John F Kennedy
To people of a certain age John F Kennedy represents everything that they had believed in. The future, science , colour, fun, beauty. What they ended up with was Ronald Reagan, global warming, banksters and the Iraq War. So what what did John F Kennedy do for us?
Well obviously he kept a load of authors employed with over 300 conspiracies about his death. It seems that everyone had an interest in seeing him dead, yet the incontestable fact is that Lee Harvey Oswald was the one with a rifle and Lee Harvey Oswald was delusional yet was killed after he said he was the patsy! Make of it what you will, but, the fact he was a communist will always be on the file and the Cold War was at it’s hottest at the time of his death.
JFK also gave us Barack Obama. Just as JFK broke glass ceilings as a Roman Catholic when he became President. BHO did the same when he became President. It is not without irony that one of his biggest backers when he first looked to be President was the Kennedy family. They probably did it to piss off The Clinton clan and their ‘redneck’ version of Camelot and it certainly did, but, they probably also saw in Obama a cumulation of the chance to get the progressive ideal into place – a comprehensive national health service.
The right wing quite deranged call for a unregulated private health service is really strange and almost sociopathic in nature, when all the evidence around show that some sort of national health service is good for society. The fact that the USA managed to not have one was due to them being so completely rich and omnipotent after the Second World War, that the odd morsel to the plebs was sufficient to paper over the cracks. Now with China, Brazil and India using technology to do the stuff which the middle class Americans once had a hold on due to their position as the major super power, are over. Rugged individualism is OK when their is fair competition. Now the market is rigged against the average US John Doe and the competition is united in taking over the jobs for a lot less money. Why pay $10 an hour when you can pay $1 an hour?
It is not inevitable that we have a plutocratic society, although some are actively working for such a system. Education is a bad thing if you want a plutocratic society as people will question their lot and have the confidence to challenge the order of things. Hence the right wing attempt for a Ayn Rand objectivist society will fail due to massive amount of books and intellectual thought.
Which bring the next major thing what JFK did for us. He brought in the age of the television god. This is personified in the election of Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was televisual and that is about it. But during the time he was around that was all you need. His biggest claim was that he won the Cold War but closer look at the facts was once the space race was won the collapse of state communism was inevitable. How could international communism succeed when it was located within a state? Communism, which is a reaction to capitalism could only succeed if it was international and not nationalistic, just as capital cannot be state centric if it wants to get the best return.
Finally, John F Kennedy brought about the near end of misogyny and homophobia. His lifestyle and being made it clear that people should be allowed to love who they want and not be damned for who they are. The personal is political and any attempt to bring wrath and damnation onto peoples love life will ultimately lead to nonsense such as Putin’s anti-gay campaign and the Taliban. Both these version of social fascism will ultimately fail just as in the USA the Republican party will never gain the presidency as long as they insist on looking into consenting adults bedrooms.
