stingy poverty programs in the United States, says a lot about the state of the U.S. economy and work.

AMY GOODMAN: And it wasn’t just protests at Wal-Mart stores.

JOSH EIDELSON: In Minnesota, there were also subcontracted janitors involved who clean Target buildings. These are workers who have gone on strike previously, who are facing, as Wal-Mart warehouse workers do, what I call the "Who’s the Boss" problem, where they’re not legally employed by this giant corporation, but they would argue they are subject to the business model of that company, and they’re trying to put that company in the spotlight as a way of forcing some pressure to raise those conditions.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what’s going to happen on Thursday and how these actions, if they are, are related.

JOSH EIDELSON: So, The New York Times’ Steven Greenhouse reported that the fast-food campaign, an effort that, as I reported first at Salon, came out last year with a strike in one city in New York, which we’ve seen escalate since then, Greenhouse reported, is going to involve strikes in a hundred cities on Thursday and protests in many more. So this is a serious escalation by a campaign that is significantly backed by the Service Employees International Union, that also represents an effort by labor, in a time when organized labor is largely on defense, to tackle one of our largest and increasingly representative industries. The nature of fast-food work increasingly is the nature of work in the United States—precarious, surveilled, involving emotional labor, involving a lack of a consistent schedule, and poverty wages. And so, these workers, by going on strike not against one company, but against all the big companies in the industry, and beginning in one city and now escalating reportedly to a hundred cities, are trying to squeeze that industry. It remains to be seen whether the end result there, whether the best-case scenario for them, happens through some kind of national deal with major corporations to pave the way for unionization at the franchisees or whether the most direct effect is seen through legislative change. But workers have been clear from the beginning that their demand is $15 an hour and the right to unionize.

AMY GOODMAN: Whole Food workers, they’re getting involved. In New York, in some of the stores on Thanksgiving, they were open ’til 4:00.

JOSH EIDELSON: So, I reported on the case of Whole Foods workers in Chicago, who went on strike demanding the right to be off on Thanksgiving. Their argument was, let people do the shopping up until Thanksgiving, and then on Thanksgiving, this holiday that we’ve made possible for people, we should get to be home and enjoy it. And those workers at Whole Foods went out on strike in Chicago. This is a group that’s tied to the same folks in the fast-food movement in Chicago, which also includes retail and Whole Foods, and they got what they wanted. Whole Foods claimed to me and to them that that had been their policy all along, that no one has to work on Thanksgiving if they don’t want to. But none of the Whole Foods workers I talked to in Chicago or elsewhere in the country said that that was how the policy had been explained to them. And so, a rally planned by those workers for that Wednesday turned into something of a victory rally when the company said, "Yes, anybody can take the day off on Thanksgiving if they want to."

AMY GOODMAN: And how does this movement tie in, for example, to the $15-an-hour victory that was won at SeaTac Airport in Seattle?

JOSH EIDELSON: So, folks who are involved out in Washington state have attributed the political momentum behind that $15 win, that narrow but quite significant in terms of where we go nationally potentially win, attributed it in part to the call for $15 being made by those fast-food workers around the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Josh, thanks so much for updating us. Josh Eidelson is staff reporter at Salon.com. We’ll link to his piece, "Tens of Thousands Protest, Over 100 Arrested in Black Friday Challenge to Wal-Mart."

---

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JFK: Final Words

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration: The actual Katzenbach memo, written in Robert Kennedy's absence.  As everyone with an IQ above room temperature should know, the Warren Commission followed every single order in it.  It is dated November 25, 1963.

As the anniversary approaches, the media will flood the people of this country with a mass of specials, all purportedly related to the assassination of JFK.  In this flood, very little of value will be revealed.  Most of it will fall into the category of fluff, all designed to increase ratings, and almost none of it will point to a plan by the very “Military-Industrial-Complex” that Eisenhower warned about and whose warning is presented at the very start of Oliver Stone’s documentary on the subject.  We can amend the term to the Military-Industrial-Corporate-Complex (MICC) today in order to better see the merits of the film.

