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| Dealey Plaza, looking at the grassy knoll (left) and the former Texas School Book Depository Building (background). |
How long can a city wear sackcloth and ashes for a crime it
didn’t commit?
The memorial at Dealey Plaza was rather low-key, which could
have been expected even without the bone-squeezing wet cold of the day. Some
conspiracy theorists and some citizens protesting police brutality tried to
horn in on the solemnities. It could have been worse, however: it could have turned
into an anti-conservative bashapalooza.
The fact is, a
significant number of people younger than me — depending on where you place the
cutoff, I’m either at the trailing edge of the boomers or in the vanguard of Generation
X — tend to view the youth of the 1960s as supremely narcissistic, and the
annual spasm of grief over the assassination of John F. Kennedy as just one
more symptom of their emotional retardation. And, in all candor, the constantly
reiterated “death of innocence” line is not only tiresome and melodramatic but
inapposite, as cynics aren’t necessarily any more objective than are idealists;
cynicism is merely idealism distorted by despair.
Nevertheless, this cross-generational impatience is too
brutally dismissive. Even with a proper appreciation of Kennedy’s all-too-human
failings as a Catholic, a husband and a politician, there is still no known sin
in his life up to that point that made his death a poetic justice. Even Abraham
Lincoln’s most vociferous opponents were astonished and mortified by his death,
and Lincoln was a far more controversial man who held power during a more
violent, agonized period of our history. By contrast, even given some of the
tensions created by the civil rights movement during the time, nobody could
look objectively at the events of 1963 and say that Kennedy’s assassination was
inevitable. By any reasonable evaluation, it was a tragedy and ought to be
acknowledged as such.
However, in the midst of the ritualized outpouring of
nostalgia and mourning for a popular president gunned down in the prime of his
manhood, there has been some effort to rewrite the history surrounding Dealey
Plaza so progressives can draw parallels between 1963 and 2013 — parallels that
are far-fetched and, quite frankly, inane.
