Post by Rob Caprio on Feb 27, 2019 21:44:37 GMT -5
The Spiritual Truth of "JFK"
(c) 1992 by Peter Gabel
Peter Gabel is president of New College of California and associate editor of Tikkun. This article is reprinted with permission of the author
In this article Peter Gabel looks at what Americans lost with the death of JFK. He is also looking at the reawakening the movie "JFK" was causing in 1992. It is important to remember the importance of this film, whether you believe everything in it or not, it caused much progress in this case. The fact that it was being attacked prior to the movie even being edited for release says a lot as well, as Oliver Stone said none of his other movies were attacked so much, or so early. He says this about the movie.
Quote on
Oliver Stone's JFK is a great movie, but not because it "proves" that John F. Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy. Stone himself has acknowledged that the movie is a myth -- a counter myth to the myth produced by the Warren Commission -- but a myth that contains what Stone calls a spiritual truth. To understand that spiritual truth, we must look deeply into the psychological and social meaning of the assassination -- its meaning for American society at the time that it occurred, and for understanding contemporary American politics and culture.
Quote off
Gabel says the spiritual problem the movie talks about deals with the underlying truth about life in American society -- the truth that we all live in a social world characterized by feelings of alienation, isolation, and a chronic inability to connect with one another in a life-giving and powerful way. This has obviously gotten worse since 1992 with the advent of the internet, computers and cell phones becoming more common, satellite and cable reaching more homes than ever, thus making the movie going process less important, video games played continuously and telecommuting being available for more and more working people. Where ever you look, it seems people are disconnecting from face-to-face interaction more and more. This is counter productive to a democracy where, "True democracy would require that we be actively engaged in ongoing processes of social interaction that strengthen our bonds of connectedness to one another, while at the same time allowing us to realize our need for a sense of social meaning and ethical purpose through the active remaking of the no- longer "external" world around us."
JFK came into office and changed the perception of the strict authoritarian, rigidly anticommunist mentality that had preceded him. He gave the feeling of hope to many Americans and this led to an opening-up of desire. "The opening-up that I am referring to is a feeling that Kennedy was able to evoke -- a feeling of humor, romance, idealism, and youthful energy, and a sense of hope that touched virtually every American alive during that time.
It was this feeling -- 'the rise of a new generation of Americans' -- that more than any ideology threatened the system of cultural and erotic control that dominated the fifties and that still dominated the governmental elites of the early sixties -- the FBI, the CIA, even elements of Kennedy's own cabinet and staff. Kennedy's evocative power spoke to people's longing for some transcendent community and in so doing, it allowed people to make themselves vulnerable enough to experience both hope and, indirectly, the legacy of pain and isolation that had been essentially sealed from public awareness since the end of the New Deal."
Everyone alive at the time of the assassination knows exactly where they were when Kennedy was shot because, as it is often said, his assassination "traumatized the nation." But the real trauma, if we move beyond the abstraction of "the nation," was the sudden, violent loss for millions of people of the part of themselves that had been opened up, or had begun to open up during Kennedy's presidency. To combat this desire that had been opened-up the government needed to create a process to quickly "prove" - to the satisfaction of people's emotions - that the assassination and loss were the result of socially innocent causes.
Quote on
Here we come to the mass-psychological importance of Lee Harvey Oswald and the lone gunman theory of the assassination. As Stone's movie reminds us in a congeries of rapid-fire, post-assassination images, Oswald was instantly convicted in the media and in mass consciousness even before he was shot by Jack Ruby two days after the assassination. After an elaborate ritualized process producing twenty-six volumes of testimony, the Warren Commission sanctified Oswald's instant conviction in spite of the extreme implausibility of the magic bullet theory, the apparently contrary evidence of the Zapruder film, and other factual information such as the near impossibility of Oswald's firing even three bullets (assuming the magic bullet theory to be true) with such accuracy so quickly with a manually cocked rifle. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist, nor do you have to believe any of the evidence marshaled together by conspiracy theorists, to find it odd that Oswald's guilt was immediately taken for granted within two days of the killing, with no witnesses and no legal proceeding of any kind -- and that his guilt was later confidently affirmed by a high-level Commission whose members had to defy their own common sense in order to do so. The whole process might even seem extraordinary considering that we are talking about the assassination of an American president.
