Fifty years ago the President of the USA was shot in broad daylight as he traveled in his motorcade through downtown Dallas. I was two days turned seventeen and the bullets that cut down Kennedy nailed my soul to history as surely as any war in a trench or bombing blitz over London.
We sat glued to the fifteen inch black-and-white T.V. dimly conscious that something immeasurable had happened. It was like the Death Star coming from behind the moon and parking itself over us where there were no Starfighters in sight to stop it. The world which before had rested on an even keel lurched horribly on its side, and as it struggled to right itself you knew it would never get back to where it had been.
Twenty years later when I was going through a turning-point year of my own life and asking questions to the root of my soul suddenly that day in Dallas appeared. I dreamed of Jackie Kennedy being bounced back against the car seat as the security-detail driver took off at speed just after the president’s head has been blown apart. It was a spiritual event, and the message then was somehow I had to let go of the anger of that event, and all those like it.
But that is not to let go of truth and meaning.
Jean Baudrillard, “America” (1986, p. 88): “When all is said and done, it is on the murder of Kennedy that Reagan’s current reign is founded. And this is not to mention the murder of the Indians. That murder has neither been avenged nor elucidated, and with good reason…. It is the energy of Kennedy’s murder which radiates out over present-day America.”
Did the postmodern philosopher Baudrillard read his fellow Frenchman, Girard, or is this so obvious that any honest observer with two eyes can see it? A 2003 Gallup Poll reported 75% of Americans do not believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. The general surprise this might cause is perhaps exactly beside the point. Of course they don’t believe it.
The killing of the king is an ancient theme shrouded in myth and necessity, but today the generative role of violence is progressively revealed for what it is, and it is more and more difficult for it to disguise itself as myth or necessity. Violence cannot and does not rest easy in its lair, and it is violence itself which is protecting itself.
Mathias Broeckers author of a German book, "JFK: Coup d’Etat in America ", says “JFK had made a radical change while president, from a classic cold warrior to a policy of reconciliation and peace. He had made angry enemies in the military and the CIA and when he announced to end the cold war in his speech on June 10th 1963 he finally was marked to death.”
James Douglass, the veteran Christian peace activist, makes much the same points, but more spiritually. He wrote JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. He used the word “unspeakable,” borrowing it from Thomas Merton to describe a constellation of forces and interests capable of such evil that we have no adequate word for it. (Merton called it "the nest of the unspeakable.")
The lack of semiotic clarity is a crucial feature: the essential character of the unspeakable is to lie about itself, to dissimulate. In a time when the lie is being revealed it is necessary to find ever new layers of deceit. In the age of the disclosure of the victim because of the gospel (Girard) the lie that seeks to cover it over has to become ever more cunning.
Again according to Broeckers: “In January 1967, shortly after Jim Garrison in New Orleans had started his prosecution of the CIA backgrounds of the murder, the CIA published a memo to all its stations, suggesting the use of the term “conspiracy theorists” for everyone criticizing the Warren Report findings.”
The effort has been successful. Discrediting suspicion of a crime as a form of mania becomes self-fulfilling. Free-floating suspicion without resolution becomes a cultural meme—now both “right’ and “left” wings imitate each in their preferred forms of conspiracy belief. So everybody knows “something happened,” but the accounts of what it is are so radically different that each side, reflecting each other in the unhinged “theoretical” gaze, looks equally deranged.
As it’s said, those whom the gods wish to destroy they first drive mad, and the lack of authentic history makes us crazy. The role of the gospel message in this setting is to insist unsparingly on the truth of the victim.
The killing of Kennedy is the core of a neural cluster out of which all the relentless U.S. military killing from Vietnam and Cambodia to Iraq and Afghanistan to South Waziristan and Yemen has continued to pour. It is a matter of insisting that Cain killed Kennedy, not for the sake of a new focus of blame and hate, but to continue the revelation that Jesus began, the one that is both terrible in its responsibility and yet leads to a decisive new way for humanity.
“Therefore this generation will be held responsible for the blood of all the prophets that has been shed since the beginning of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who was killed between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, this generation will be held responsible for it all." (Luke 11:50)
And
“Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And when I am lifted up from the earth I will draw all people to myself." (John 12:31-32)
We recall the anniversary of Kennedy's death, and must continue to do so, because it is founded by Jesus in a deeper anniversary, the beginning of the world order itself. When all those dates are unpacked a new world will truly begin.
Tony Bartlett
Tony Bartlett
