JFK’s Assassination and Contemporary Alienation

This is the first of the many articles from Tikkun's first ten years excerpted in this 30th anniversary issue. You can read the full version of each pluse many others not printed in this issue at www.tikkun.org/tikkunat30 . We wish we could have printed dozens more articles from the entire 30 years, we just do not have enough space!

Vol. 7, No. 2. 1992.

(editor’s note in 2016: Prompted by Oliver Stone’s reexamination, in his film “JFK” that was released in 1991, of the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963, Gabel’s discussion of the deeper meaning of the film presents a unique way of thinking about political life for then – and for now.)

The spiritual problem that the movie speaks to is an underlying truth about life in American society—the truth that we all live in a social world characterized by feelings of alienation, isolation, and a chronic inability to connect with one another in a life-giving and powerful way. In our political and economic institutions, this alienation is lived out as a feeling of being “underneath” and at an infinite distance from an alien external world that seems to determine our lives from the outside. True democracy would require that we be actively engaged in ongoing processes of social interaction that strengthen our bonds of connectedness to one another, while at the same time allowing us to realize our need for a sense of social meaning and ethical purpose through the active remaking of the no-longer “external” world around us. But we do not yet live in such a world, and the isolation and distance from reality that envelops us is a cause of immense psychological and emotional pain, a social starvation that is in fact analogous to physical hunger and other forms of physical suffering.

One of the main psychosocial mechanisms by which this pain, this collective starvation, is denied is through the creation of an imaginary sense of community. Today this imaginary world is generated through a seemingly endless ritualized deference to the Flag, the Nation, the Family—pseudocommunal icons of public discourse projecting mere images of social connection that actually deny our real experience of isolation and distance, of living in sealed cubicles, passing each other blankly on the streets, while managing to relieve our alienation to some extent by making us feel a part of something. Political and cultural elites—presidents and ad agencies—typically generate these images of pseudo-community, but we also play a part in creating them because, from the vantage point of our isolated positions—if we have not found some alternative community of meaning—we need them to provide what sense of social connection they can. We have discussed this phenomenon in Tikkun many times before, emphasizing recently, for example, the way David Duke is able to recognize and confirm the pain of white working-class people and thereby help them overcome, in an imaginary way, their sense of isolation in a public world that leaves them feeling invisible.

In the 1950s, the alienated environment that I have been describing took the form of an authoritarian, rigidly anti-communist mentality that coexisted with the fantasized image of a “perfect” America—a puffed-up and patriotic America that had won World War II and was now producing a kitchen-culture of time-saving appliances, allegedly happy families, and technically proficient organizations and “organization men” who dressed the same and looked the same as they marched in step toward the “great big beautiful tomorrow” hailed in General Electric’s advertising jingle of that period. It was a decade of artificial and rigid patriotic unity, sustained in large part by an equally rigid and pathological anti-communism; for communism was the “Other” whose evil we needed to exterminate or at least contain to preserve our illusory sense of connection, meaning, and social purpose. As the sixties were later to make clear, the cultural climate of the fifties was actually a massive denial of the desire for true connection and meaning. But at the time the cultural image-world of the...