Quote off
Gabel says the lone gunman theory works for those in power because, "The great advantage of the lone gunman theory is that it gives a nonsocial account of the assassination. It takes the experience of trauma and loss and momentary social disintegration, isolates the evil source of the experience in one antisocial individual, and leaves the image of society as a whole -- the "imaginary community" that I referred to earlier -- untarnished and still "good." From the point of view of those in power, in other words, the lone gunman theory reinstitutes the legitimacy of existing social and political authority as a whole because it silently conveys the idea that our elected officials and the organs of government, among them the CIA and the.FBI, share our innocence and continue to express our democratic will. But from a larger psychosocial point of view, the effect was to begin to close up the link between desire and politics that Kennedy had partially elicited, and at the same time to impose a new repression of our painful feelings of isolation and disconnection beneath the façade of our reconstituted but imaginary political unity."
Gabel says, "The great achievement of Oliver Stone's movie is that it uses this traumatic, formative event of the Kennedy assassination -- an event full of politically important cultural memory and feeling -- to assault the mythological version of American society and to make us experience the forces of repression that shape social reality. The movie may or may not be accurate in its account of what Lyndon Johnson might have known or of the phones in Washington shutting down just before the assassination or of the New Zealand newspaper that mysteriously published Oswald's photographs before he was arrested. But the movie does give a kinetic and powerful depiction of the real historical forces present at the time of the assassination, forces that were in part released by the challenge to the fanatical. Anticommunism of the fifties that Kennedy to some extent brought about.
I say this is the great achievement of the movie because no matter who killed Kennedy, it was the conflict between the opening-up of desire.that he represented and the alienated need of the forces around him to shut this desire down that caused his death. This struggle was an important part of the meaning of the 1960s, and it provides the link, which Stone draws openly, between John Kennedy's death and the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. There is no way for the.forces of good to win the struggle between desire and alienation unless people can break through the gauzy images of everything being fine except the lone nuts, a legitimating ideology that is actually supported by our denial of the pain of our isolation and our collective deference to the system of Authority that we use to keep our legitimating myths in place. Oliver Stone's JFK brings us face-to-face with social reality by penetrating the compensatory image-world of mass culture, politics, and journalism. And for that reason it is an important effort by someone whose consciousness was shaped by the sixties to transform and shake free the consciousness of the nineties."
In our political and economic institutions, this alienation is lived out as a feeling of being "underneath" and at an infinite distance from an alien external world that seems to determine our lives from the outside.
(c) 1992 by Peter Gabel
Peter Gabel is president of New College of California and associate editor of Tikkun. This article is reprinted with permission of the author
In this article Peter Gabel looks at what Americans lost with the death of JFK. He is also looking at the reawakening the movie "JFK" was causing in 1992. It is important to remember the importance of this film, whether you believe everything in it or not, it caused much progress in this case. The fact that it was being attacked prior to the movie even being edited for release says a lot as well, as Oliver Stone said none of his other movies were attacked so much, or so early. He says this about the movie.
Quote on
Oliver Stone's JFK is a great movie, but not because it "proves" that John F. Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy. Stone himself has acknowledged that the movie is a myth -- a counter myth to the myth produced by the Warren Commission -- but a myth that contains what Stone calls a spiritual truth. To understand that spiritual truth, we must look deeply into the psychological and social meaning of the assassination -- its meaning for American society at the time that it occurred, and for understanding contemporary American politics and culture.
Quote off
Gabel says the spiritual problem the movie talks about deals with the underlying truth about life in American society -- the truth that we all live in a social world characterized by feelings of alienation, isolation, and a chronic inability to connect with one another in a life-giving and powerful way. This has obviously gotten worse since 1992 with the advent of the internet, computers and cell phones becoming more common, satellite and cable reaching more homes than ever, thus making the movie going process less important, video games played continuously and telecommuting being available for more and more working people. Where ever you look, it seems people are disconnecting from face-to-face interaction more and more. This is counter productive to a democracy where, "True democracy would require that we be actively engaged in ongoing processes of social interaction that strengthen our bonds of connectedness to one another, while at the same time allowing us to realize our need for a sense of social meaning and ethical purpose through the active remaking of the no- longer "external" world around us."
JFK came into office and changed the perception of the strict authoritarian, rigidly anticommunist mentality that had preceded him. He gave the feeling of hope to many Americans and this led to an opening-up of desire. "The opening-up that I am referring to is a feeling that Kennedy was able to evoke -- a feeling of humor, romance, idealism, and youthful energy, and a sense of hope that touched virtually every American alive during that time.
