Rick Warren repels me, though Obama has picked up JFK's torch. It is not a small flame he holds in his hands.
LBJ, fully aware of the political fallout, did indeed pursue civil rights legislation. I will give him credit for that, even as I forgive him readily for his profane tongue and other rough-hewn ways.
We don't know all the names of the people who marched for civil rights in the South and elsewhere, braving snarling police dogs, but a line can be drawn from their bravery to the election of Barack Obama a month and a half ago.
Also of vivid interest are the audio tapes between President Kennedy and his brother-Attorney General and several southern governors. Once in a while NPR or the History Channel plays these and they are revealing. We have the advantage nowadays of knowing how things changed, but we are listening to a President and an Attorney General try to persuade some extraordinarily recalcitrant Southern governors to remove their heads from their hindquarters on the issue of racial equality. The tension between inclusion and bigotry crackles on those tapes. It is stunning to listen to them.
One's appreciation of the Kennedys goes way, way up listening to those tapes. This was soul work prior to the peak of the civil rights movement. It was good men doing the right thing long before it was popular work.
"The 60s" were socially and politically tumultuous for a lot of people. That's a safe and unambitious sentence but under its broad umbrella many points' picnics ensue.
It seems to me both likely AND unaccountable that someone like Janis Joplin would have grown up in Port Arthur, Texas but wind up in the Haight District of San Francisco. I really don't think young people ever heard anything like Janis Joplin up to that point and not since, either. A lot of insightful comments on culture and/or the 1960s I've read or listened to over the years begin with Janis Joplin, and properly so.
If Dwight and Mamie were "nice," they were also brain-numbingly dull. I'm talkin' DULL. Voters somnolently donned "I Like Ike" buttons like soulless automatons, as if voices in their heads were telling them 'We won the war. We want suburbs and Chevy wagons and dull politicians." Early on, popular music was kind of a doo-wap ditty vibe. Janis was yet to pick up that mike in a recording studio. Jim Morrison must have been filling out his college app to UCLA. For reasons not wholly clear to most people of the time, the Joplin and Morrison models didn't seem to come with any doo-waps or ditties.
The Beats were never citizens of that America. Not from the start and not during the Eisenhower years. They were somewhere else entirely in the psychic zip code directory. The Beats were refreshing because they weren't wearing I Like Ike buttons and buying washing machines and they weren't moving to the suburbs. Imagine a conversation between Mamie Eisenhower and say, William Burroughs. Imagine how odd it would be to hear them try to interact. They were both Americans of approximately the same era and yet represented almost entirely different worlds.
If you have a free moment or two in the coming week, step into a library and have a look at Robert Frank's THE AMERICANS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Americans_(photography) . Consider the time in which these photographs were taken and the state of mind they capture in our country. The 60s rose out of this landscape, or rather, out of the need to respond to this landscape. This landscape was not Ike and Mamie's America, but it was a lot more real.
That Ike's veep, Nixon, was a palatable and reasonable model of leadership to almost 50% of the people voting in the 1960 election gives one pause. But there he was, nearly winning. If you don't like Richard Nixon, and I certainly do not, the reason you don't like him needs to begin here, or even earlier, long before G. Gordon Liddy is asked to break into Democratic Headquarters at The Watergate. If you don't get a whiff of the weasel in Nixon in 1960 or earlier, you just aren't fully awake, IMO.
The man who defeated him was from back east, a Catholic, and quite dashing. The old guard in the party were uneasy or even outright opposed to Kennedy. Eventually he won them over. It's funny how competent and visionary leadership, coupled with considerable personal charm, can persuade people.
IMO the reason Kennedy is mourned is that he was the generational translator between the landscape of Frank's landscape and the nation's future. The Kennedys were monied landholders but spoke to the poor as no one has spoken to them since. Carter was honorable in this endeavor but could not translate the distance and command the level of emotional attention poverty demanded like the Kennedys.
A great aunt of mine, may she rest in peace, was a Nixon lover from the word go. "John Kennedy couldn't keep his wiener in his drawers," she liked to point out, as if sexual infidelity nullified national leadership. It's akin to saying that because Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose no one should pay any attention to her one-of-a-kind voice.
This was what the 60s was like: in one freeze-frame moment Janis Joplin is in, say, an 11th grade homeroom in a Texas high school, not fully awake and not very motivated, but generally present and more or less ready to go through the day's schedule. In a likely yet unaccountable freeze-frame moment way too shortly after that one, she is in a Bay Area club after midnight with a mediocre blues band behind her singing like a woman being tortured, the melody "rising from her throat like a giant talon" aimed for the audience, as one critic described her. What we heard in Janis' voice in San Francisco translates the dull and mundane day-to-day life from Port Arthur, Texas to that club in California.