As I look back, I felt from the first that there was more to the killing than the Warren Commission Reported.  With the Katzenbach Memo, above, it is clear that the government moved quickly to pass the “lone gunman” idea. 

Since then, every President has been careful not to heed Eisenhower’s warning, and we can best see this by looking at their most significant positive accomplishments that were in the public interest.

LBJ came first.  Whatever his failings as a human, he did twist arms to the point of almost breaking them in order to pass Medicare and voting rights.

Next was Nixon.  He actually created the EPA.

Ford managed to see the final days of our involvement in Vietnam.  He was also adept at sliding down airplane steps on his back and immediately getting up to shake hands.  He was also able to nail a few tennis partners in the back with his serves.

Carter did get some sort of treaty in the Mideast.  There have been none since.

Then Reagan.  He created Bin Laden, supported Saddam Hussein to war with Iran, and increased the budget some 17 times, thereby bankrupting the Soviet Union.  Was he told about Iran-Contra?  Yes, but he forgot.  He supported also the war on FDR’s programs that continues today.

Maybe Bush the first did Medicare part D? 

Clinton entertained us with talk about his hummers.

Bush the second was the funniest unintentionally funny president in history.

Obama passes for black.

That’s about it.  Not one single action against the MICC since Kennedy.  The film is more than just a counter myth.  It has also forced release of many documents hidden from the public for years:

November 22 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and virtually all major TV channels, magazines, and other media outlets are planning specials, documentaries, articles with historical analyses and personal retellings of where people were at the time of assassination. Also, Oliver Stone's 1991 Oscar-nominated film JFK challenging the conventional theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman and suggesting that there may have been a conspiracy to kill Kennedy will be shown this month in over 250 theaters nationwide. To put the Kennedy assassination in a historical perspective that is both spiritual and political, we here reprint Peter Gabel's brilliant article on the subject, "The Spiritual Truth of JFK (As Movie and Reality)," originally published in Tikkun in March/April 1992 in response to the original release of Stone's film. Gabel’s piece is an example of the kind of historical analysis we are trying to develop in Tikkun—locating the critical event of JFK's assassination in the context of the repression of our collective spiritual longings for a loving world that characterized the 1950s, and what he calls the "opening up of desire" represented by JFK. In defending Stone's film against its critics, Gabel also shows how the conflict between hope and fear, between the desire for an erotic, loving, and caring world and the forces seeking to deny and contain that desire, is central to understanding the meaning of historical events. His analysis also implicitly helps explain why this month there is such an outpouring of memory, pain, longing, and loss in recollecting the assassination fifty years later.

---

The Spiritual Truth of JFK (As Movie and Reality)

by Peter Gabel 

Oliver Stone's JFK is a great movie, but not because it "proves" that John F. Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy. Stone himself has acknowledged that the movie is a myth -- a countermyth to the myth produced by the Warren Commission -- but a myth that contains what Stone calls a spiritual truth. To understand that spiritual truth, we must look deeply into the psychological and social meaning of the assassination -- its meaning for American society at the time that it occurred, and for understanding contemporary American politics and culture.

The spiritual problem that the movie speaks to is an underlying truth about life in American society -- the truth that we all live in a social world characterized by feelings of alienation, isolation, and a chronic inability to connect with one another in a life-giving and powerful way. In our political and economic institutions, this alienation is lived out as a feeling of being "underneath" and at an infinite distance from an alien external world that seems to determine our lives from the outside. True democracy would require that we be actively engaged in ongoing processes of social interaction that strengthen our bonds of connectedness to one another, while at the same time allowing us to realize our need for a sense of social meaning and ethical purpose through the active remaking of the no-longer "external" world around us. But we do not yet live in such a world, and the isolation and distance from reality that envelops us is a cause of immense psychological and emotional pain, a social starvation that is in fact analogous to physical hunger and other forms of physical suffering.

