[On July
18th, 1969, Senator Ted Kennedy was involved in a car accident
that left his female companion Mary
Jo Kopechne dead. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that Chappaquiddick incident
and four other Kennedy
family histories, leading up to a weekend post on cultural representations
of the family!]
On the bitter
divisions that preceded, and perhaps even contributed to, a tragic day.
On November 21, 1963, the day
before John F. Kennedy was assassinated, numerous copies of a
flyer featuring Kennedy’s picture (arranged like a mug shot) and titled
“Wanted for Treason” were distributed in Dallas (most likely by members of the John
Birch Society). Many of the seven (almost entirely inaccurate and
ludicrously extreme) “treasonous activities against the United States” that the
poster attributes to Kennedy feel, to be blunt, as if they could have been and
perhaps were written about Barack Obama during his two presidential administration
with virtually no changes; but while those echoes have a great deal to tell us
about our contemporary moment and its historical origins and connections,
they’re not my main point here. Instead, I think the flyer helps us to
contextualize Kennedy’s assassination, to realize that—whether or not Oswald
had the slightest thing to do with the flyer or had even seen it or anything
like it—Kennedy was governing in an era of increasingly unhinged and explicitly
violent (if we remember the penalty for treason) right-wing rhetoric, published
and circulated en masse, for purposes that can at best be called divisive.
One problem with seemingly “lone
wolf” assassinations (like Oswald’s of Kennedy, unless you go down the Oliver Stone route of
course) is that the dominant narrative of such events can make it far too easy
for us to elide the culture of extreme and violent oppositional rhetoric (as in
the Kennedy flyer) in which the lone wolf committed his or her crime. Which is
to say, it’s usually not, to my mind, either-or. There are those assassins who
are obviously and centrally driven by specific historical and social contexts,
such as John
Wilkes Booth in his murder of Lincoln; and there are those who are pretty
clearly just plain nuts, such as John
Hinckley in his Jodie Foster-inspired attempt on Reagan. But in many—if not
most—cases, a political assassination represents a complex combination of these
two factors—an individual who is sufficiently detached from normal reality and
society to plan and commit such an act, operating within a historical and
social climate that fosters violent perspectives and responses and attacks on
political figures.
Which leads me to a few questions
about one of the most violent moments in our recent political history. Was Congresswoman
Gabrielle
Giffords’ shooter influenced by the
map on Sarah Palin’s website featuring key “targeted” Democratic
Congressional districts (including Giffords’) with crosshairs over them? Did he
know that Giffords’ Tea Party-endorsed opponent in the preceding election was
an Iraq War veteran who featured a
fundraising event where supporters could come out and shoot an M16 to
“help” unseat Giffords? Did the shooter have any connection to the multiple
times her
office had been vandalized and she had received death threats after the
passage of the health care reform bill, a bill for which she voted and to which
Sharron Angle and others were in part referring when they spoke of “2nd
Amendment remedies” if elections don’t do the job (and Giffords did indeed
win re-election)? The overt answer to all of those questions might well be no,
but I believe we cannot and should not attempt to understand his actions
without at least some awareness of and engagement with these contexts.
Next
KennedyStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Kennedy connections you’d highlight?
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