Her math teacher in Port Arthur might have warned her to have her homework in on time. No one in her high school likely warned her not to overdose on smack. Her voice is the testimony of the distance she traveled between homeroom and heroin. She was at once the girl in homeroom there everyday and the world's newest blues star gone forever. She was the rarest of musical talents. I miss her.
In the 60s, a lot of white folks, some members of my own family included, left the cities and plopped down in the suburbs. The racial understory of this migration is still vibrating. The chamber of commerce version involved winning the war, an increase in our standard of living, the privilege of moving to larger houses on larger pieces of land in neighborhoods of like-minded others. But it was also an abandoment of neighborhoods of diverse others, a gutting of the vitality of the life of American cities, and a cultural dismissal of that diversity and vitality. The rise of the Republican Party's hyper-conservatism (and political success) roughly coincides with the migration of the middle class to the suburbs. In the South, it was intensified by civil rights legislation and air conditioning.
Not all, but most of my family were pro-Union. Two or three in particular were notable names in unions in two different states. We're a scattered bunch by zip code. We're split sharply along political lines. The Kennedy voters, including my parents, saw the acknowledgement in John Kennedy of the working class, and considered and admired the ability he had in toggling between his privileged birthright and his commitment to public service. My parents were children of New Deal Democrats. They listened to Kennedy and liked what they heard because it was what they already believed. Their admiration and respect was pre-legacy admiration and respect.
It didn't hurt that Kennedy was intelligent and surrounded himself with other intelligent people. It didn't hurt that he was mentally vigorous. He believed in the Arts, and in Science. It didn't hurt that the First Lady was a world citizen. The cultural mileage between Mamie Eisenhower and Jacqueline Kennedy is considerable. John Kennedy did make mistakes. Choosing public service despite his privileged upbringing wasn't one of them.
In the Zapruder footage of Kennedy's murder in Dealey Plaza, a black woman, realizing what has just happened, is seen weeping into her purse. Another discussion of the 1960s could begin with that Texas woman at that moment, because she did her best in that stunning instant, as well as any of us, or better, to understand how in the freeze-frame of the 1960s from one moment ago the young president was smiling, playing with his children on the lawn of the White House but in the next was murdered 15 feet from where she stood, having come to Dealey Plaza that very mid-day to honor him.
Cities once vital and diverse gave way to unendingly bland subdivisions.
A vigorous and liberal president is murdered in Dealey Plaza.
Someone's daughter in a Port Arthur, Texas high school overdosing soon after on heroin.
When you consider these as portals into the turbulent 60s what's missing is that we need translators for the distance between the two freeze-frames, for the people who abandoned the cities, for the president murdered, and for the Texas girl who died from heroin -- and those people, that president, and that Texas girl WERE the translators.
In times since, I don't knock people who smoke cigarettes. It's not healthy and I don't smoke myself, but I would not be able to give up liberal politics or good music either. We need translators, and translators take different forms.
The Rick Warren choice is offensive to many people, but as in the case of Richard Nixon, the truest disregard for Rick Warren is earned in far earlier moments in his career as a right-wing authoritarian. His position on stem cell research, for example, is equally antiquated and dangerous as his position on gay marriage and any number of other key issues. He is an Inquisitor, over-dressed, well-fed, and culturally sanctioned, and therefore politically excused. I don't like him. But then I never liked him to begin with.
Solis and Chu? I love 'em. Richardson, too. The Cabinet itself looks pretty good, and occasionally it looks splendid. I'm hopeful that the amalgam of good sense Obama has shown in almost everything is ongoing and will eclipse the Warren pick. I think I know what he's shooting for, but had he asked me, I would have recommended he choose someone else. Most megachuches are in the suburbs. Go easy on the heroin and get the math homework in on time.
Caroline Kennedy, in endorsing Barack Obama, felt he would be "a president like my father." I hope her instinct is correct. In fact, I believe the same thing. But John Kennedy's are big shoes to fill, even as his time served was relatively short. His time served generated much-needed change in the country, political fall-out and all. His time served rang the alarm clock on Dwight and Mamie's long nap. His time served, however brief it was, translated Frank's photographs of another America, the one the chamber of commerce doesn't run pictures of when it tries to lure conventions and tourists to spend their money. Kennedy's time served, however brief, was far longer than the trajectory of Oswald's bullet in Dealey Plaza, which can only be measured in aftermath. You can rebuild a temple the Romans have razed to the ground but it's not a weekend project.
And somewhere, say in my house for instance, the music player is running a Janis Joplin CD. It is snowing, winter is here, and Janis is singing "Summertime."
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