One of the main psychosocial mechanisms by which this pain, this collective starvation, is denied is through the creation of an imaginary sense of community. Today this imaginary world is generated through a seemingly endless ritualized deference to the Flag, the Nation, the Family -- pseudocommunal icons of public discourse projecting mere images of social connection that actually deny our real experience of isolation and distance, of living in sealed cubicles, passing each other blankly on the streets, while managing to relieve our alienation to some extent by making us feel a part of something. Political and cultural elites -- presidents and ad agencies -- typically generate these images of pseudocommunity, but we also play a part in creating them because, from the vantage point of our isolated positions -- if we have not found some alternative community of meaning -- we need them to provide what sense of social connection they can. We have discussed this phenomenon in Tikkun many times before, emphasizing recently, for example, the way David Duke is able to recognize and confirm the pain of white working-class people and thereby help them overcome, in an imaginary way, their sense of isolation in a public world that leaves them feeling invisible.

In the 1950s, the alienated environment that I have been describing took the form of an authoritarian, rigidly anticommunist mentality that coexisted with the fantasized image of a "perfect" America -- a puffed-up and patriotic America that had won World War II and was now producing a kitchen-culture of time-saving appliances, allegedly happy families, and technically proficient organizations and "organization men" who dressed the same and looked the same as they marched in step toward the "great big beautiful tomorrow" hailed in General Electric's advertising jingle of that period. It was a decade of artificial and rigid patriotic unity, sustained in large part by an equally rigid and pathological anticommunism; for communism was the "Other" whose evil we needed to exterminate or at least contain to preserve our illusory sense of connection, meaning, and social purpose. As the sixties were later to make clear, the cultural climate of the fifties was actually a massive denial of the desire for true connection and meaning. But at the time the cultural image-world of the fifties was sternly held in place by a punitive and threatening system of authoritarian male hierarchies, symbolized most graphically by the McCarthy hearings, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the person of J. Edgar Hoover.

In this context, the election of John F. Kennedy and his three years in office represented what I would call an opening-up of desire. I say this irrespective of his official policies, which are repeatedly criticized by the Left for their initial hawkish character, and irrespective also of the posthumous creation of the Camelot myth, which does exaggerate the magic of that period. The opening-up that I am referring to is a feeling that Kennedy was able to evoke -- a feeling of humor, romance, idealism, and youthful energy, and a sense of hope that touched virtually every American alive during that time. It was this feeling -- "the rise of a new generation of Americans" -- that more than any ideology threatened the system of cultural and erotic control that dominated the fifties and that still dominated the governmental elites of the early sixties -- the FBI, the CIA, even elements of Kennedy's own cabinet and staff. Kennedy's evocative power spoke to people's longing for some transcendent community and in so doing, it allowed people to make themselves vulnerable enough to experience both hope and, indirectly, the legacy of pain and isolation that had been essentially sealed from public awareness since the end of the New Deal.

Everyone alive at the time of the assassination knows exactly where they were when Kennedy was shot because, as it is often said, his assassination "traumatized the nation." But the real trauma, if we move beyond the abstraction of "the nation," was the sudden, violent loss for millions of people of the part of themselves that had been opened up, or had begun to open up during Kennedy's presidency. As a sixteen-year-old in boarding school with no interest in politics, I wrote a long note in my diary asking God to help us through the days ahead, even though I didn't believe in God at the time. And I imagine that you, if you were alive then, no matter how cynical you may have sometimes felt since then about politics or presidents or the "real" Kennedy himself, have a similar memory preciously stored in the region of your being where your longings for a better world still reside.

