Camelot in Wonderland: Kennedy, Death, and the Myth of a Better America

By: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis

      Political assassinations often turn complex and imperfect men into saints. Immediately after the killing, the assassin’s victim is purged of his sins and every form of controversy surrounding his foreign and domestic polices become misunderstood attempts at peace and prosperity. An assassination’s anniversary, then, plunges the public down a rabbit hole of memory that leads to a fantasy land where the victim’s lost vision of the future becomes reality. The nation’s current state of affairs is temporarily accepted as a consequence of the figure’s death, no other type of history weighing in on it. Of course it is all imagination, a wish things were the way the deceased leader wanted them to be: better. This is the case of John F. Kennedy, a man taken from the American public as perhaps the greatest president the country had ever seen.

     As the anniversary of Kennedy’s death approaches, American television churns out its traditional barrage of documentaries that portray America as a fatherless nation come November 22nd, 1963. We are reminded that Kennedy was here to save the world and that he signified the last hope for peace to prosper, anywhere. Post-Kennedy America, so it seems, became a nightmare version of itself, nearly post-apocalyptic in scope. Vietnam, segregation, the counterculture, the sexual revolution, and hippies were all things that could have been avoided had Kennedy lived. And all throughout we are left without much space to question whether his presidency was really destined to become the epitome of democracy, the true example of freedom in the world. To this day, it is thought Kennedy left before he could fix everything. That his unfinished presidency meant the country’s destiny was severed from greatness. But history shows that the Kennedy administration, while fashionable and charismatic, meant business as usual. 

     Before that fateful November day, Kennedy had amassed a considerable amount of criticism that came from all sides of the political spectrum. The Civil Rights movement regarded Kennedy an opportunist keeping desegregation on the sidelines for his second term, when it couldn’t hurt his chances of securing another term. Washington hardliners considered Kennedy’s foreign policy as soft after the Bay of Pigs fiasco and weak when Cuba resurfaced as a potential military target come the missile crisis. The argument was Soviet Russia would never have made Cuba a nuclear site had Kennedy taken it during the invasion.

     Others blamed Kennedy for Vietnam and warned that sending military advisors and economic aid to Southeast Asia would be interpreted as intervention and could land America in a war it could not easily win. Kennedy had agreed with Eisenhower’s labeling of Laos as “the cork in the bottle” in regards to it being the instigator of threat in the region. Kennedy partnered with Diem in South Vietnam and went ahead with a policy of limited military action. But all of that dissipated after Dallas, when either a lone gunman from the Dallas Book Depository or a team of assassins shooting from the Grassy Knoll made John F. Kennedy the fourth President to be assassinated while in office.

     As the nation mourned it also began to forget. Kennedy became an idea that should live on as an example future presidents should aspire to, future generations even. His criticisms faded into visions of an incomplete experiment yielding results on American Freedom being the standard of living worldwide. Vietnam no longer became a war Kennedy began in the early years of his presidency. The fact he kept intervention limited meant Kennedy was really just laying the international framework for diplomacy to take over. Instead Vietnam became Lyndon Johnson’s fault, the Southern Vice President turned President after the assassination (maybe landing the role after he had conspired with the assassins to stage a coup d'état should conspiracy theorists have their way). Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) bases its main argument on this contention. 

     According to the film, the authority of the state over its people resides in its war powers. Stone’s Kennedy, painted as a complete pacifist, wanted to end the war and bring the Cold War to its knees through diplomacy. Assuming war is the organizing principle of American society, a dark government wing set between the military and the White House began to form, to question Kennedy’s commitment to Southeast Asia. Of course, we have to accept war is also the backbone of the country’s economy, the Military-Industrial-Complex Eisenhower warned about. No war meant no economic prosperity and so Kennedy had to be replaced with someone committed to war. Vietnam became the force that pulled the rifle’s trigger. Blame the assassination on war and those who court it. Forget Kennedy escalated intervention in 1962 and approved the Strategic Hamlet Program which involved village internment and the forced relocation of Vietnamese peasantry so Communist insurgents could remain isolated from possible sympathizers. It was only after April 1963 that Kennedy started to voice a desire to extract American forces from Vietnam. He was quoted as saying: “We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at any point.”

