Every once in awhile, November 22 falls on Thanksgiving Day. And for this Thanksgiving, I think of Phil Ochs' extended folk song, Crucifixion. Phil Och's haunting song is about JFK, celebrity, iconic people, and the way society kills those who it often claims to adore. Jack Newfield, in his book about RFK's last campaign, tells how Phil got a chance to sit with RFK and played this song for Bobby, and how Bobby teared up listening to Phil play.
We lost so much with the murders of King and RFK, though I continue to say JFK died for our sins. LBJ got through what JFK was never getting through, i.e. Civil Rights and Medicare, for starters, and knowingly and somewhat cynically used JFK's martyrdom to act boldly in a short term period.* The white backlash was already coming--the Dallas newspapers heralding JFK's arrival had full page ads claiming JFK was a commie, black-loving traitor--and Barry Goldwater's wing of the Republican Party was on the rise. Had JFK not been shot at, and went on to run against Goldwater in 1964, we would have seen a closer electoral contest than the LBJ-Goldwater contest. Yet, the irony is that King and Bobby (and Phil Ochs) believed in the myth of JFK and wanted to do what JFK had doubts about and was not effective at getting up through the assassination. I believe it is what brings so much passion, emotion, and sadness to the memories of King and Bobby. It is also why, I think, even though neither King nor Bobby were killed as a result of a conspiracy--unlike JFK, likely killed by mobsters and possibly renegades from the FBI and CIA--the powers-that-be breathed a sigh of relief with King's and Bobby's murders, as Americans increasingly lost faith in the idea of change and the idea our government could ever be used to help people. After RFK's assassination and subsequent election of Nixon, the counterculture and economic royalty interests worked in an adversarial tandem to undermine what was good about New Deal policies and New Deal culture, and still act to block our path, as we see how neo-liberalism and reaction play together in Congress and in corporate media discourses and narratives.
With the rise of social media, and the way in which the bad trends of the past 55 years have reached this moment in time, we also see many of our youth coming to believe we must act together to save our entire planet's future, and must act together to arrest and reverse inequality in our society. We would do well as parents and grandparents to have more respect for our youth. If we want to take anything to move forward from any commemoration of this dark day in American history, let it be that we say to our youth how much we admire their vigor, passion, hope, and concern for our fellow humans and creatures living on our planet. JFK, despite his health issues so carefully and deceitfully hidden, represented youthful vigor to my parents' and my generations. It is what so many of us recall as much as anything about the man or his politics. Let us remember our own feelings in our own youthful days, and let us be the parents our children need and deserve. Rather than putting down our children and burdening them with debt as they try to improve themselves, let's finally begin to decide to give our children more opportunities, and applaud their wanting to step up and help us all.
Other songs commemorating the day, out of, I'm sure, many others: Tom Clay's mashup of Dion's "Abraham, Martin, and John" and "What the world needs now," and the Byrds' "He was a friend of mine."
* I was so pleased Caro woke up to this insight, as he began his decades long saga as an LBJ hater. Robert Dallek's two volume biography from twenty to twenty five years ago had the correct perspective of LBJ, unlike Caro, who, again, finally woke up in the last two volumes of his biographical series.
