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The Spiritual Truth of JFK


   this article examines the assassination within the wider context of the
   mass psychological perspective of the time period.  peter gabel touches
   upon something here that is rarely if ever explored in such a perceptive
   and far-reaching way.  one of the most provocative analyses i have seen.


       . . .  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. . . .
         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. . . .  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.  

     the following appears in the March/April issue of "Tikkun" magazine,
         a Bimonthly Jewish Critic of Politics, Culture, & Society.
       ________________________________________________________________

                        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 here with permission of the author


         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 countermyth 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.
         The spiritual problem that the movie speaks to is an 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.  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.  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.  But we do not yet live in such a world, and the
      isolation and distance from reality that envelops us is a cause of
      immense psychological and emotional pain, a social starvation that
      is in fact analogous to physical hunger and other forms of physical
      suffering.
         One of the main psychosocial mechanisms by which this pain, this
      collective starvation, is denied is through the creation of an
      imaginary sense of community.  Today this imaginary world is
      generated through a seemingly endless ritualized deference to the
      Flag, the Nation, the Family--pseudocommunal icons of public
      discourse projecting mere images of social connection that actually
      deny our real experience of isolation and distance, of living in
      sealed cubicles, passing each other blankly on the streets, while
      managing to relieve our alienation to some extent by making us feel
      a part of something.  Political and cultural elites--presidents and
      ad agencies--typically generate these images of pseudocommunity,
      but we also play a part in creating them because, from the vantage
      point of our isolated positions--if we have not found some
      alternative community of meaning--we need them to provide what
      sense of social connection they can.  We have discussed this
      phenomenon in "Tikkun" many times before, emphasizing recently, for
      example, the way David Duke is able to recognize and confirm the
      pain of white working-class people and thereby help them overcome,
      in an imaginary way, their sense of isolation in a public world
      that leaves them feeling invisible.

      In the 1950s, the alienated environment that I have been describing
      took the form of an authoritarian, rigidly anticommunist mentality
      that coexisted with the fantasized image of a "perfect" America--a
      puffed-up and patriotic America that had won World War II and was
      now producing a kitchen-culture of time-saving appliances,
      allegedly happy families, and technically proficient organizations
      and "organization men" who dressed the same and looked the same as
      they marched in step toward the "great big beautiful tomorrow"
      hailed in General Electric's advertising jingle of that period.  It
      was a decade of artificial and rigid patriotic unity, sustained in
      large part by an equally rigid and pathological anticommunism;  for
      communism was the "Other" whose evil we needed to exterminate or at
      least contain to preserve our illusory sense of connection,
      meaning, and social purpose.  As the sixties were later to make
      clear, the cultural climate of the fifties was actually a massive
      denial of the desire for true connection and meaning.  But at the
      time the cultural image-world of the fifties was sternly held in
      place by a punitive and threatening system of authoritarian male
      hierarchies, symbolized most graphically by the McCarthy hearings,
      the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the person of J.
      Edgar Hoover.

      In this context, the election of John F. Kennedy and his three
      years in office represented what I would call an opening-up of
      desire.  I say this irrespective of his official policies, which
      are repeatedly criticized by the Left for their initial hawkish
      character, and irrespective also of the posthumous creation of the
      Camelot myth, which does exaggerate the magic of that period.  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.  As a sixteen-year-old in boarding school with no
      interest in politics, I wrote a long note in my diary asking God to
      help us through the days ahead, even though I didn't believe in God
      at the time.  And I imagine that you, if you were alive then, no
      matter how cynical you may have sometimes felt since then about
      politics or presidents or the "real" Kennedy himself, have a
      similar memory preciously stored in the region of your being where
      your longings for a better world still reside.
         In this issue, Peter Dale Scott gives an account of the
      objective consequences of the assassination, of the ways that the
      nation's anticommunist elites apparently reversed Kennedy's
      beginning efforts to withdraw from Vietnam and perhaps through his
      relationship with Khrushchev to thaw out the addiction to blind
      anti-communist rage--an addiction that, as he saw during the Cuban
      missile crisis, could well have led to a nuclear war.  But for
      these same elites, the mass-psychological consequences of the
      assassination posed quite a different problem from that of
      reversing government policy--namely, the need to find a way to
      reconstitute the image of benign social connection that could
      reform the imaginary unity of the country on which the legitimacy
      of government policy depends.  In order to contain the desire
      released by the Kennedy presidency and the sense of loss and sudden
      disintegration caused by the assassination, government officials
      had to create a process that would rapidly "prove"--to the
      satisfaction of people's emotions--that the assassination and loss
      were the result of socially innocent causes.

      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.
         But it is not so surprising if you accept the mass-psychological
      perspective I am outlining here--the perspective that Kennedy and
      the Kennedy years had elicited a lyricism and a desire for
      transcendent social connection that contradicted the long-
      institutionalized forces of emotional repression that preceded
      them.  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 facade
      of our reconstituted but imaginary political unity.

      Having said this, I do not want to be understood to be suggesting
      that there was a conspiracy to set up Oswald in order to achieve
      this mass-psychological goal.  There may well have been a
      conspiracy to set up Oswald, but no complex theory is required to
      explain it.  And it would be absurd, in my view, to think that the
      entire media consciously intended to manipulate the American people
      in the headlong rush to convict Oswald in the press.  The point is
      rather that this headlong rush was something we all--or most of
      us--participated in because we ourselves, unconsciously, are deeply
      attached to the status quo, to our legitimating myths of community,
      and to denying our own alienation and pain.  The interest we share
      with the mainstream media and with government and corporate elites
      is to maintain, through a kind of unconscious collusion, the
      alienated structures of power and social identity that protect us
      from having to risk emerging from our sealed cubicles and allowing
      our fragile longing for true community to become a public force.
         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.  Through his crosscutting images of the
      anti-Castro fringe, the civil-rights movement, high and low New
      Orleans club life, and elites in corporate and government offices
      who thought they ran the country, Stone uses all his cinematic and
      political energy to cut through the civics-class version of history
      and to bring the viewer into sudden contact with the realities of
      power and alienation that were present at that time and are present
      in a different form now.
         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.


        This is one of four articles on "JFK," The Assassination, The 
        Movie, and The Coverup, in the March/April issue of Tikkun. 


    (te.kun[umlout over the `u']) To mend, repair and transform the world.

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                              KOYAANISQATSI

   ko.yan.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language)  n.  1. crazy life.  2. life
       in turmoil.  3. life out of balance.  4. life disintegrating.  
         5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.