Category: Columnists

(On the myths of nations)

Some moments past mid-day (Central Time) on November 22, virtually the whole of the United States stood still for one minute. It was in honour and commemoration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the thirty fifth American president, who was slain exactly 50 years earlier. In downtown Dallas where the great reckoning around a small plaza took place, the mayor waxed lyrical describing it as the moment when hope collided with hatred. Fifty years later, the myth of Camelot survives in the heart and imagination of most Americans. And so does the Kennedy mystique.

Camelot was not original, to be sure. It belongs to the legend of King Arthur and the fabled knights of the round table. But it was the magical motif that John Kennedy chose for the moment. It was meant to invest his administration with the aura of nobility of purpose. Yet there are those who insist that it was not a profoundly imaginative or a particularly brilliant choice of myths. King Arthur, they point out, was a political failure and a cuckolded husband who lost both his kingdom and his queen.

However that may be and whatever the fatal foibles of their king, it is the glorious legacy of the knights in shining armour and of their gallantry and chivalry that has been handed down from generation to generation. When and where it mattered most, Jack Kennedy always had his heart and political instincts in the right place.

It will be foolish and futile to continue to debate whether nations need myths or not. All human societies and nations in particular thrive on imaginary delusions. This is the only way to nudge humanity towards a higher telos. When it is not a particular myth of creation, it is a potent legend of re-creation. Certain existential dilemmas and intolerable contradictions such as death and the finitude of existence are resolved at the level of the imaginary.

So it is that in some traditional societies, death and dying which ought to be the ultimate nemesis of the ruling class in its firm, final and irrefutable logic, is magically transformed into a natural ally of the dominant caucus. The king does not die, he merely ascends to the ceiling. Thus the natural pecking order subsists in life hereafter. There is no point in killing the king. You are merely consigning him to the inconvenience of early dinner somewhere else, and in the same royal splendour.

But some nations and societies are better and more collectively talented at self re-creation and ceaseless self-invention. The myth of Camelot was particularly good for America and the Kennedy clan at that point in time. America had been founded amidst such impassioned rhetoric and grandiloquent grandstanding as a new haven of freedom and equality for humanity. But the actual reality was less than flattering. Slavery, pogrom and genocide of the local populace were the order of the day. When Abraham Lincoln proclaimed democracy as the government of the people by the people and for the people, universal adult suffragette was a myth and the true political emancipation of the Black people was still centuries and momentous protests away.

Fifty three years after, the election that brought Jack Kennedy to the American presidency looks like a done deal. But it was in reality a hard slog and obstacle course indeed, owing as much to Kennedy’s personal charm and magnetism and equally to the potency of the ruthless political machine the older Kennedy had put in place.

The very idea of a Catholic president was considered an affront and an aspiration of incredible temerity to the delicate political palate and sensibility of the real American power brokers. A generation earlier, the Irish populace was regarded with the hostile political curiosity reserved for scumbags. The Boston Brahmins viewed the Irish as belonging to an inferior caste and Joseph Kennedy in particular as a dangerous bounder. It was not until old Joe stole the thunder from them by marrying into the local nobility and bootlegging his way to stupendous riches that they began to reckon with him.

The election of Kennedy was a watershed in American history, just like the triumph of Barack Obama several decades later. The baby boomers had come of electoral age, altering the demographic and electoral complexion of America forever in favour of youth and idealism. Before then, America was run like a corporate guild presided over by old, doddering authoritarian no-nonsense figures whose feet were firmly planted on earth and who had no time for fancy stuff. They were old American conservative patriots who viewed untested youth as a stuff that must be endured and only barely tolerated.

Kennedy’s predecessor in office, Dwight Eisenhower, a veteran of two World Wars and indisputable hero of the second, was so vexed by his film star glamour and highfalutin rhetoric that he dismissed the youthful senator from Massachusetts as a whippersnapper. A whippersnapper is a young fellow whose pretensions to knowledge and political nous can be quite irritating to older folks.

