Written during Christmas of 1963,
from the same park across the street from the Supreme Court building, where he
had also written DS 72 earlier. In late 1963, everyone was still amazed and
stunned by Kennedy’s assassination just a month earlier, and still wondering
what it meant and where it would lead. Kennedy is the man “not born today,” and
of course, it being Christmas, the implied other reference is to Jesus, hung on
his own “terrible tree.”
Kennedy’s life and presidency—his
war record and injury from his PT Boat service in the Navy, the debates against
Nixon, his great inaugural speech, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, his
setting the goal of landing a man on the moon “because it is hard,” his greatly
popular wife, and then his involvement with Marilyn Monroe and other women,
even a suspected involvement in Monroe’s death, the mysterious details around
his assassination, the inexplicable shooting of Oswald by someone live on TV—all
of it is receding now into American legend. But on Christmas Day, December of
1963, it was right there on everyone’s mind. At that moment, I was 5 years old.
I actually remember a lot from that time of my young life, including, I can
hardly believe it, when Marilyn Monroe died a year earlier. I remember seeing
the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show a year and a half later. But for some
reason I don’t remember anything about Kennedy’s assassination. But I have to
think that for every American, the thought of it was frightening. This poem is
simply a reflection of that—frightened, angry at the slow pace of details being
released, anger at the fool world where such a thing can happen. Grief, not
feigned for artistic effect, not dramatized grief, but the real thing. Honest
and grieving.
We know from our perspective 2015
how the 60s unfolded in such a crazy way—Vietnam and all those people dying
there, the Counter-Culture, the Silent Majority, MLK and the Civil Rights
Movement, the wave of prominent assassinations, the great cultural production
in music and literature, the real gains in progressive legislation. All the
unrest. It was a time that caused real fear and anxiety in the established
conservative power structures, and they began planning their pushback right
then, which came to real power in 1980, and has now grown to monstrous proportions,
destroying piecemeal many of the progressive gains bought in the 60s, often
with blood.
I do think that a revolutionary
countermovement is swelling from underneath and this is why neo-liberal power is
responding with such destructive, hateful vehemence. Occupy Wall Street was
unorganized, and it eventually fizzled, but it was just the beginning. Corporate
power, fossil fuels, even Capitalism itself is looking vulnerable, is beginning
to totter. Their days in power look to be starting to wane, finally. But the
damage being done to voting rights, race relations, the environment—the whole
planet!—education at all levels, women’s rights, right now, is so terrifying
that it’s very natural and very easy to identify with the overall tone of this
Dream Song: anger, but mainly grief, in the face of an unforeseen and stunning
tragedy, in light of our series of unfolding tragedies, none of which, then or
now, should have happened. It’s a hot, rainy summer for me at this moment, but
Merry Christmas, Henry, from the future. I criticize and sneer at you all the
time when I think you’ve earned it, but not today. Your moment at Christmas of
1963 and mine in July 2015 are not entirely different. When grief is genuine it
merits respect.
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