***As The 50thAnniversary Approaches -November 22, 1963-Frankie’s Cry Of The Banshee-For The Class Of 1964 Everywhere
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia
entry covering the background to the assassination of American President John
F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 for those too young to remember that event.
Frankie Riley comment:
Well you, the North Adamsville High
School Class of 1964, knew this was coming at some point. That date, that furious
date, November 22, 1963, is etched, one way or another, in each of our minds forever.
Some events form the signposts for every generation. For our parents, the Class
of 1964 parents, it was starving or semi-starving, soup lines and Hoovervilles,
hitting the western roads or just marking time through the Great Depression and
slogging, gun in hand, through World War II, or waiting anxiously at home,
waiting for the other shoe to drop. For today's kids it is the dastardly
heinous criminal acts around 9/11 and the permanent "war against
terrorism" that seems to color every political move made these days. For
us, the post-World War II baby-boomers as we are now designated and as my old
corner boy scribe Peter Paul has called us, or some of us, the generation of ’68,
it was the Cold War “red menace” Soviet Union space race throw-up satellite
Sputnik and, in the end, the political horrors emanating from the Irish tragic
Kennedy assassination. The cry of the banshee out in the wilds, on the wide
oceans, and careening the wild winds.
Usually, when discussing these
milestone events the question asked centers on where you were or what you were
doing on that fateful day. I do not need to ask that question here. I know
where you were, at least most of you. Unless you were sick, legitimately or
otherwise, playing hooky, legitimately or otherwise, or on a field trip,
legitimately or otherwise, you were sitting in some dank classroom as the old
craggy-faced, rum-besotted (as least we all suspected that and which was later
confirmed when he was arrested for drunk driving about seven times), headmaster,
one Mr. Donald O’Toole, came over the P.A. system to announce the news of the
shooting of President Kennedy. What I would find interesting is not what your
current take is on that event, whether you were a Kennedy partisan or not, but
how you reacted at the time. Here is the story of my reaction:
In the fall of 1960, for most of us
our first year at North, a new wind was blowing over the political landscape in
America with the Kennedy nomination and later his election victory over Richard
Nixon. If you want the feel of that same wind pay attention to the breezes that
I sense coming from today's youth, a little anyway if they can stop that
eternal, infernal texting and look up for a minute. Maybe that wind grabbed you
in 1960. It did me. Although some people that I have met and worked with over
the years swear that I was born a “political junkie” the truth is that 1960
marked my political coming of age.
One of my forms of “fun” as a kid
was to write little 'essays' on political questions. You know, like-Should Red
China (remember that term) be admitted into the United Nations? Or, are
computers going to replace workers and create high unemployment? (I swear that
I wrote stuff like that. I do not have that good an imagination to make this
up. It also might explain one part of a very troubled childhood.)
In any case, I kept these little
'pearls of wisdom' in a little notebook. Within a couple of days after the
Kennedy assassination I threw them all away, swearing off politics forever.
Well, I did not hold to that promise. I have also moved away from that youthful
admiration for JFK (although I will always hold a little spot open for brother
Robert-oh, what might have been.) but I can still hear the clang as I threw
those papers in the trash barrel.
*******
So naturally if Frank Riley has
anything to say on any subject, from dung beetles to one-worldism, just like in
the old North Adamsville Salducci’s Pizza Parlor nights, one Peter Paul Markin
has to put his face into the conversation. In fact insists on it like some kind
of royal prerogative. Here, as usual, is
his lame take on the Kennedy days from a sketch he wrote in 2010. In other
words he refuses to give us any new stuff, any new pearls of wisdom but just
the same old two thousand fact driven rehash like the world had not moved on,
for good or ill, since about 1965. Christ, just the same old, same old. Here it
is if you can stand it:
“Peter Paul Markin, Class of
1964:
A while back [October, 2010] I mentioned,
in a little sketch that amounted to a nostalgic 1960s Boston kid time trip down
political memory lane, the following that linked in with another sketch under the sign of the
50th anniversary of Jack Kennedy’s presidential election victory election over
one Richard Milhous Nixon, the arch-political villain of the age:
“During the course of the afternoon
that event [the Massachusetts governor’s race where President Obama was to
speak at a rally in behalf of Deval Patrick’s reelection at the Hynes Center in
Boston], and the particular locale where it was staged, brought back a flood of
memories of my first serious organized political actions in 1960 when, as a lad
of fourteen, I set out to “save the world.” And my soul, or so I thought at the
time, as well. That was the campaign of one of our own, Jack Kennedy, as he ran
for president against the nefarious sitting Vice President, one Richard Milhous
Nixon. In the course of that long ago campaign he gave one of his most stirring
speeches not far from where I stood on this Saturday.
Although gathering troops (read:
high school and college students) for that long ago speech was not my first
public political action of that year, a small SANE-sponsored demonstration
against nuclear proliferation further up the same street was but I did not help
to organize that one, the Kennedy campaign was the first one that hinted that I
might, against all good sense, become a serious political junkie. Yah, I know,
every mother warns their sons (then and now) and daughters (now) against such
foolhardiness but what can you do. And, mercifully, I am still at it. And have
wound up on the right side of the angels, to boot.
