Lest We Forget

Far-called our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
  Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Kipling, “Recessional”

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. 

Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

After six months of fairly heavy-duty reading (Nathanael West, Virginia Woolf, Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Bellow, Orwell, Ishiguro, and Pasternak), I decided that it was time for a little diversion – a divertissement. In May I read P. G. Wodehouse’s Love Among the Chickens, and now I’m nearing the middle of Stephen King’s 10/22/63.

It’s a novel set in a Maine town in June of 2011 where Jake Epping is a high school teacher. He’s divorced and seemingly satisfied with his life until Al Templeton, a man who runs the diner where Jake goes every day to eat, tells him a secret: that he has found an invisible portal in the diner’s pantry that can take him back in time to September 1958. From this strange premise, King asks the reader “what if” and embarks on an alternative history adventure in which Jake is enlisted in a scheme to prevent Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating JFK (hence, the novel’s title which is the date when the assassination occurred in Dallas, Texas).

King very cleverly explores not only the fascinating physical experience of finding oneself thrown back 53 years in time (before Jake Epping’s birth), but some of its most obvious implications. In his beautiful book, Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman touched on the subject of time travel:

In this world, time is like a flow of water, occasionally displaced by a bit of debris, a passing breeze. Now and then, some cosmic disturbance will cause a rivulet of time to turn away from the mainstream, to make connection backstream. When this happens, birds, soil, people caught in the branching tributary find themselves suddenly carried to the past.

Persons who have been transported back in time are easy to identify. They wear dark, indistinct clothing and walk on their toes, trying not to make a single sound, trying not to bend a single blade of grass. For they fear that any change they make in the past could have drastic consequences for the future.

When a traveler from the future must talk, he does not talk but whimpers. He whispers tortured sounds. He is agonized. For if he makes the slightest alteration in anything, he may destroy the future. At the same time, he is forced to witness events without being part of them, without changing them. He envies the people who live in their own time, who can act at will, oblivious of the future, ignorant of the effects of their actions. But he cannot act. He is an inert gas, a ghost, a sheet without soul. He has lost his personhood. He is an exile of time.

Jake considers how the future – his present in 2011 – might be altered, but convinces himself that the positive effects of stopping Lee Harvey Oswald must far outweigh the negative effects, no matter what they turn out to be. And to his credit, Stephen King, who researched the assassination, admits to being “ninety-eight percent, maybe even ninety-nine” certain that Oswald acted alone. He opens the book with a quote from Norman Mailer: 

It is virtually not assimilable to our reason that a small lonely man felled a giant in the midst of his limousines, his legions, his throng, and his security. If such a nonentity destroyed the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, then a world  of disproportion engulfs us, and we live in a universe that is absurd. 

Mailer could’ve spared us his usual purple prose by reading a book of physics: the universe operates by accidents – randomness rules. Or he might have read Ecclesiastes: I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. [9:11]

But we all have corrective memories, which is why the past sometimes seems so inviting. Everything seemed – we think – so much easier to understand, so much simpler, and, if you’re a white man, so much better 20, 30, or 50 years ago. In 1958 (the year I was born) the going was definitely good for any white man, and it isn’t only conservatives who think how nice it would be to go back to it, if only in unserious daydreams. It’s only when some people pretend that the past can be retrieved, that things can be great again, that problems arise. 

Sometimes we need to be reminded of just how shitty the past really was. Watching the 1937 Leo McCarey comedy The Awful Truth with my dear sister one day, perhaps 13 years ago, she remarked at a scene in a night club, “Wouldn’t it have been great to be around in those days.” It was my sad duty to inform her that the time and place depicted in the scene never existed except on the soundstage of a Hollywood movie studio. The world depicted in the film is, in fact, deliberately misleading, since the Great Depression was at its deepest in 1937, with no light at the end of the tunnel. 

