"This Man Should Not Be In Charge Of a Government"

What set off the exchange between me and the Democratic loyalist I wrote about on Sunday was my posting this screencap of a tweet by MSNBC pundit and despicable hack Joy Reid:

My acquaintance commented, "Your nihilism is adorable."  Though I'll admit to nihilism on a cosmic level, it was odd to be accused of it when I had just made a harsh moral judgment of Reid's celebrity-cult treatment of the Kennedys.  But then Reid and my acqaintance have no principles save partisanship and leader-worship.  She'll accurately catch Trump and the Republicans in their falsehoods, but she's uncritical (and an amplifier) of Democratic lies and misconduct.  My acquaintance didn't get it; he's a Reid fanboy for her partisan attacks on Trump, which are all that matter.

It's amoral to celebrate the Kennedys, or anyone else, for their glamor while ignoring their actions.  "Teddy chased redemption" seems almost a Freudian slip, since Teddy, like Jack and Bobby, chased women with a good deal more sincerity; if these guys were alive today, they'd probably be on the hot seat for sexual aggression and assault along with so many other American elites.  I have some sympathy for Mrs. Kennedy, who I presume didn't know what she was getting into when she married that compulsive cockhound; but "pathos" is not a moral virtue, nor a particularly attractive quality; I'd say it's downright creepy of Reid to voyeurize her pain, when she surely knows what caused it.  I suppose she was visualizing Jackie in her bloodstained pink suit, or draped in widow's black at the funeral.  That's no better.

(I suddenly realized while I was writing this that 2017 is JFK's centennial, and that must have been what Reid was referring to.  I haven't noticed the kind of celebration that I'd expect for such a national icon; is it just me?)

But there are graver concerns, which Reid presumably is also aware of but is happy to ignore: JFK's attempts to block the Civil Rights movement and the 1963 March on Washington, his waging of state terror against Cuba and other Caribbean countries, his escalation of the US invasion of Vietnam.  And perhaps his most discrediting achievement:

On 14 October 1962, in the classic pose of a public-school boy after lunch, legs straight out from a leathery armchair, I picked up a newspaper and saw on the front page that Kennedy had threatened Khrushchev with atomic war unless he recalled some ships carrying Russian missiles to Cuba.

I was horrified.  I'd paid no attention to the Bay of Pigs fiasco, I had little interest in unilateral disarmament, I'd gone to only one 'ban the bomb' march and I disliked Bertrand Russell.  I'd dismissed the subject from my head, for the simple reason that it would never happen.  Yet here we were, on the brink of the smouldering pit.

For me this was the beginning of the Sixties.  I was never an 'easy rider' or a counter-culture protester, but when Kennedy gave his ultimatum I thought: Gambling with the end of the world is dumb, this man should not be in charge of a government.  The hero of that dreadful confrontation was never, for me, Kennedy. The hero was plump, occasionally foolish, even though ruthless, Nikita Khrushchev.

This did not mean I automatically supported Russia from that moment on, but it did mean I was an early convert to one of the great illusions of the Sixties: where power is involved, there's nothing to choose between one side and the other [279].

In one of those cases of synchronicity that keep life interesting, I've just finished reading Matthew Spender's 2015 memoir A House in St. John's Wood: In Search of My Parents (Farrar Straus & Giroux), which contains the passage I quoted above.  Spender, the son of the poet Stephen Spender, was 17 at the time of the Cuban missile crisis.  (I was 11, and though I remember watching news coverage of the crisis, I don't remember what I thought of it.)   Then, today, I read David Swanson's reflections on Daniel Ellsberg and (among other issues), the Cuban missile crisis.  Like any important historical question, there is room for disagreement about Kennedy's legacy, but the kind of fatuous celebrity adulation Reid exhibited is inexcusable in a self-styled journalist.  I suspect she has fantasies of a hot fifteen-minute tryst with JFK in a White House closet; many people do, as they fantasize about Barack Obama. 

Donald Trump also has glamor, after all: it's part of what his fans love about him. C'mon, Joy, can't you see Melania's "glamour and pathos"?  So did Ronald Reagan -- but I'm going too far there, assuming that Reid is immune to his charisma.  Many sincere Democrats hold Reagan in the highest regard.  Our wise and noble leaders have frequently responded to the glamor of dusky foreign men in uniform, such as Mussolini.  Which is fine and dandy, but a bad idea when you're supposed to be thinking about issues and policies that affect the lives of billions of people.