The funny thing about those
triggered remembrances is that as far removed from mainstream electoral politics
as I have been for about the last forty years I noticed many young politicos
doing their youthful thing just as I did back then; passing out leaflets,
holding banners, rousing the crowd, making extemporaneous little soapbox
speeches, arguing with an occasional right- wing Tea Party advocate, and making
themselves hoarse in the process. In short, exhibiting all the skills (except
the techno-savvy computer indoor stuff you do these days before such rallies)
of a street organizer from any age, including communist street organizers. Now
if those young organizers only had the extra-parliamentary left-wing politics
to merge with those organizational skills. In short, come over to the side of
the angels.
But that is where we come back to
old Jack Kennedy and that 1960 campaign. Who would have thought that a kid, me,
who started out walking door to door stuffing Jack Kennedy literature in every
available door in 1960 but who turned off that road long ago would be saying
thanks, Jack. Thanks for teaching me those political skills.”
And not just that thanks for
heralding the break-out, or at least the attempted break-out of my 1960s
generation from the Eisenhower-Nixon cold war death trap. See, at the time of
the great attempted break-out from the confines of mainstream society and the
tracked career path all kinds of people seemed like they could be allies, and
Jack Kennedy seemed a kindred spirit. I will not even mention Bobby, that one
still brings a little tear to my eye. But enough of nostalgia we still have to
fight to seek that newer world, to hear that high white note before everything
comes crashing down on us.”
*******
And here is more from Mr. Markin
under cover of a book review from 2007. This guy is too much, way too
much-Frank Riley.
On Coming Of Political Age-Norman Mailer's
"The Presidential Papers"
Commentary/Book Review
The Presidential Papers, Norman Mailer, Viking, 1963
Commentary/Book Review
The Presidential Papers, Norman Mailer, Viking, 1963
At one time, as with Ernest
Hemingway, I tried to get my hands on everything that Norman Mailer wrote. In
his prime he held out promise to match Hemingway as the preeminent male
American prose writer of the 20th century. Mailer certainly has the ambition,
ego and skill to do so. Although he wrote several good novels, like The Deer
Park, in his time I believe that his journalistic work, as he himself might
partially admit, especially his political, social and philosophical musings are
what will insure his place in the literary pantheon. With that in mind I
recently re-read his work on the 1960 political campaign-the one that pitted
John F. Kennedy against Richard M. Nixon- that is the center of the book under
review. There are other essays in this work, some of merely passing topical
value, but what remains of interest today is a very perceptive analysis of the
forces at work in that pivotal election. Theodore White won his spurs breaking
down the mechanics of the campaign and made a niche for himself with The
Making of a President, 1960. Mailer in a few pithy articles gave the
overview of the personalities and the stakes involved for the America of that
time.
Needless to say the Kennedy victory
of that year has interest today mainly for the forces that it unleashed in the
base of society, especially, but not exclusively, among the youth. His rather
conventional bourgeois Cold War foreign policy and haphazard domestic politics
never transcended those of the New and Fair Deals of Roosevelt and Truman but
his style, his youth and his élan seemingly gave the go ahead to all sorts of
projects in order to ‘‘seek a newer world.” And we took him up on this. This
writer counted himself among those youth who saw the potential to change the
world. We also knew that if the main villain of the age , one Richard Milhous
Nixon, had been successful in 1960 as he graphically demonstrated when he later
became president we would not be seeing any new world but the same old, same
old.
I have been, by hook or by crook,
interested in politics from an early age. Names like Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg, Joseph McCarthy, Khrushchev and organizations like Americans for
Democratic Action (ADA) and the like were familiar to me if not fully
understood then. I came of political age with the 1960 presidential campaign.
Mailer addresses the malaise of American political life during the stodgy
Eisenhower years that created the opening for change-and Kennedy and his superb
organization happily rushed in. These chances, as a cursory perusal of the last
40 odd years of bourgeois presidential politics makes painfully clear, do not
come often. The funny thing is that during most of 1960 I was actually ‘Madly
for Adlai’, that is I preferred Adlai Stevenson the twice- defeated previous
Democratic candidate, but when the deal went down at the advanced age of 14 I
walked door to door talking up Kennedy. Of course, in Massachusetts that was
not a big deal but I still recall today that I had a very strong sense I did
not want to be left out of the new age ‘aborning.’ That, my friends, in a small
way is the start of that slippery road to the ‘lesser evil’ practice that
dominates American politics and a habit that took me a fairly long time to
break.
Mailer has some very cutting, but true, remarks about the
kind of people who populate the political milieu down at the base of bourgeois
politics, those who make it to the political conventions. Except that today
they are better dressed and more media savvy nothing has changed. Why?
Bourgeois politics, not being based on any fidelity to program except as a
throwaway, is all about winning (and fighting to keep on winning). This does
not bring out the "better angels of our nature." For those old enough
to remember that little spark of youth that urged us on to seek that
"newer world" and for those too young to have acquired knowledge of
anything but the myth Mailer’s little book makes for interesting and well-written
reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment