At the end of her life, my mother brought up the murder of John F. Kennedy. In 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination and the year my mother passed away from ovarian cancer, there was a great deal of renewed interest in what happened on November 22, 1963. On my second to last visit with my mother, in October of 2013, she was not yet bedridden. She could still sit at the kitchen table and take a short walk. She could even, with the help of “buddy” (her morphine pump), go out to eat. The day of that last dinner, at a very particular moment, she explicitly asked me if anyone had solved the Kennedy assassination. Then, later that night, while eating with my father, my aunt, and my uncle, she asked me if I had had any recent encounters with a legendary stranger from Greensboro whom over the years I had affectionately dubbed “The Human Being.”
The story of these two stories, in a way, begins when I was thirteen and my mother drove me across town to a new movie theater in our hometown of Winchester, Virginia. Center Cinema was demolished in 2010, but in 1991 it was a brand-new arcade of games, lights, candy, and huge screens with R rated films promising to tell teenagers the secrets of the adult world. That afternoon, my mother and I attended the matinee of JFK, Oliver Stone’s three hour and twenty-six-minute exploration of the Kennedy assassination, a movie that won the Oscar that year for Best Cinematography and was also nominated for Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor, Original Score, Sound Mixing, Adapted Screenplay, and Film Editing. I mention all of these accolades now because a certain portion of Hollywood has disowned Stone and I think that’s important to talk about in light of JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, his new documentary about the murder. However, when I was thirteen, I didn’t care a bit about critical accolades or whether a work of art belonged to the paranoid or reparative school.
However, for some reason, I did care passionately about the stories of the American presidents. I had all the presidents memorized, in order, and read every book I could get my hands on about our past leaders and, especially, the ones who died at the hands of assassins. Why did my mother take me to that movie and not my brother or sister? I don’t know the answer to that. My memory of that day or that time period in my life is far from perfect. But what everyone in my family recalls, to this day, is my childhood obsession with presidential history. Revisiting that day at the movies, I imagine my mother, a school-teacher, wanted to nurture that part of me that liked to read and reflect rather than that other part that seemed to delight in playing wicked pranks on my sister. On the other hand, I think it’s important to allow that maybe my mother also wanted to see JFK for reasons of her own.
How many women of her generation had a secret or not so secret crush on John F. Kennedy? How many women of today would be offended by framing my mother’s admiration of this man solely in terms of a “crush”? Maybe the better way to frame the question is: How many young people, for the first time in their lives, connected with politics through the figures of John F. Kennedy and his glamorous wife, Jackie? Where else in the history of American presidents do we see a story so awash with romance and mystery, the intoxicating tangle of sex and death? At the age of thirteen, I didn’t know about Marilyn Monroe, Judith Campbell Exner, or Mary Pinchot Meyer, Kennedy’s three most famous mistresses. The truth is, when I walked into that theater in Center Cinema, the one whose double doors opened next to a gift claw machine full of stuffed animals and shiny trinkets and plastic pastel easter eggs, I wasn’t thinking about what my mother might’ve been thinking about when she was a teenager in 1963.
My thoughts that day, far from empathy, were more like a list, a reeling of facts: John F. Kennedy was the thirty-fifth president of the United States. His Vice-President’s name was Johnson, just as the assassinated Abraham Lincoln’s VP was named Johnson. Although Kennedy was only president for a thousand days, there were other presidents, like Zachary Taylor, James Garfield, and William Henry Harrison who also died in office and served far shorter terms. At thirteen, I thought about American history in the same way I thought about baseball cards. Here was information to be memorized, mastered, and deployed.
And yet, to fairly empathize with my past self and repair my relationship with that puerile prankster, I should probably also add that I loved music passionately and the way a song could sweep away the obsession with lists and facts and scramble it all into a world of wish and color, a kind of dream. Every time I think about JFK, I remember with an aching clarity the brilliant score, the military drumbeat and the sad and noble horns of John Williams, that clash of wartime cadence and woodwind wail like a subliminal reminder of the twin spirits that always contend for America’s soul, the music from that opening movement one part funeral and one part plank walk; one part war and one part peace. Listening to that music and watching the old stock footage of the motorcade moving through Dallas, I knew, sitting in the dark with my mother, that I was about to watch a death take place. I was about to witness the murder of my mother’s hero. I was probably eating Sour Patch Kids.
A reparative reading, according to Eve Sedgewick, operates in contrast to the paranoid reading that seeks to cancel or humiliate a work of art in light of a perceived flaw. Rather than harp upon that imperfection that might suggest racism, capitalism, or misogyny, the reparative reading “succeeds in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.” What does a reparative reading of the Kennedy assassination story look like? How do we approach the granddaddy of all conspiracy theories in a way that addresses the trauma, the injustice, and the loss without getting lost in the desire to create a simple monster to fear, incarcerate, or abolish? I would argue that one way to do so is to ask that basic Buddhist question: Who’s asking?
Well, of course, I am. And so, based on my belief that everything is personal, I would like to propose that one reparative way to frame the impact of the assassination, broadly, and Stone’s work, specifically, is to tell the story of a man and a woman who were profoundly impacted by the director’s movie and to explore the web of connections that spun out of that day at Center Cinema thirty years ago. Ten years after that first viewing, when I was twenty-four, I decided to “follow my bliss,” as so many people in my mother’s generation used to say. I applied for an MFA program and got rejected by everyone but the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. After getting into UNCG, I was told that one of the rites of passage was that first-year students had to prepare the cheese wheels and fruit wheels—the hors d’ouevres—for the big celebrity readings we always scheduled for Thursday nights at the new music building.
I was not a fan of the poet who read one night in the fall of 2001. So, after setting up the tables, cups, napkins, wine, and the wheels of meat, I didn’t quietly slip into the auditorium for the remainder of the reading. Instead, I took to wandering the halls, looking for one of those quiet soundproof rooms with a piano and nothing else. Maybe I emphasized this detail to my mother at the inception of the Human Being saga because it appealed to her desire to see me play music, to not give up on all of those lessons from my youth. In any event, I knew those piano practice rooms existed, but I couldn’t remember exactly where they were, so I ducked my head into the library where a man who looked like an anthropologist was walking out the door. He couldn’t have been any shorter than six-four and he had these dirty blonde rock and roll locks, like Robert Plant and Sammy Hagar. His eyes seemed alight with an extremely active intelligence. They seized upon me when I asked him if he knew where a young man might find a piano practice room.
He put his hands on my shoulders.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said. “But I’m going to help you.”
I should’ve known right then and there that I’d made a mistake. No faculty member had ever bent over and initiated such an immediate and intimate one-on-one huddle. Those kneading hands should’ve told me everything I needed to know. But as the poetry reading spilled out into the lobby, I guess I was under his manic spell. I followed him as he rushed my colleagues and the literary citizens of Greensboro. I watched in horror as he proceeded to lay hands on senior faculty and point at me, saying, “Young man over there wants to learn how to play piano. Do we know where we can find him a room with a piano in this building? Can you help? Can you help?”
Every stranger this man solicited on my behalf recoiled in the face of this sudden plea for charity. Nobody seemed to possess any intelligence of pianos in small rooms. And then, in my mother’s favorite moment in the story, the man placed his hands on the wrong person. I would often stand up and approach whoever else was listening and I would hover my hands atop their shoulders, just as my new friend had more than just hovered his atop a raven-haired woman in a black leather jacket, a black leather skirt, and black leather boots. She looked like New York, this final unwitting victim. And when those strange hands touched down on her leather shoulders, she bugged her eyes, sunk her chin into her neck, and took a huge step back. My new friend responded in kind, mirroring the rejection. He then threw his hands up like he was under arrest, like he was signaling a touchdown for all the poets and socialites with their stabbed cheese cubes paused in midair.
“Excuse me!” he nearly screamed.
This was the cinematic moment. The lobby went silent as my new friend began to take slow and grand steps backwards. He backed away from the woman in the black leather jacket like she was a bomb about to go off, his eyes wide and furtive, darting back and forth between her shocked mien and whatever face I was offering to the crowd. Then, with his eyes fixed on her and in the sort of voice you might use on a petulant child, he uttered the coup de grace sentence for the entire lobby to hear:
“Mam,” he said. “Next time someone asks you for help, please try to remember: You’re a human being.”