But not to worry. The young man from Hyannis Port seized the American imagination with his stirring and sterling rhetoric. He was not going to be stopped in his track by some fuzzy-woozy old men who were past their political sell-by date. Particularly resonant with the American people was his admonition that one should ask what one can do for his country and not what the country can do for one. It was a motif from the Arthurian legend. The American torch had indeed passed to a new generation.

After the somnolent and somnambulist years of Harry Truman, the former haberdasher from Missouri, and Eisenhower during which the USSR managed to send the first man into space, America was stirring anew. Here was the new knight in shining armour and a new American prince to boot. The superman had finally arrived at the supermarket. There was an infectious optimism in the air. For good or bad, America would never be the same again.

And John Kennedy looked every inch the part. He was rich, young, handsome and delectably telegenic. He was courtly, courteous and charismatic in the extreme. He went to Harvard, had written books and was a war hero to boot. He had the aura of a film star. There was something about him which made women swoon. Half of them wanted to be his mother and the other half his wife.

Meanwhile, his real wife, the former Jacqueline Bouvier, of French extraction, brought a French élan and chic sophistication to the White House. This was life imitating a great movie. The normally sedate residence of American presidents bristled like a great Parisian café with aficionados of the arts and the illuminati of the haute couture. It was too good to be true. Something was bound to give. This kind of charismatic authority is always brittle and unstable, and so disruptive of normal life.

Predictably, the enthralling movie ended in a real nightmare in downtown Dallas 50 years ago with Kennedy’s brains and blood sprayed and splashed into his wife’s dress. It was said that earlier on while the Kennedys were on a state visit to France, Charles de Gaulle had taken a wistful look at the wife and then noted to associates that he could see her in another 12 years on the yatch of a rich Greek shipping tycoon. Whether this was due to exemplary political clairvoyance or to the fact that the great French wizard was privy to some classified intelligence which showed Aristotle Onassis, the fabled Greek Casanova, already making hay behind JFK’s back will never be known.

Like everything Kennedy, it was very difficult to separate myth from reality and fact from fiction and fantasy. Kennedy himself was very much a creation of myth and ruthless modern marketing. When the fact got in the way of the legend, it was the fact that gave way. Contrary to the myth of superhero, Kennedy had been sick and sickly for a long time and relied heavily on massive doses of pain killers to get by.

Jack was also a serial philanderer who turned the White House to a sexual Bedlam. Even his war record was largely pumped up fiction. His older brother, the late Joe, was the real thing. Joe had volunteered for a dangerous aerial mission and was never to be seen again. As for being a book writing intellectual, a close scholarly associate noted wryly that the late American president only managed to finish one serious book he knew about.

But this grand occlusion of reality and illusionist fantasia worked magic with the American people and the world at large. The bouffant Kennedy hair-do became a global brand. JFK seized the American and global imagination in a way that no leader had done before. Whenever and wherever he visited, the crowd went into a frenzied adulation. It was charisma in the original sense of the ancient Greek word.

Yet where and when political sorcery ends, reality sets in. Somebody had to pick the tab of magic. It was the American people—and the world at large. Kennedy’s inflammable rhetoric of American exceptionalism and the gung-ho mindset of the “best and brightest” team he had assembled set America irrevocably on a war path which was to end in tears and tragedy. You cannot procure laughter with the coins of pains.

The Cuban missile crisis and the Bay of Pigs fiasco are just two sides of a bad coin. America was trapped in its imaginary delusions. The lesson had to be taught that America was not founded as a martial nation. The doughty and hardy Vietnamese who had earlier given the French a bloody nose were lurking in the wings to give the Americans their own comeuppance. A dark chapter had unfolded in American history. It is also to be noted that even the great Civil Rights reforms initiated by Kennedy were eventually consummated by his successor, the earthy, joyously profane and gleefully oafish Lyndon B Johnson.

Fifty years ago, the magic ended in downtown Dallas. But John Kennedy lives on in the imagination of many who saw him as a symbol of hope and national capacity for self renewal. A nation perishes without visionaries. It has been argued that Kennedy was neither a great president nor a particularly good one. Death spared him a horrible fate. But when allowances have been made for human lapses and frailties, it is the magic that endures and not the grim mathematics of political failure. Therein lies the secret of the enduring myth and the continuing global fascination with an authentic American icon.