     Meanwhile, race relations became another experiment left unfinished. We remember Kennedy signing Executive Order 10925, which required government contractors employ or treat employees equally without regard of race, creed, color or national origin. We forget Martin Luther King, Jr. and his associates (who accused the President of being slow paced with domestic reform) drafted a document that called on Kennedy to enact a sort of Second Emancipation Proclamation that would deal the final blow to segregation, nation-wide, in 1962. Kennedy did not execute that order. The path towards the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended up being a long and violent one and it was ultimately signed by Lyndon Johnson.

     And yet, Kennedy has captured the hearts and minds of the American public, being that he became what hearts and minds ought to be. Annually, we go down the rabbit hole to a place called Camelot, where royalty is synonymous with the Kennedy name and peace is an idea original to it. Where the United States of America can revel in the make-believe that it was once close to reaching perfection, of being the moral weight on which the world could balance. But once down there, we should ask ourselves whether those visions of a near perfect America are given too freely to a man who was so far from it. John F. Kennedy has become a man out of time. Unstuck in it. He became universal, the light we still hope can shine on darker days. 

     Perhaps it is unfair to judge a man with the full weight of history. Kennedy’s legacy is no doubt unquestionable. He most publicly aided the fight for Civil Rights, prevented a nuclear confrontation with Russia during the Cuban Missile Crisis, initially approved an overhaul of American immigration policy reuniting many foreign families and dismantling the selection of immigrants based on country of origin, and funded NASA’s space program with the intention of putting a man on the moon (in truth this last one came out of a sense of national prestige after the Soviets wounded it by being the first to fly in space, but still). His accomplishments are admirable and deserve remembrance, but they do not constitute an example of political flawlessness. John F. Kennedy is much more complex than he is permitted to be. A man that knew J. Edgar Hoover was wiretapping Martin Luther King, Jr. based on rocky evidence some of his associates were communist sympathizers. A strategist that contemplated pulling out of Southeast Asia only after the Communists acquired the upper hand over the political fate of the region. A politician that can be accused of postponing Civil Rights reform for fear of losing a re-election. In a sense, Kennedy is the great enigma. A figure, a symbol, that guarded his secrets well by hiding them in plain sight. An American icon that should be remembered for every decision he took as Commander in Chief of the United States, so long as he is remembered as an imperfect man.

Because It's Fun: Comics, History, and Knowledge

By: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis

      Imagine you are writing your Master’s dissertation on comic book superheroes and how they uphold the righteousness of the current war against terrorism. You argue that superheroes like Captain America and Nick Fury (apparently his superpower is never growing old) return to their war metaphors, the ones they upheld as heroes of the Second World War and the Cold War respectively, to ask readers to view the present, the contemporary, through their wars. You would say post-9/11 America is too much a grey area of contention and meaning and that superheroes could ease that shade of thought into a simpler yet more dangerous vision of an America still defined by the idea that war is good, fair, and necessary…just like World War II.

      In the process you read comics, a couple of books on historical theory, and actual history books on the wars your superheroes act through. All throughout you constantly feel like an innovator and you realize that in writing history through comic books you are actually having fun! You connect the popular to the academic and it feels like the topic can really resonate within a discipline that holds too dear to traditional primary sources. The kind of history that is being produced cannot be so specifically defined, if anything it might resemble something close to a history of mentalities rooted in the world of 9/11, but it is still an analytical record of what comic book creators and people could have thought on upon reading the comics of that era. Who said old documents and newspapers were the only ways one could reconstruct the past? Aren’t comic books, film, literature, and other works of art representative of their time periods and the things that were contemplated in them?