However tempting it may be to feel nostalgia for the past, because of the quite general feeling that ours is a decadent moment in time and things seem to be declining precipitously, it’s a good thing we can never go back. Though Stephen King dwells lovingly on some of the sweeter details of late 50s/early 60s America, in 11/22/63 he also reminds us of its ugly side:

In North Carolina, I stopped to gas up at a Humble Oil station, then walked around the corner to use the toilet. There were two doors and three signs. MEN was neatly stenciled over one door, LADIES over the other. The third sign was an arrow on a stick. It pointed toward the brush-covered slope behind the station. It said COLORED. Curious, I walked down the path, being careful to sidle at a couple of points where the oily, green-shading-to-maroon leaves of poison ivy were unmistakable. I hoped the dads and moms who might have led their children down to whatever facility waited below were able to identify those troublesome bushes for what they were, because in the late fifties most children wear short pants. 

There was no facility. What I found at the end of the path was a narrow stream with a board laid across it on a couple of crumbling concrete posts. A man who had to urinate could just stand on the bank, unzip, and let fly. A woman could hold onto a bush (assuming it wasn’t poison ivy or poison oak) and squat. The board was what you sat on if you had to take a shit. Maybe in the pouring rain. 

If I ever gave you the idea that 1958’s all Andy-n-Opie, remember the path, okay? The one lined with poison ivy. And the board over the stream. 

Once Jake (now George Amberson) arrives in Dallas, the ugly details proliferate. Because it was no coincidence that Dallas was the scene of one of the most significant acts of violence in history. Dallas was, in fact, the perfect place for it. Jake tells us

I didn’t like Dallas. No sir, no ma’am, no way. . . There were billboards advocating the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren; billboards showing a snarling Nikita Krushchev (NYET, COMRADE KRUSHCHEV, the billboard copy read, WE WILL BURY YOU!) ; there was one on West Commerce Street that read THE AMERICAN COMMUNIST PARTY FAVORS INTEGRATION. THINK ABOUT IT! Twice, on businesses whose names suggested they were Jewish-owned, I saw soaped swastikas.

A Dallas realtor explains to Jake why blacks were inferior to whites:

“You see, Noah got drunk this one time on the Ark, and he was a-layin on his bed, naked as a jaybird. Two of his sons wouldn’t look at him, they just turned the other way and put a blanket over him. I don’t know it might’ve been a sheet. But Ham – he was the coon of the family – looked on his father in his nakedness, and God cursed him and all his race to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. So there it is. That’s what’s behind it, Genesis, chapter nine. You go on and look it up, Mr. Amberson.”

In his Afterword to the novel, King wrote:

Some people will protest that I have been excessively hard on the city of Dallas. I beg to differ. If anything, Jake Epping’s first-person narrative allowed me to be too easy on it, at least as it was in 1963. On the day Kennedy landed at Love Field, Dallas was a hateful place. Confederate flags flew rightside up; American flags flew upside down. Some airport spectators held up signs reading HELP JFK STAMP OUT DEMOCRACY. Not long before that day in November, both Adlai Stevenson and Lady Bird Johnson were subjected to spit showers by Dallas voters. Those spitting on Mrs. Johnson were middle-class housewives.

This is an afterword, not an editorial, but I hold strong opinions on this subject, particularly given the current political climate of my country. If you want to know what political extremism can lead to, look at the Zapruder film. Take particular note of frame 313, where Kennedy’s head explodes. [Italics are mine] 

So, I will trudge along and finish King’s novel. I’m avoiding any spoilers I may encounter, since most of the fun of reading a book like this is in the suspense of not knowing exactly how it will end. Meanwhile the “political climate” King referred to has grown considerably worse since 2011. The election is less than seven weeks away. The diabolical object currently in the White House, along with his herd mentality devotees, doesn’t sound like he is going out without a fight. He reminds me a great deal more of Lee Harvey Oswald than of JFK. He even claimed he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue in New York City and nothing would happen. I hope he isn’t too shocked when, on November 3rd, something does happen.