Like a superhero determined to remain anonymous to the masses, he ran out of the building and into the night. I never thought I would see him again, but by the following Monday he had already earned the nickname that would make him a legend in the MFA program and beyond. He was The Human Being.
When someone dies and it hurts, you sometimes find yourself using the second person. Correction: I sometimes fall into the second person. Maybe I want to impose my experience on you right now and, thereby, find some reassurance that I’m not alone in contending with these stories. Maybe there’s something simultaneously violent and reparative about this enforcement of empathy. When someone like your mother or your president dies, is it going too far to say that you tend to replay the final moments—those last conversations—those final smiles? I don’t know, dear reader, whoever you are. But here’s what I do know: Early in the day on that final October Saturday I spent with my mother (before a very final and nearly speechless goodbye in November), she asked me about the Kennedy assassination and then later that night, at dinner with my aunt and uncle, she asked me to share the latest Human Being story.
I didn’t think about the pairing at the time. But that sequence seems significant to me now as I’m writing this essay and going back over the day and my life. Isn’t this how loss and trauma work? Isn’t this what so many of us have done with the Zapruder film? We press rewind on minds like they’re made out of film. We impose the “we” of the first-person plural to feel less alone. We—I—return to the facts of the movie and the movie that gave rise to the movie: Abraham Zapruder was a Dallas dressmaker who made history on November 22, 1963 by capturing the murder of John F. Kennedy on a Bell and Howell Zoomatic Director Series handheld video camera. Decades before the era of citizen-journalists capturing bombings, school shootings, and acts of police brutality on cellphones cameras, Zapruder was the canary in the coal mine, the precursor. As Don DeLillo wrote in his novel about Greece and the CIA, The Names, “Film is more than the twentieth century art . . . You have to ask yourself if there’s anything about us more important than the fact that we’re constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.” Note DeLillo’s use of the second person. What I do to the Zapruder film I do to my final memories with my mother and I guess I’m doing it to you, whoever you are. I go back. We go back. I put us on instant replay. I dive down into the footage of a life.
October of 2013. After crying atop a pile of hot garments she had just tossed to the living room floor from the dryer and telling me, while I hugged her, that, “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” my mother and I adjourned to the warm bricks of the back patio where the sandbox was now a garden and there were yellow mums and a blue sky and the leaves were still green and you could see the old stones of the Civil War wall that divided our backyard from a cow pasture.
“Do you think they’ll finally tell us the truth about the Kennedy assassination?” she asked. “Have we learned anything new?”
In that first person plural “we” is the dying spirit of my mother’s generation, the baby boomers. This “we” and this “us” bears the mark of both the reparative and the paranoid, for with every “us” comes a “them,” right? But with every “we” is the idea of a community and a story that’s bigger than me. The unsolved mystery of the Kennedy assassination was one of the card-carrying cries of the anti-war movement in the late sixties and early seventies. Now it’s a silo, just another conspiracy theory niche for crazy people to obsess over in the same way as the folks who call the moon landing a hoax. Well, that’s bullshit. Not every “conspiracy theory” is the same and how I—how we—handle this particular one represents a possibility; a chance to evolve and complicate a story with shared stakes. I am not a baby boomer, but when my baby boomer mother took me to see JFK when I was thirteen, she and Oliver Stone taught me something I try not to forget, and that is this: There are real people who risk it all for an ideal. There are real people in American history who sacrifice their lives for the truth.