It was this feeling -- 'the rise of a new generation of Americans' -- that more than any ideology threatened the system of cultural and erotic control that dominated the fifties and that still dominated the governmental elites of the early sixties -- the FBI, the CIA, even elements of Kennedy's own cabinet and staff. Kennedy's evocative power spoke to people's longing for some transcendent community and in so doing, it allowed people to make themselves vulnerable enough to experience both hope and, indirectly, the legacy of pain and isolation that had been essentially sealed from public awareness since the end of the New Deal."
Everyone alive at the time of the assassination knows exactly where they were when Kennedy was shot because, as it is often said, his assassination "traumatized the nation." But the real trauma, if we move beyond the abstraction of "the nation," was the sudden, violent loss for millions of people of the part of themselves that had been opened up, or had begun to open up during Kennedy's presidency. To combat this desire that had been opened-up the government needed to create a process to quickly "prove" - to the satisfaction of people's emotions - that the assassination and loss were the result of socially innocent causes.
Quote on
Here we come to the mass-psychological importance of Lee Harvey Oswald and the lone gunman theory of the assassination. As Stone's movie reminds us in a congeries of rapid-fire, post-assassination images, Oswald was instantly convicted in the media and in mass consciousness even before he was shot by Jack Ruby two days after the assassination. After an elaborate ritualized process producing twenty-six volumes of testimony, the Warren Commission sanctified Oswald's instant conviction in spite of the extreme implausibility of the magic bullet theory, the apparently contrary evidence of the Zapruder film, and other factual information such as the near impossibility of Oswald's firing even three bullets (assuming the magic bullet theory to be true) with such accuracy so quickly with a manually cocked rifle. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist, nor do you have to believe any of the evidence marshaled together by conspiracy theorists, to find it odd that Oswald's guilt was immediately taken for granted within two days of the killing, with no witnesses and no legal proceeding of any kind -- and that his guilt was later confidently affirmed by a high-level Commission whose members had to defy their own common sense in order to do so. The whole process might even seem extraordinary considering that we are talking about the assassination of an American president.
Quote off
Gabel says the lone gunman theory works for those in power because, "The great advantage of the lone gunman theory is that it gives a nonsocial account of the assassination. It takes the experience of trauma and loss and momentary social disintegration, isolates the evil source of the experience in one antisocial individual, and leaves the image of society as a whole -- the "imaginary community" that I referred to earlier -- untarnished and still "good." From the point of view of those in power, in other words, the lone gunman theory reinstitutes the legitimacy of existing social and political authority as a whole because it silently conveys the idea that our elected officials and the organs of government, among them the CIA and the.FBI, share our innocence and continue to express our democratic will. But from a larger psychosocial point of view, the effect was to begin to close up the link between desire and politics that Kennedy had partially elicited, and at the same time to impose a new repression of our painful feelings of isolation and disconnection beneath the façade of our reconstituted but imaginary political unity."
Gabel says, "The great achievement of Oliver Stone's movie is that it uses this traumatic, formative event of the Kennedy assassination -- an event full of politically important cultural memory and feeling -- to assault the mythological version of American society and to make us experience the forces of repression that shape social reality. The movie may or may not be accurate in its account of what Lyndon Johnson might have known or of the phones in Washington shutting down just before the assassination or of the New Zealand newspaper that mysteriously published Oswald's photographs before he was arrested. But the movie does give a kinetic and powerful depiction of the real historical forces present at the time of the assassination, forces that were in part released by the challenge to the fanatical. Anticommunism of the fifties that Kennedy to some extent brought about.
I say this is the great achievement of the movie because no matter who killed Kennedy, it was the conflict between the opening-up of desire.that he represented and the alienated need of the forces around him to shut this desire down that caused his death. This struggle was an important part of the meaning of the 1960s, and it provides the link, which Stone draws openly, between John Kennedy's death and the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. There is no way for the.forces of good to win the struggle between desire and alienation unless people can break through the gauzy images of everything being fine except the lone nuts, a legitimating ideology that is actually supported by our denial of the pain of our isolation and our collective deference to the system of Authority that we use to keep our legitimating myths in place. Oliver Stone's JFK brings us face-to-face with social reality by penetrating the compensatory image-world of mass culture, politics, and journalism. And for that reason it is an important effort by someone whose consciousness was shaped by the sixties to transform and shake free the consciousness of the nineties."
In our political and economic institutions, this alienation is lived out as a feeling of being "underneath" and at an infinite distance from an alien external world that seems to determine our lives from the outside.