      So, the dissertation written, you prepare to present your investigation and in comes another realization: what if the academic universe accepts your findings as anything but history? You panic and reread. It comes down to double checking you punched the academic ticket by establishing historiographical precedence, gave your shout out to the classics in cultural theory and discourse and ideology, and included the ever necessary justification on comic books being an actual historical source. Neglecting one of these points can land you in a tough spot when presenting the dissertation, leaving yourself wide open for criticisms that can derail the discussion into areas more traditional than you expected, and sometimes unrelated to the nature of your work. Then you go back to square one and that sense that you created something necessary and spectacular dives into frustration. It becomes an insisting needle in the eye that keeps the investigation outside of academia’s limelight while also questioning its degree of accessibility to a more general public. You wrote this for a university, remember? 

   All of a sudden everything seems far away from fun. Instead the feeling is more akin to being stuck in a sort of limbo that keeps you far from actually contributing to the creation of knowledge, much less it being useful and helpful in understanding the contemporary. Relentlessly, the following question arises: why did you write this? But the answer is simple. Because it was fun.

      The answer is valid. It is also deceiving. Fun is necessary for keeping interest alive in producing any kind of work, but it must be met with the assurance that knowledge can be extracted from the endeavor fun is to reside in. Comic books can balance this necessity just fine. They keep us enthralled in the fantasy that goes with reading about gods and super beings fending off alien invasions, especially if they do so with the force of American history backing them up. In their simplicity we find ideologies that seem innocent but that dig deeper in creating ideas that keep war a rational and often just and necessary action.  And it seems to come casually, not imbued in the seriousness of academic writing. This, evidently, should be studied.

      Matthew Pustz, in his anthology Comic Books and American Cultural History, argues that casual learning (meaning that knowledge can be extracted from more popular productions of fiction given a wider exposure of the product and its appeal) can bring about something we cannot lose sight of: “that the past is worth knowing about and that doing history can be fun.” This is where academic history has trouble keeping up. Somewhere along the road, academic historians lost touch with the possibility of knowledge being popular and common (in the best possible way). And it comes down to a matter of accessibility, something the academic culture is short on. 

     Consider the following situation: the current price for a Captain America or Nick Fury comic book stands between $2.99 and $3.99, much less than the $19.99 and up price range set upon books and academic journals and magazines. The American Historical Review journal, for example, requires paid membership to the American Historical Association which costs $40.00 if you are a student. If you are not a student then prices go up. The journal, as it stands, is published five times a year while comic books publish their continuing stories either biweekly or monthly (almost never outside that timeframe). Accessibility is key in terms of relevance and interest and it seems that comic books here have the upper hand. Academic historians cannot compete in attractiveness and persuasion with beings draped in the colors of the American flag wielding unbreakable shields or beings camouflaged in military fatigues aiming down sights trained on Third World dictators (labeled as such by the characters themselves).

     This is one of those ‘for better and worse’ scenarios. On the one hand we have academic journals too detached from the common reader to become appealing or even be considered as necessary readings in a more general and popular sense. On the other we have comics that too freely justify war (in the cases of Captain America and Nick Fury more intently) and do so in spectacular fashion. The good here is that both are capable of shedding much light on our current military and political predicament. Now, they can do better to up accessibility for a wider range of readers or to be more mindful of the symbols their stories uphold. It can be argued that fiction is not bound to the responsibility of being either pedagogical or informative on the history it uses. And yet readers expect certain degrees of faithfulness to the past and are quite eager to accept it at face value. And writers know this all too well. If anything, it should be noted that with much fun comes great responsibility. 

     In the end it is all a matter of balance, something the academic world is severely lacking. Comic books might use history too loosely, but academic history is too serious about it. And that takes away from its appeal and the possibility of being integrated into the popular arena of the common reader. Academic history cannot remain within the consensus of its tradition in terms of sources and methodology. It will lose readers and remain a thing restricted to the college world, whereas comics are rising in popularity. Superhero stories often become gateways to history much like war movies and historical dramas do. Movies such as Saving Private Ryan became for the history of the Second World War what Gangs of New York became for the history of the city of New York, gateways to common knowledge. Forrest Gump, a favorite amongst history teachers, became the equivalent of a general American history book, over in 142 minutes. The reason why they stay within popular culture and cycle through repeat viewings? Because they are fun to watch. Because, whether we like it or not, we learn from them, casual though the knowledge in them may be. Comic books do the same thing. They introduce readers to history, become gateways to the past. And they let us know that history, while important, can also be fun.