You could say that JFK raises question x, y, or z about the murder of John F. Kennedy and the crimes of the American Security State, and you’d be right, and an entirely different essay could get lost in the weeds of those questions or maybe even definitively answer a few of them at this point. But there’s a difference between pursuing those answers and telling the story of one who does like Stone’s protagonist, Jim Garrison, the only attorney to bring a trial against the CIA in the death of John F. Kennedy. At the age of thirteen, I wanted to be a lawyer, maybe a bit like Garrison. I used to stay up on Thursday nights and watch The Cosby Show and Cheers with my whole family, but only my mother and I would watch L.A. Law at 10 o’clock, and maybe that has something to do with why she took me, and not my brother or sister, to see JFK. Here, in Garrison, was the story of a lawyer who risked everything and not just for money or fame or tribe like you’d see with Corbin Bernsen’s character of Arnie Becker on L.A. Law. No. What guided Garrison’s character in the movie was the search for the truth. One thing I’ll never forget about that first time I saw JFK was watching Garrison, played by Kevin Costner, choose truth over family towards the end of the movie and feeling shaken by the fights he had with his wife, Liz, played by Sissy Spacek, who seemed to intuit that her husband cared more about solving the murder of President Kennedy than he did about his own flesh and blood. What was perplexing to me then and what is still confounding to this day is whether or not this transtribal allegiance to Truth—like it was a kind of God—made Garrison more a hero or a fool.
Why not both, right? Anyone who follows the story of the Kennedy assassination and the men and women who died trying to discover the truth(s) finds a family of truth-tellers who, like Garrison, have sacrificed greatly in the name of truth. My mother, in her own way, was one of those people. History is both told and complicated by truth-tellers—folks like Daniel Ellsberg, Martin Luther King, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Oliver Stone. Is it possible that Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy’s ostensible assassin, was an FBI informant who was himself about to blow the whistle on the CIA’s coup plot? This is a possibility James W. Douglass raises in JFK and the Unspeakable, a book Stone calls “The best account I have read of this tragedy and its significance.” Is it possible that American history is so awash with propaganda that we raise our children believing our truth-tellers were our villains? Truth-tellers like Garrison do not live an easy life. I put my mother in that camp because she was an activist who once revealed the secret history of a corporation that wanted to move to our small southern town and set up shop on the Shenandoah River. Through a campaign that included packing a city council meeting with a Falstaff’s army of old women from a nursing home and embarrassing that city council with the corporation in question’s past of corruption and pollution, my mother was able to prevent that company, Cardinal Glass, from expanding their toxic empire to the Shenandoah Valley. It was right around the time of JFK that my mother took on Cardinal Glass and it is this legacy of goading and inspiring citizens and future truth-tellers that I see as the positive reparative legacy of Stone’s picture.
But truth-tellers aren’t always easy to live with. Like my mother, The Human Being had a shine about him and was a little “off his rocker,” as we say down South. I always liked that saying because it suggests that the proper place for an adult, or old people in particular, is in that rocking chair, watching the world go by. The Human Being was no voyeur, content to ride the spectatorship to the grave, and I suspect this is one of the reasons my mother always loved to hear Human Being stories. The Human Being, like my mother, was off his rocker. One day, at a local Barnes and Noble, I saw The Human Being in the café of the bookstore offering to collect mugs and plates from readers who seemed shocked to see a man in filthy garments suddenly attending to their dishes. One young woman said to The Human Being, as he seized her saucer, “You don’t have to do that.” To which The Human Being responded, in a stentorian voice, “We like to help people around here.” The Human Being, with his bus tub full, then approached a manager at the café counter who gave him two dollars for his help. It seemed The Human Being had an under the table arrangement with the store. Call it a charitable collusion to defraud the IRS if you would like. Call it a reparative conspiracy in a southern town where ordinary citizens have to take care of the homeless that their government won’t. Whatever you want to call that handoff of currency, The Human Being, now flush with cash, got in line with a bottle of water and, knowing The Human Being and his tendency to “make things happen,” I got in line behind him.
When The Human Being arrived at the cashier and one of those new-fangled cash registers that delivered your change to you via a plastic chute that dropped your coins into a plastic dish so the cashier didn’t have to touch you, The Human Being smiled.
“Out of a hundred?” he said to the cashier, a woman of no more than twenty.
“Out of one,” the woman said.
“One hundred,” The Human Being said.
“One dollar,” the cashier said.
“One hundred pennies,” The Human Being said.
The woman sighed and cast her eyes toward the heavens. The change slid down the slide and into the beige dish. The Human Being, like an archaeologist on a dig, studied the silver faces of the American presidents slash slavemasters under the café light.
And then he said this:
“In one slot and out another. Just like you.”