In this issue, Peter Dale Scott gives an account of the objective consequences of the assassination, of the ways that the nation's anticommunist elites apparently reversed Kennedy's beginning efforts to withdraw from Vietnam and perhaps through his relationship with Khrushchev to thaw out the addiction to blind anti-communist rage -- an addiction that, as he saw during the Cuban missile crisis, could well have led to a nuclear war. But for these same elites, the mass-psychological consequences of the assassination posed quite a different problem from that of reversing government policy -- namely, the need to find a way to reconstitute the image of benign social connection that could reform the imaginary unity of the country on which the legitimacy of government policy depends. In order to contain the desire released by the Kennedy presidency and the sense of loss and sudden disintegration caused by the assassination, government officials had to create a process that would rapidly "prove" -- to the satisfaction of people's emotions -- that the assassination and loss were the result of socially innocent causes.

Here we come to the mass-psychological importance of Lee Harvey Oswald and the lone gunman theory of the assassination. As Stone's movie reminds us in a congeries of rapid-fire, post-assassination images, Oswald was instantly convicted in the media and in mass consciousness even before he was shot by Jack Ruby two days after the assassination. After an elaborate ritualized process producing twenty-six volumes of testimony, the Warren Commission sanctified Oswald's instant conviction in spite of the extreme implausibility of the magic bullet theory, the apparently contrary evidence of the Zapruder film, and other factual information such as the near impossibility of Oswald's firing even three bullets (assuming the magic bullet theory to be true) with such accuracy so quickly with a manually cocked rifle. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist, nor do you have to believe any of the evidence marshaled together by conspiracy theorists, to find it odd that Oswald's guilt was immediately taken for granted within two days of the killing, with no witnesses and no legal proceeding of any kind -- and that his guilt was later confidently affirmed by a high-level Commission whose members had to defy their own common sense in order to do so. The whole process might even seem extraordinary considering that we are talking about the assassination of an American president.

But it is not so surprising if you accept the mass-psychological perspective I am outlining here -- the perspective that Kennedy and the Kennedy years had elicited a lyricism and a desire for transcendent social connection that contradicted the long-institutionalized forces of emotional repression that preceded them. The great advantage of the lone gunman theory is that it gives anonsocial account of the assassination. It takes the experience of trauma and loss and momentary social disintegration, isolates the evil source of the experience in one antisocial individual, and leaves the image of society as a whole -- the "imaginary community" that I referred to earlier -- untarnished and still "good." From the point of view of those in power, in other words, the lone gunman theory reinstitutes the legitimacy of existing social and political authority as a whole because it silently conveys the idea that our elected officials and the organs of government, among them the CIA and the FBI, share our innocence and continue to express our democratic will. But from a larger psychosocial point of view, the effect was to begin to close up the link between desire and politics that Kennedy had partially elicited, and at the same time to impose a new repression of our painful feelings of isolation and disconnection beneath the facade of our reconstituted but imaginary political unity.

Having said this, I do not want to be understood to be suggesting that there was a conspiracy to set up Oswald in order to achieve this mass-psychological goal. There may well have been a conspiracy to set up Oswald, but no complex theory is required to explain it. And it would be absurd, in my view, to think that the entire media consciously intended to manipulate the American people in the headlong rush to convict Oswald in the press. The point is rather that this headlong rush was something we all -- or most of us -- participated in because we ourselves, unconsciously, are deeply attached to the status quo, to our legitimating myths of community, and to denying our own alienation and pain. The interest we share with the mainstream media and with government and corporate elites is to maintain, through a kind of unconscious collusion, the alienated structures of power and social identity that protect us from having to risk emerging from our sealed cubicles and allowing our fragile longing for true community to become a public force.

The great achievement of Oliver Stone's movie is that it uses this traumatic, formative event of the Kennedy assassination -- an event full of politically important cultural memory and feeling -- to assault the mythological version of American society and to make us experience the forces of repression that shape social reality. The movie may or may not be accurate in its account of what Lyndon Johnson might have known or of the phones in Washington shutting down just before the assassination or of the New Zealand newspaper that mysteriously published Oswald's photographs before he was arrested. But the movie does give a kinetic and powerful depiction of the real historical forces present at the time of the assassination, forces that were in part released by the challenge to the fanatical anticommunism of the fifties that Kennedy to some extent brought about. Through his crosscutting images of the anti-Castro fringe, the civil-rights movement, high and low New Orleans club life, and elites in corporate and government offices who thought they ran the country, Stone uses all his cinematic and political energy to cut through the civics-class version of history and to bring the viewer into sudden contact with the realities of power and alienation that were present at that time and are present in a different form now.