When Supermen Lament not Being Real: the demise of the superhero in the wake of 9/11

by: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis

When the Twin Towers fell on September 11th, 2001, Superman was nowhere to be found. Spider Man’s senses failed to tingle, the Fantastic Four explored other dimensions, and Captain America was too invested, perhaps, in other threats more immediate and less secretive than the one that descended upon New York on that day. The Hulk had no other option than to get angry after the fact. The case could weigh more profoundly on Spider Man given his actual residency in the city, being that Superman lives in the fictional city of Metropolis (evident though it may be that said city was originally modeled after Manhattan in both scope and character to the point of it being labeled in the comics themselves as “The Big Apricot”). And yet, the fact still remained that neither one of them could even conceive such a likelihood so as to later explain the attack in fictional form.
 
     Writing for SF Weekly, Robert Wilonsky noted perceptively that, “In a post-Sept 11 world, even the phrase, ‘Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane!’ sounds different; its awe has been replaced by shock and repulsion” (see Comic Book Nation by Bradford Wright). Comic books as an expression in escapism could no longer be recognized as such when the comic book world itself had to explain the absence of the Twin Towers and why their heroes were incapable of stopping the terrorist attacks when they had been able to fend off countless other threats more intense and dangerous in scope when contrasted with the reality of the the comic world. Battling Galactus, the giant world-eating alien, pales in comparison to two planes that should’ve been easily swatted from the sky by a single superhero, much less by a group of them such as the Avengers or the Justice League, each with their own god-like heroes any one of which could’ve single-handedly stopped the attacks. But that quite simply did not happen. 

      In their absence, the public chose to confide their expected heroics to real men and women who served as firemen, police officers, congressmen, senators, vice presidents and presidents. Men and women that actually existed. This still didn’t ease the pain of explaining the attacks within the logic of a superhero world. The immediate comic book response was Heroes by Marvel Comics. Published in December 2001, Heroes was particularly interesting in its effort to unite icons old and new—or rather, in its ambition to establish new icons while simultaneously reintroducing old ones, as writer Stefanie Diekmann states in the Guardian article “Hero and Superhero.” Many of Marvel's famous characters, such as Spider Man, the Silver Surfer and Captain America, were resurrected and represented alongside the ‘protagonists’ of 9/11: firemen, police officers and other rescue workers immortalized visually as covered in the black dust of the broken towers. 

      The front page of Heroes is subtitled: “The world's greatest superhero creators honor the world's greatest heroes.” The idea within the book is that fiction should bow to reality in the immediate aftermath of an event so catastrophic in proportions so as to actually establish an historic time-frame or era (remember, American life after the attacks is now considered as the post-9/11 era). DC Comics followed in releasing 9/11: The Worlds’s Finest Comics Book Writers & Artists Tell Stories to Remember with short stories and single page artwork by the industry’s top talents. The book’s cover sees an Alex Ross drawn Superman standing before a mural littered with policemen, firefighters, nurses, and rescue workers. Above and to the left of Superman is a small word balloon saying “Wow.” Again, fiction recognizing reality’s place in the aftermath, or not intentionally seeking a spotlight it can’t honestly and sincerely fill at the moment.

      This passing of the baton, if only for a moment, is interesting if not a bit deceptive. Superheroes do recognize true heroics in the men and women of 9/11, but they do so with an authority bestowed upon them by readers that accept their judgment as sound in recognizing heroics in other people. In other words, they seem to be grading the true protagonists of 9/11 by superhero standards, the same ones expected by comic book readers. If such is the case, the superhero’s lament is one of not being real enough to save the day. But their saving grace is being able to guide the coronation of everyday rescue workers, policemen, nurses, and firemen as real-life superheroes. 