“Excuse me?” the cashier said as The Human Being walked way.
“You’re excused,” The Human Being said, once again unsatisfied with the poverty of the exchange. Truth-tellers are not always politicians, comedians, poets, lawyers, Hollywood directors, or intelligence officers who decide to leak the atrocities of their government. Sometimes they are middle-aged women trying to keep “job creators” from destroying the ecosystem of a small town on a big river. Sometimes they are the homeless who just can’t stay silent in the face of a world that’s increasingly going “touch-free” at the car wash, the grocery store, and the café.
The last time I saw The Human Being was just months before my mother’s death. I didn’t know it at the time, but the story I’m about to tell you and the one I told her that night in front of my father, my aunt, and my uncle, was the last one I ever witnessed. I tell it to you now because something about the way The Human Being ended up reminds me of Oliver Stone and Jim Garrison and that part of my mother that lives on in me and is often, in some way, still alive in some of my students when I meet them as freshmen in college.
“Truth first with self and love first with others,” my therapist once said to me, after confiding that he, too, was someone who often got into trouble with loved ones for “telling the truth.”
I struggle so hard with that advice, still not sure if it’s wisdom or folly. Based on the fact that my government continues to cave to the CIA on the final classified JFK files, I reckon the leaders of my country also still struggle with this issue of the truth. “The truth is out there,” you often here the JFK folks say, and with Stone’s new documentary, perhaps now we’re closer to that being fully right. Perhaps now we can all put this story to bed and finally, as a nation, speak the unspeakable. So, with that struggle in mind, I’m going to tell you this final two-part Human Being story but I’m not going to beat around the bush about the moment in which it was requested and the way a certain force shapes my mother’s—my—narrative. At the end of my mother’s life, I could paint her in a purely noble and sentimental light and say she was a righteous activist who still yearned to hear the truth in her final days, and some sliver of that may be true, but I also suspect this is true: my stories of JFK and The Human Being had one big thing in common—they were both a way to avoid dealing with the bigger truth at hand, the one that may well organize Western civilization: Fear of death.
Who knows? Maybe fear of death so twentieth century. Maybe the Silicon Valley guys will figure out this one glitch in our operating system. Maybe we’re all about to get uploaded into the cloud. Maybe you and I won’t have to die in the future. But my mother did die, and her terror-management, to use the language of psychology, perhaps had something to do with her request for a final update on someone else’s death and that final edition of The Human Being chronicles.
And so here it is—the final story: I was at a tobacco shop with a writer named Paul Crenshaw on a summer day when next door, at an adult store, Paul and I overheard some noise and rumors that—oh, look at that. I almost lied. Paul and I knew exactly who was scheduled to visit that adult store that day—one of the most famous porn stars of the twentieth century: Nina Hartley. Yes, we were at the tobacco shop. That’s true. But we didn’t walk next door on a naïve lark. It was part of a plot. Like so many other men in Greensboro that day, Paul and I made a pilgrimage to the Adam and Eve adult novelty store. We wanted to see a celebrity in public. We wanted to encounter a porn star in person.
Before I get back to the porn star, I feel I should add that there is a detail to this story I can’t pin down. Around the time my mother took me to see JFK, she also gave me a copy of the Zanesville Times Recorder from Friday, November 23, 1963. She kept it in the dresser of her old bedroom at my grandmother’s house on Coldspring Road in Zanesville, Ohio. Just as I would keep copies of the newspapers from 9/11 in the desk of my boyhood bedroom, my mother held onto this parched document in her childhood sanctuary and what I can’t be sure of is if she gave me that paper right before or right after taking me to see JFK. I do know that by the time I was fifteen I was that geek who was giving guest lectures on the Kennedy assassination in the classrooms of my high school and writing poetry about the event, as if the killing of Kennedy was akin to the crucifixion of Christ and the good news slash horror story needed to be spread by young apostles. But what came first, the old paper or the new movie? Text or spectacle?
Why in the hell did my mother light that fire in my head?
