The audacity of decadence

Stanely Mushava
THE Golden Jubilee of John F Kennedy’s assassination being commemorated today provides America with an opportunity to introspect on the precipitate degeneration of the Oval Office from the JFK administration to the Obama administration.On his accession in 2009, Obama evoked nostalgic hindsight to JFK. The charismatic and articulate new president shared not only Kennedy’s eloquence but also his taboo-breaking ascendancy to the presidium.

Obama was the first black US president, while Kennedy was the first Catholic president. Both were ostensible heralds of a new epoch; an epoch which has proven to be a file too large to retrieve even 50 years after Kennedy’s assassination.

The most significant common ground, however, is that both men fronted as pacifist orators while they are imperialist warmongers. Both posed as figureheads of change while they are automatons of continuity.

The successive administrations between the two have only brimmed up the Western butcherbird’s washbasin of Developing World casualties.

While Kennedy retains faint vestiges of virtue in speaking up against the capitalist political economy which pull the strings on America’s successive presidential jumping-jacks and invalidates majority aspirations, Obama remains a willing automaton of the Bilderberg fat cats.

Kennedy probably landed in the line of fire for swelling the hype against capitalist interests, becoming the second American president to be assassinated after Abraham Lincoln who was caricatured in US newspapers for thawing the federacy’s stranglehold on black slaves through the Emancipation Proclamation in the lead-up to his assassination.

I must at this point, however, forestall the danger of eulogising Kennedy out of proportion. Far from a saintly statesman, Kennedy had appalling skeletons in his closet, which the certified accounts of American history conveniently ignore to avoid denting their effigy of a model hero.

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh lifted the rug off some of Kennedy’s indiscretions in his 1997 book “The Dark Side of Camelot.”

The book includes claims about the president’s semi-regular use of narcotics, enlistment of a mob leader for electoral fraud and womanising. Hersh’s book has been dismissed by his peers as a dumpsite of hearsay. Space and time disqualify me from posing as an authority on Kennedy’s indiscretions.

The Independent which enjoyed authoritative proximity to JFK can, however, prop Hersh’s account of the president’s disdain for restraint.
“One of Kennedy’s girlfriends, Judith Exner, was used to pass classified CIA plans for the assassination of Fidel Castro to Chicago mafia boss Sam Giancana, while another shared a joint of marijuana with the president, having been promised that cocaine was readily available if she preferred,” wrote Nick Bryant in a 1994 issue of The Independent, when Bill Clinton was up for impeachment for similar escapades.

The Daily Beast, before its merger with Newsweek, claimed that JFK had at least a dozen mistresses including Mimi Alford and Marilyn Monroe. Suffice to say, Kennedy does not qualify for politics’ litany of saints, if any such record exists.

What I have authoritative proximity to indict is the Kennedy administration’s well-documented hand in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, that grand patriarch of Pan-Africanism, who deserves infinitely more wreaths than Kennedy.

Six months after Lumumba’s death, Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo was assassinated by assassins using CIA supplied weapons while Fidel Castro somehow escaped the noose, despite featuring prominently on the Yankee Hitlist from the days of Eisenhower.

Obama has warmly embraced the JFK legacy by flinging America’s imperialist tentacles far and wide, more recently in Libya.

Barack Hitler (slip of pen) has also scored a first by remote controlling drones to escalate the body count in Afghanistan.

I have cause to believe that my pen defies my diplomatic grip of the overwhelming similitude between Obama and the Fuhrer. To guarantee

Living Space for his capitalist taskmasters Obama has become an unrelenting champion of abortion which accounts for the murder of 53, 380, 843 unborn babies in America since the Roe vs. Wade decision.

“There will always be people, many of good will, who do not share my view on the issue of choice. On this fundamental issue, I will not yield and Planned Parenthood will not yield,” Obama said in a CBS  interview.

Ironically, Planned Parenthood, which has invested financially in Obama, is implicated in racially targeted abortions, which blacks accounting for more than a third of its customer base.

Planned Parenthood founder Mary Sanger once said: “The masses of Negroes, particularly from the south, still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among whites is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.”

This puts abortion on the same slate with the Holocaust as premising on the fact that both are driven by racial prejudice.

Quite clearly, the deification of JFK and Obama into progressive paragons is much ado about nothing. It is the audacity of decadence, to revise relevance into the title of Obama’s bestseller.