JFK Still Dead, Baby Boomers Still Self-Absorbed

by Nick Gillespie Nov 6, 2013 - Th Daily Beast

Kennedy assassination nostalgia reveals the deeply engrained generational arrogance of the baby boomers. After 50 years, let’s hope the fever is breaking.

If there’s one November tradition less digestible and more shart-inducing than Thanksgiving dinner (sorry, Mom!), it’s the seasonal and ritualized fixation over the assassination and broad legacy of John F. Kennedy.

An American family gathers around a TV, which displays John F. Kennedy's face, to watch the debate between Kennedy & Richard Nixon during the presidential election. (Time Life Pictures/Getty)

Each fall since November 22, 1963, regular programming is pre-empted and whole rainforests are clear-cut to bring us books filled with the latest minor (and often delusional) variations on who killed Kennedy and why; the supposedly transformative effect of the “Camelot” years on contemporary geo-politics and, more plausibly, the hat-wearing habits of the American male; and counterfactuals about just how awesome—or awful—JFK’s second term would have been.

Whatever emotional immediacy, contemporary relevance, and news value this all once inarguably possessed, can we now admit that the topic has grown thinner than the post-1963 resume of Kennedy impersonator Vaughn Meader? It now lives on mostly as a sort of repetition-compulsion disorder through which the baby boom generation (born between 1946 and 1964) seeks to preserve its stultifying cultural hegemony even as it slowly—finally!—begins to exit the stage of American life on a fleet of taxpayer-funded Rascal Scooters. (Full disclosure: As someone born in 1963, I am at the very tail end of the baby boom.)

Among the three-dozen-plus books published in this, the 50th year after the assassination, are two volumes titled November 22, 1963, one devoted to the 39-hour life of Patrick Kennedy, and Jesse Ventura’s They Killed Our President: 63 Reasons to Believe There Was a Conspiracy to Assassinate JFK. (What is it that Barack Obama’s former preacher, Jeremiah Wright, likes to say?: “God bless America? God damn America!”)

There are new novels about the event; a fully enjoyable, if equally unpersuasive, “case against LBJ” as murderer-in-chief; and a breathless expose by prominent Obama-birther Jerome Corsi promising “stunning new revelations about the JFK assassination” (to help readers avoid his books and concisely signal the crazy, Corsi graciously affixes Ph.D. to his byline).
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