Maybe some of you who saw JFK know what I’m talking about when I say fire. When you start to question the elephants in the room of American life, you one day find yourself part of that eternal flame. The story of Jim Garrison raises profound questions that have only become more urgent in the twenty-first century. Is the American nation held hostage by the Security State? When the thirty-fourth president, Dwight Eisenhower, handed over the presidency to Kennedy and warned the nation in his farewell address that the most grave threat to our democracy came from “the military-industrial complex,” had the World War II general already witnessed the insidious forces that would later murder his successor, slaughter millions in Vietnam, flood African-American neighborhoods with crack cocaine in order to fuel regime change wars in South America in the 1980s, and then destroy the Middle East and develop a secret chain of torture gulags after the attacks of 9/11? Does even raising such questions send this essay perilously close to the border that divides the paranoid from the reparative?
When it comes to art, I think questions are fundamentally more reparative than answers, and that answers, more often than not, tend to be the problem. JFK deploys the “corpse/culprit” plot structure, the most addictive storytelling form of our time, but rather than giving the viewer the simple satisfaction of the police tidily solving the case in one hour (like what one might see on Law and Order), Stone lets the private citizen struggle for three and a half hours against the police and their desire to evade the answers. As a thirteen-year-old boy, when my mother and I finally got to the end of JFK and watched the gory flip of that flap of flesh as the president’s head jolted back and to the left, I believed I was witnessing history, a clear and revelatory picture of the past. As a child who prided himself on memorizing all of the presidents in order and reciting them for grandmothers, aunts and uncles at family reunions, this new forensic clue about our thirty-fifth president was, as my mother used to say, “right up my alley.” But, of course, there is a difference between a clue and a fact. There is a profound difference between a question and an answer. That newspaper my mother gave me and that movie she took me to introduced me to a world of mysteries—questions as answers—and for that empathic intro I am forever grateful.
Nina Hartley arrived at Adam and Eve wearing a leather mini-skirt, fishnet stockings, and a blonde coiffed hairdo reminiscent of the latter-day Dolly Parton. I orbited around the porn star, half-writer, half-starstruck voyeur. I watched as my friend Paul did the same. There were men from across the social and racial spectrum there at Adam and Eve with their glossy black and white glamour shots, copies of Nugget, Penthouse, and Hustler, slick DVD and VHS boxes exploding with images of genitals and lingerie, gnawing faces and forbidden scenarios. And there in the center of this rapid-fire exchange of taboo media was a middle-aged white woman reveling in the spotlight until a middle-aged white man burst through the double-doors, backlit by the summer sun. It was then that the circle broke and all the eyes turned away from the porn star and towards the tall sunburnt figure in the khaki pants that were pinned at the cuff, signifying a traveler who had made his journey to Adam and Eve atop a bicycle.
“Nina Hartley,” said The Human Being. “If you let me make love to you, I promise I will try to save your soul.”
Paul and I looked at each other across the crowd of gray-faced strangers who couldn’t believe the audacity of hope they were witnessing from this lean homeless man in the doorway. Paul smiled at me with a look that instantly communicated shock and awe, that species of joy that comes from witnessing a legend first-hand. As a graduate of the UNCG MFA program, Paul understood the lore. But there’s a difference between hearing about something and seeing it for yourself. For that brief imperishable instant, Paul and I witnessed together a showdown between the porn star and The Human Being.
“Honey,” Hartley said. “I appreciate the offer, but my soul is already saved.”
Then, just like ten years earlier, The Human Being put up his hands in that gesture of touchdown slash mock-arrest and did that superhero turn-away and rode off into the sun down Spring Garden Street.
As I told this story to my mother and my evangelical aunt and uncle in October of 2013, I knew my mother would get a good rise out of the Christian content, but I also felt it sincerely necessary to add a coda to the tale, the fact that one of the women at the counter knew HB’s name and that a former student of mine named Jackie, upon hearing the story, had told me that she, too, had recently seen this man on Spring Garden shortly after the death of his—The Human Being’s—mother.
Which led to one final detail.
