Is it possible to save America from ugly things after JFK assassination ?? - Charles Taylor draws conclusions to analyze the Hatred against President Obama.
This is a study in Puniness : The Puny Lee Harvey Oswald and the Puniness of Dallas at the time of Kennedy's assassination :
In the Free Dictionary "Puny" is this :
1. Of inferior size, strength, or significance; weak: a puny physique; puny excuses.
2. Chiefly Southern U.S. Sickly; ill.
Puniness - the quality of being unimportant and petty or frivolous
The Nation
You Can't Always Get What You Want: On Stephen King
By Charles Taylor
December 21, 2011
You Can't Always Get What You Want: On Stephen King
Some excerpts :
In King’s new novel, 11/22/63, the sense of justice that has always animated his fiction, his hatred of bullies and bigots and busybodies, collides with the futility of extracting revenge. Encompassing more than fifty years of US history, 11/22/63 charts the country’s deterioration from the politics of inclusion to the enshrinement of economic and spiritual meanness as the official expression of national character. The plot device might almost be a child’s wish-fulfillment fantasy: a portal allows the hero to go back in time to try and stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Before the book ends, King addresses the simplicity of that wish. 11/22/63 becomes a double tragedy—of the murder that scarred America’s psyche and, despite the evidence that our good intentions produce horrendous results, of the persistence of the messianic belief that Americans have the power to right any wrong.
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If King sometimes sentimentalizes small towns, he’s spent enough time in them (and learned enough about them from Shirley Jackson) to understand the violence they breed: the spouse and child battering, the bullying, the backbiting, the jealousy, the destructiveness of gossips and prudes. King’s approach isn’t the trite Peyton Place device of showing the tawdry reality beneath the placid surface. King has more in common with the David Lynch of Blue Velvet, who refuses to separate the peaceful and beautiful from the violent and unmooring in small-town life.
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Well before the narrative reaches the ominous day, King creates a portrait of American life streaked with violence. One incident takes place during the childhood of a man who will grow up to become one of Jake’s GED students. Al has warned Jake that the past itself, determined not to change, will throw every obstacle it can in his way. To see whether he’s right, Jake decides he’ll intercede and stop a nightmare his student lived through as a child. He’s only partly successful, yet he doesn’t think twice about trying again. Here is where King makes us complicit, playing on the sense of justice he believes resides deep in the American character in order to draw us to Jake and his mission, and show how easily, and dangerously, the thought of any bad consequences can be brushed aside. We want to see Jake stop the drunken abuser who’ll murder his family, and if Jake succeeds we’re quite willing for this part of the story to end there. King isn’t. Fittingly, this novel about time travel has a long memory.
Though his treatment of them has sometimes lapsed into caricature, King captures how meager men loom terrifyingly large in the lives of the people they torment. For that reason his portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald is something new in his work. As drawn by King, Oswald is the quintessence of the American loser, a small ferrety presence not given to the terrifying outbursts of King’s usual bullies and bigots. King, who says in the novel’s afterword that he believes Oswald was the lone assassin, understands that Oswald’s puniness is, ironically, just the thing that, in the fevered imaginations of so many, has denied him the glory he was seeking in killing JFK. Who wants to believe that such a nothing of a man is capable of scarring a nation? Certainly no one who wants history to make rational sense. And probably not the readers of a large novel. A book of this size should give us a villain like Bill Sikes or at least Wackford Squeers instead of this scrawny man squirreling away his Russian wife, Marina, and baby daughter in the crummiest apartments, poring over his pathetic leaflets, nursing slights like a moody child.
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King brings that puniness to life in all its grungy detail. Jake moves in across the street from the Oswalds in a Dallas neighborhood stinking of petroleum and raw sewage, the street lined with houses little better than shacks and an ugly Monkey Ward warehouse. He keeps tabs on Oswald and his wife, and the details of their life and the lives around them strand us in a place that geographically, economically and psychically feels as if the New Frontier were taking place on another continent. Cold disgust motivates King’s portrait of Oswald: disgust at what he did, disgust that this amoeba has attached himself to our collective consciousness.
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“On the day Kennedy landed at Love Field, Dallas was a hateful place,” King writes in the afterword. There are echoes of the protests against President Obama in placards that read Help JFK Stamp Out Democracy. While it’s tempting for the left to feel superior to the thuggish and moronic elements of the radical right, it, too, or at least its bien-pensant caucus, is a target of this novel. There are plenty of reasons to be disappointed with or even angry about Obama’s performance. His persistent attempts to reach a consensus with people whose every utterance demonstrates they’ve abandoned common sense and common decency suggest someone who approaches the presidency with the ameliorating style of corporate management rather than the mixture of vision and street-fighting necessary in a president.
But to listen to the endless parade of white left commentators who have accused Obama of abandoning his base because he hasn’t achieved perfection in politics or in social justice is to realize that the radical right doesn’t have a monopoly on the divisiveness Obama’s presidency has given rise to. I’m not suggesting that Obama’s blackness makes criticizing him off-limits. But the reduction of the meaning of Obama solely to his policy decisions, the implicit dismissal of what the fact of Barack Obama means to people who before him never felt they had a voice in American politics—just as the fact of JFK made other people find their political voice for the first time—is not unlike the blindness King captures in 11/22/63. It is the seed of a reckless politics built on wish fulfillment. The constant pleasure of reading 11/22/63 is, as the National Book Foundation committee noted of King’s work in general, attributable to his belief in “the abiding power of narrative.” For a novelist who has specialized in making the everyday terrifying, 11/22/63 is something new, an alternative reality that tells us there are worse things to be scared of than the world as it is.
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