I think it's possible, and not really all that difficult, to recognize Khrushchev as the real hero of the missile crisis without succumbing to what Matthew Spender called a great illusion of the Sixties, "that where power is involved, there's nothing to choose between one side and the other."  In this case, there certainly was a good deal to choose beween JFK and Khrushchev.  One can condemn one side without overlooking the faults or crimes of the other, and certainly the crimes of the Soviet Union didn't excuse the crimes of the US.  But this is also a great illusion of the present day: for example, that if the Republicans are bad, the Democrats must be good; if the Republicans are stupid, the Democrats must be smart; if Hillary is crooked, the Donald must be honest.  The evidence simply doesn't support such a conclusion.  But who needs evidence?  The situation is far too grave to worry about such trivia.

It's not nihilism to recognize the faults or crimes of one's own side along with those of one's opponents; it's more like nihilism to ignore them and denounce those who point them out.  I agree that Donald Trump should not be in charge of a government; but I also agree with Matthew Spender that neither should John Kennedy have been.  (Nor Obama.)  Kennedy's apologists have tried to defend him, pointing to the pressure he was under from militarists and hard-liners, but those defenses backfire: if he couldn't resist such pressures, he had no business being President.  We lucked out in 1962; we may not be so lucky next time.

The Time Is Overripe By Now

An old friend of mine posted the image above on Facebook.  (Later she also posted a picture of Obama with Bill Clinton linked to one of those advertisements where if you donate a pittance to the Obama campaign, your name will be entered in a lottery to attend an event where both Great Men will be present.)

At first I was suspicious, as I've learned to be with words of the wise posted on the Internet, but the quotation turned out to be genuine.  Too bad, though, because first of all, not everybody thinks of liberals in those terms.  The Right, obviously, but also some supposed beneficiaries of liberal virtue.  I've quoted before this excerpt from one of Langston Hughes's "Simple" stories, "Liberals Need a Mascot":

"Just what is a liberal?" asked Simple.

"Well, as nearly as I can tell, a liberal is a nice man who acts decently toward people, talks democratically, and often is democratic in his personal life, but does not stand up very well in action when some social issue like Jim Crow comes up."

"Like my boss," said Simple, "who is always telling me he believes in equal rights and I am the most intelligent Negro he ever saw -- and I deserve a better job. I say, 'Why don't you give it to me, then?' And he says, 'Unfortunately, I don't have one for you.'

"'But ever so often you hire new white men that ain't had the experience of me and I have to tell them what to do, though they are over me. How come that?'

"'Well,' he says, 'the time just ain't ripe.' Is that what a liberal is?" asked Simple.

"That's just about what a liberal is," I said ...

That was published in 1949.

Second, Hughes's description of a liberal fits John Kennedy's practice as President.  He escalated US involvement in Vietnam, brought the world to the brink of nuclear war over Cuba, and severely disappointed Civil Rights activists who'd put their hope in him as a champion of racial equality in America.  (And doesn't that "looks ahead and not behind" remind you of someone today?)  You can call Kennedy lots of things, but "liberal" isn't one of them unless you're using Langston Hughes's criterion.

I've also quoted Martin Luther King Jr. before (via) on Kennedy as a Civil Rights icon, and I might as well quote him again:

No president has really done very much for the American Negro, though the past two presidents have received much undeserved credit for helping us. This credit has accrued to Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy only because it was during their administrations that Negroes began doing more for themselves. Kennedy didn't voluntarily submit a civil rights bill, nor did Lyndon Johnson. In fact, both told us at one time that such legislation was impossible. President Johnson did respond realistically to the signs of the times and used his skills as a legislator to get bills through Congress that other men might not have gotten through. I must point out, in all honesty, however, that President Johnson has not been nearly so diligent in implementing the bills he has helped shepherd through Congress.

Of the ten titles of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, probably only the one concerning public accomodations -- the most bitterly contested section -- has been meaningfully enforced and implemented. Most of the other sections have been deliberately ignored.

...

I'm sure that most whites felt that with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, all race problems were automatically solved. Because most white people are so far removed from the life of the average Negro, there has been little to challenge this assumption. Yet Negroes continue to live with racism every day.

--Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope, 1969

I pointed out some of these things to my friend; her reply was "I'm proud to be a liberal!"  I'm not sure I see what there is to be proud of, but to each her own.  But I see this as part of a larger problem.  It's not so much that political labels are meaningless, though it sometimes seems so.  When large numbers of Americans think of politicians like JFK, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama as liberals, something is wrong.  Obama knows better: he's said that in Europe he'd be considered a conservative, and that was early in his term, before he'd shown just how far he was willing to follow and extend Bush-era policies.  Even "centrist" is far too generous for him.  If American liberals are willing to claim such men as one of them, then they should revise their mission statement.