My mother came of age during the Vietnam War. She protested against the massacre of the Vietnamese. Like Eisenhower and Kennedy, Oliver Stone was a veteran, which gives his work a unique credibility. He saw the Vietnam War for himself. Stone is one of the artists who regularly confronts that period of history that left over two million Vietnamese dead, to say nothing of those poisoned (“sprayed and betrayed”) by Agent Orange, the toxic herbicide America used to defoliate the jungle canopy in order to better surveil their targets, otherwise known as human beings. After the disaster of Vietnam, Stone became one of the greatest directors of the twentieth century. Much his work orbited around the catastrophic war in Vietnam. Films like Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, and JFK cannot be understood without appreciating the fact that the United States attempted to control the fate of another nation through mass murder.
Then, after the attacks on 9/11, we did it again. We did. We, the people, did it in Iraq. We, the people, did it in Afghanistan. You could say that the Oliver Stone who envisioned JFK is the same Stone who imagined Snowden, the story of another truth-teller who risked it all to reveal the crimes of the Security State, and perhaps JFK Revisited: Through the Looking-Glass, is the final bookend to this saga between nation and state. To be sure, there is a through-line here, a deep concern with an Intelligence Community that, generation after generation, finds a way to sacrifice its own people on the altar of a hunger for war.
“War is the health of the state,” Randolph Bourne once wrote.
Certainly, a lot of money was made by a lot of statesmen and their revolving door corporations in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. However, in addition to the 1.1 million lives lost and the 37 million displaced in America’s post-9/11 Global War on Terror, we now also see again, a generation of Americans returning with a strange species of illness. Like with Agent Orange and Vietnam, the burn pits of Iraq and Afghanistan have poisoned American veterans, including Beau Biden, the dead son of our current president, Joe Biden who often poses for pictures with the bust of RFK sitting over his shoulder. Yes, sure as QAnon supporters love to thunder about how JFK, Jr. is still alive and about to redeem his dead father, the Kennedy mythology is alive and, if not well, relevant. The Kennedy story still shapes the way we see our nation and our state and the troubling tangle of those two ideas (nation and state) when it comes to war. Are the same forces that killed John F. Kennedy responsible for the destruction of the Middle East and that torture gulag—Guantanamo Bay—that still remains open down in that troubled territory of Cuba that may have, in many ways, sealed the fate of JFK? Does raising this question about Cuba this late in the essay tease the paranoid territory or is it possible that reparation—justice—the process of healing—begins with difficult questions?
Because we are an increasingly secretive war-torn country and because, on the grounds of national security, our presidents continually cave to the appeals of the CIA for even more secrecy, my mother died not knowing the answer to the question of who killed her president. However, I was able to give her, in the end, the name of The Human Being. After HB left Adam and Eve, I purchased a gratuitous tube of lube and asked the young woman behind the counter if she knew anything about the man who had just interrupted the porn star.
“Oh yes,” she said. “That was Eric.”
Eric, I came to discover, was once a member of a prominent Greensboro family. Before his days as a homeless prankster who was once seen holding a dead squirrel aloft like a prized pelt as he rode his bike down Tate Street at an alarming speed, Eric had been a successful businessman. My former student and cop-friend, Jackie, said that, right around the time of the Adam and Eve incident, the police had had to stop Eric from giving away all of his inheritance on Spring Garden. After Eric’s mother died, he’d been given one final chance to return to the dignity of his former privileged life. Jackie said Eric had inherited an exorbitant sum of money but was causing alarm one day because he was out there on the streets, giving it all away.
I would like to tell you that my mother smiled at that final sacrificial detail. I would love to be able to say that my Christian aunt and Christian uncle joined with my Christian father in applauding this charitable gesture from The Human Being who was actually just a man named Eric. But that wasn’t the feeling at the table at the end of that story on that Saturday night in October of 2013, right before the massive television explosion of events commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. No, that’s not how the end of the story felt. Part of me is ashamed at the way I used to treat this tragedy and converted this troubled man’s life into a kind of comedy for my friends and family. Part of me still struggles with Eric’s story and whether or not to treat it as a tragedy, a comedy, or that category Stone seems to prefer: a history. One of the things I like about history is that you don’t have that same burden of spin. You don’t feel that same pressure to make your audience laugh or cry. You just tell the story the way it happened. You come to the end where The Human Being’s mother dies and you look one more time into your mother’s eyes.
