Yeah, There Was Always Going to Be a June 5, 1968

My telephone rang in the middle of the night,

but I didn’t answer it. It rang and rang

and rang and SHUT UP! and rang as if it were possessed.

I always figured that good news doesn’t travel in the middle of the night, so I didn’t answer the telephone.

I let it go to hell. I was right, too.

It was somebody calling to tell me that Kennedy had been hit.

Richard Brautigan, Rommel Drives On Deep Into Egypt

I think the past was the first casualty in World War II. People simply became uninterested in the past. Now they are only interested in the past in a sort of theme-park-life way — they ransack the past for the latest design statement. There’s no sense of a continuity to which one owes a certain sort of obligation or duty or feels one’s self shaped by one just sort of picks and chooses what elements of the past one wants to exploit for one’s purposes. The second casualty possibly — I don’t know if you can date it — is the death of the future. It might be connected with the Kennedy assassination. It’s quite possible that Kennedy was in some way an avatar of the notion of radical change, of a new world recovering from the threat of thermonuclear war in the ’50s. Had he lived and served two full terms, he might have nergized this palnet. I don’t mean that I approve of Kennedy. I’m talking about a media construct by and large, but he might have — the media construct which we call J.F. Kennedy — might well have energized the planet and thrown it into a forward motion, as he did, to his credit, with the space race.

J. G. Ballard, C21, 1991