If This Is Groundhog Day, Where's Bill Murray?

Later that month Tom Wicker asked him on Face the Nation whether, in light of the administration claim that the "great threat from Asian communism" made victory essential for the security of the United States, it did not follow that "perhaps we ought to do as much as needs to be done?" The United States, Kennedy replied, had originally gone into South Vietnam in order to permit the South Vietnamese to decide their own future. Plainly the South Vietnamese did not like the future held out by the Saigon regime. So we had moved on to the national security argument.

"Now we're saying we're going to fight there so that we don't have to fight in Thailand, so that we don't have to fight on the west coast of the United States, so that they won't move across the Rockies...Maybe [the people of South Vietnam] don't want it, but we want it, so we're going in there and we're killing South Vietnamese, we're killing children, we're killing women, we're killing innocent people...because [the Communists are] 12,000 miles away and they might get to be 11,000 miles away."

Quoted from the RFK book I'm reading, p. 824.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to make comparisons between any two geopolitical situations, but isn't it somewhat odd that you could change a couple nouns and arrive at a statement that one could imagine a senator saying today?

Oh Yes

1. The Rebel Sell: Why the culture can't be jammed, Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter
2. The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
3. Rabbit, Run, John Updike
4. Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
5. Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser
6. Middlemarch, George Eliot
7. The Code of the Woosters, P. G. Wodehouse
8. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
9. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
10. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Jack Weatherford
11. Let Us Compare Mythologies, Leonard Cohen
12. The Sandman: The Wake, Neil Gaiman
13. The Sandman: Season of Mists, Neil Gaiman
14. The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller
15. The Sandman: The Doll's House, Neil Gaiman
16. The Sandman: The Kindly Ones, Neil Gaiman
17. Underworld, Don Delillo
18. The Sandman: Fables and Reflections, Neil Gaiman
19. The Sandman: Brief Lives, Neil Gaiman
20. Robert Kennedy and His Times, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr
21. The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes, Neil Gaiman
22. The Sandman: Dream Country, Neil Gaiman
23. The Sandman: A Game of You, Neil Gaiman
24. The Sandman: World's End, Neil Gaiman
25. The Sandman: Endless Nights, Neil Gaiman
26. The Dark Knight Strikes Again, Frank Miller
27. Book of Longing, Leonard Cohen

Still slogging my way through RFK.

I think one of the most interesting aspects of reading biography are the reminders that people are not monolithic. People are not always of one mind, and this may seem obvious if one assumes that to mean that people's thoughts and opinions change throughout their lives, but what I really mean is that it is possible to be of multiple opinions simultaneously. It is, indeed, possible to both love and hate someone or to be in favor of two things which seem diametrically opposed (anti-abortion and pro-death penalty, perhaps).

Is this rational? Perhaps not. Is this human? Most certainly.

What is perhaps most striking about great individuals is the particular way in which these combating impulses coalesce, which particular ones come to dominate at which points in their lives. One of the recurring threads of the RFK book (reflecting Schlesinger's point of view, from what I know of his work) is that individuals can make a difference, can identify issues and effect real, positive change. It is, perhaps, the most romantic notion of the book; a vestige of that time when all the problems of society seemed solvable.

I keep asking myself if I believe in that and I'm really not sure. Some days I do and some days I don't. Maybe I'm just making excuses for myself. Because if you do believe that's true, then you're left with the obvious question: what are you doing to make things better?

We live in a society (assuming whoever reads this comes from the developed world) where all but the very lowest members remain within the top 10% of the world's population, in terms of privilege, opportunity and well-being. I personally come from an even smaller substratum, in or about the top 10% of that 10%. And often I cannot escape the feeling that I am wasting it, sitting around and waiting for something to fall into my lap.

Unfinished Lives

1. The Rebel Sell: Why the culture can't be jammed, Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter
2. The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
3. Rabbit, Run, John Updike
4. Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
5. Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser
6. Middlemarch, George Eliot
7. The Code of the Woosters, P. G. Wodehouse
8. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
9. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
10. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Jack Weatherford
11. Let Us Compare Mythologies, Leonard Cohen
12. The Sandman: The Wake, Neil Gaiman
13. The Sandman: Season of Mists, Neil Gaiman
14. The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller
15. The Sandman: The Doll's House, Neil Gaiman
16. The Sandman: The Kindly Ones, Neil Gaiman
17. Underworld, Don Delillo
18. The Sandman: Fables and Reflections, Neil Gaiman
19. The Sandman: Brief Lives, Neil Gaiman
20. Robert Kennedy and His Times, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr

There's 5 other Sandman books which I haven't picked up yet, but which I'm sure I will sometime over the next month.

It's really an incredible achievement, though one wonders if it might have been better or worse with a more consistent art crew. Sandman is the only major comic from this period that I can think of with a rotating cast of artists; many of the others were both written and drawn by the same individual (Maus, Love and Rockets, Cerebus, Sin City), and while Alan Moore worked with different artists, his stand-alone works (Watchmen and V for Vendetta) are drawn by the same artist from beginning to end. I suppose, though, that as Sandman concerns itself with the Lord of Dreams, and dreams are always in flux, the rotating cast of artists could be taken as another commentary on the world that Gaiman created.

I mean, I'm sure he just happened to use different artists for each storyline, but it's possible that he might have thought it out a bit more explicitly like that.

The RFK book I'm really looking forward to. Early on, Schlesinger (who actually passed away a day or two ago) makes the point that what is so poignant about RFK's death is that he was still in the process of becoming, a process which he had been going through his whole life. There are glimmers of the man he was at the time and whom he was becoming, perhaps most famously in the Indianapolis speech (and if you don't know what I'm taking about, I demand that you watch the linked video, and promise you will not regret it), but we will never know whether or not he would have faltered in the years to come, what mistakes he might have made and how he might have responded to them. In some ways, perhaps he was too good, too earnest, too honest of a man to live; the perfect symbol of an era which started with such promise and somehow, some way, lost its focus, as its leaders dropped by the wayside, one by one.