I say this is the great achievement of the movie because no matter who killed Kennedy, it was the conflict between the opening-up of desire that he represented and the alienated need of the forces around him to shut this desire down that caused his death. This struggle was an important part of the meaning of the 1960s, and it provides the link, which Stone draws openly, between John Kennedy's death and the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. There is no way for the forces of good to win the struggle between desire and alienation unless people can break through the gauzy images of everything being fine except the lone nuts, a legitimating ideology that is actually supported by our denial of the pain of our isolation and our collective deference to the system of Authority that we use to keep our legitimating myths in place. Oliver Stone's JFK brings us face-to-face with social reality by penetrating the compensatory image-world of mass culture, politics, and journalism. And for that reason it is an important effort by someone whose consciousness was shaped by the sixties to transform and shake free the consciousness of the nineties.

Peter Gabel is editor-at-large of Tikkun. His new book, Another Way of Seeing: Essays on Transforming Law, Politics, and Culture (published by Quid Pro Books) is available from Reach and Teach and Amazon. The article reprinted above, “The Spiritual Truth of JFK (As Movie and Reality),” also appears in The Bank Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning(Acada Books, 2000).

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1963 Vietnam Withdrawal Plans President Kennedy meeting with Secretary of Defense McNamara and General Taylor in October 1963 after their fact-finding mission to Vietnam. Was there a Vietnam withdrawal plan in 1963? The answer is yes. What is at issue is not whether such plans had been created and initiated, but whether they were “serious,” i.e., whether the withdrawal would have continued in the face of a worsening situation in South Vietnam. On October 11, 1963, Kennedy signed NSAM 263, initiating a withdrawal of 1,000 troops out of roughly 16,000 Americans stationed in Vietnam. Other documents, including planning documents from the spring of 1963, show that this was the first step in a planned complete withdrawal. The controversy surrounds the fact that military reporting of the war effort in 1963 was decidedly rosy, and Kennedy made statements indicating that the positive outlook made withdrawal possible. Following the November deaths of South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem and President Kennedy, reporting of the military situation in Vietnam took a turn for the worse. Does this then mean that Kennedy would have done as his successor LBJ did, and escalate the war in response? John Newman’s landmark 1991 book JFK & Vietnam argues that Kennedy knew that the military reporting was skewed, and intended to withdraw anyway. Other analyses by Peter Dale Scott and James Galbraith (son of Kennedy advisor John Kenneth Galbraith), and recent books including one by no less than Robert McNamara himself, support this view. On the other side are many Vietnam historians and also social critic Noam Chomsky, whoseRethinking Camelot is largely a rebuttal of this view. RESOURCES: Essays Exit Strategy, by James K. Galbraith. On Vietnam, by Noam Chomsky, plus a response by James K. Galbraith. 'Fog of War' vs. 'Stop the Presses', by Errol Morris and Eric Alterman. The War Room, by Fred Kaplan. Walkthroughs Walkthrough - Vietnam in Late 1963 - A walkthrough of relevant documents regarding Vietnam policy from the spring of 1963 through a few days after Kennedy's death. Documents JCS Official File: Record Eighth Secretary of Defense Conference, 6 May 1963. This document, declassified in 1997, contains spring 1963 planning documents for a phased withdrawal from Vietnam. Report of McNamara/Taylor Mission to Vietnam National Security Action Memorandum No. 263 Honolulu Meeting Briefing Book, Part I. See also Part II. National Security Action Memorandum No. 273 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Volume III: Vietnam January-August 1963 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Volume IV: Vietnam August-December 1963 COMMENTS ON THIS PAGE