Camelot Remembered

The “holiday season” is well under way here on the Platinum Coast, with endless TV commercials for Best Buy and Macy’s and Target; the parking lot at our local Trader Joe’s already wears holiday garb. Buy, buy, buy is the implied message. What will this year’s hottest gift be? Black Friday looms on the horizon, our undeclared national holiday of consumerism and mass psychosis. Come one, come all, bring your nearly maxed out credit cards – unprecedented deals are waiting. Back at corporate headquarters, bean counters pore over sales data and plug numbers into Excel spreadsheets and report the trends to the executive suite.

There will be no holiday season in parts of the Philippines this year, and residents in or near Fukushima will suffer another winter of discontent and abject fear.

According to news reports this has been a bad week for President Obama. The rollout of the Affordable Care Act hasn’t gone well, and the President is being hammered because holders of cheap policies that don’t meet the minimum coverage requirements mandated by the ACA have seen those policies cancelled, even though Obama promised way back when that people who liked their crappy policies could keep them. Obama presses his lips together, as all politicians do when caught in a messy lie, and apologizes for causing a cluster-fuck. What he should apologize for is not pushing for a single-payer system.

I renew my call for a federal law to prohibit Christmas advertising prior to December 1. Let poor Thanksgiving bask in her own glory.

Popular TV shows: Scandal, Revenge, Betrayal. Do these titles speak to an American Zeitgeist? We live scandal every day, the political class has betrayed us, and worst of all, the game is rigged so that revenge is impossible. The big crooks have big lawyers and big friends in very high places. We’ve arranged things so that the wealthy are virtually untouchable; they break the law with impunity.

Fifty years ago this next week JFK was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. I was four years old at the time, and therefore too young to remember what I was doing or where I was when the news came that Kennedy had been killed. Years later I would learn about what happened in Dallas through black and white photographs in a book I found in the hall closet. Camelot. Legend and myth, and endless speculation about what might have been if JFK hadn’t been killed. Before the decade was over, JFK’s brother Robert would be gunned down in Los Angeles, and Martin Luther King Jr., would fall to an assassin’s bullet in Memphis. The 60’s were a murderous decade, and many dreams were shattered. Our national innocence died in the 60’s. JFK couldn’t keep the US out of Vietnam.

Fifty years on, the US still maintains a pointless embargo against Cuba.

JFK’s candidacy and presidency ushered in the age of the image, the photograph and the video footage; use the image to shape public perception, and always include the children in the shot.

For all his personal flaws, JFK seemed to offer the best America had to offer – youth, energy, vision and grit. Strip the veils and the Camelot myth away and JFK might not seem such a towering figure, but measured against the trolls who run the nation in 2013, he was a giant.