      Perhaps one of the most striking expressions of the superhero’s lament is found in Amazing Spider Man #36, released October 31st, 2001. Within the opening pages of the comic book we see Spider Man almost lost in the color of fire and explosions of the collapsed towers saying, ever so subtly in tone, “God.” His only expression amidst the unknowable in a single word, collecting public sentiment and becoming one with New York in a day where all shared the same feeling, calling to the same being. “God.” The pages pass and we come to New Yorkers fleeing from the destruction, looking at Spider Man, and asking: “Where were you? How could you let this happen?” Spider Man’s only response, in the form of narration and not dialogue, is: “How do you say we didn’t know? We couldn’t know. We couldn’t imagine.” The lament of the superhero, best expressed in this Spider Man issue, rests on 9/11 laying bare the limits of fiction in its wake. When the unimaginable happens, one cannot expect the imagined to act on our behalf. In the wake of 9/11 it was up to superheroes to recognize heroics in the men and women of the real world. It wasn’t up to superheroes, at that moment, to save the day but to comfort loss and let real men and women don the capes of heroes, if only for a short while.

El filme como lenguaje y el remake como traducción

Por Gabriel Alejandro

El ser humano traduce porque es un ser finito pero con deseos infinitos; traduce porque dispone, al mismo tiempo, de una ubicación concreta y móvil (espacio y tiempo) y de libertad; traduce porque, a pesar de la presencia constante de la muerte, está poseído por el deseo inextinguible de empezar siempre de nuevo: traducir es nacer de nuevo, es,como quería el rabí Nahman de Braslav, negarse a ser viejo.

-Lluís Duch

     ¿Remake? ¿Por qué? O, mejor dicho, ¿para qué? ¿Para qué alterar algo que ya funciona (o que no funcionó)? Sin duda muchos nos hemos planteado una de estas preguntas en algún momento. Una respuesta inmediata y sencilla puede ser el dinero, y la necesidad de generar cantidades copiosas por parte de la industria de cine. Otra solución menos verde pero más gris puede ser lo que argumenta Alan Moore, autor de novelas gráficas como Watchmen, V for Vendetta y From Hell. Moore, en una entrevista con el portal Co.Create, arguyó que como las mentes creativas no confían en las grandes empresas con su propiedad intelectual, estos últimos optan por acudir al refrito:   

There's been a growing dissatisfaction and distrust with the conventional publishing industry, in that you tend to have a lot of formerly reputable imprints now owned by big conglomerates. As a result, there's a growing number of professional writers now going to small presses, self-publishing, or trying other kinds of [distribution] strategies. The same is true of music and cinema. It seems that every movie is a remake of something that was better when it was first released in a foreign language, as a 1960s TV show, or even as a comic book. Now you've got theme park rides as the source material of movies. The only things left are breakfast cereal mascots. In our lifetime, we will see Johnny Depp playing Captain Crunch.

     Sea cual sea, cual más les guste, la realidad es que cada año vemos más y más propuestas para remakes. Pero, ¿alguna vez se han preguntado a qué convenciones concierne rehacer un filme? Por un lado, las diferencias socioculturales actuales son las que requieren de una traducción para las películas extranjeras. Eso va sin decir. Pero por el otro, el cambio constante de nuestras propias prácticas e ideologías socioculturales sugiere que ciertos filmes sean revisitados con una nueva perspectiva después de cierto tiempo. Estos son como una traducción de Shakespeare del inglés isabelino al inglés moderno. Y, al igual que un libro, el acto de traducir un filme se hace posible gracias a que el cine también contiene y es un lenguaje.

      La idea del filme como lenguaje surgió durante la gestación de la teoría del cine en Francia para la década de los sesenta. En aquél tiempo, los teóricos se anclaron en la lingüística estructuralista y la semiología como punto de referencia para su razonamiento. Concluyeron que, como una obra cinematográfica involucra un guion o texto, el lenguaje escrito responde a una serie de relaciones particulares o “underlining” (contexto o “fondo”) y debería estudiarse sincrónicamente. Un par de años después, un crítico de cine llamado Christian Metz comparó la metáfora de “cine-escritura” con la relación entre langue y parole de Saussure y sostuvo que el cine, como manifestación visual de un escrito, comparte la semejante característica sistemática de un lenguaje y, por ende, es uno (Robert Stam, The Political Companion to American Film. “Contemporary Film Theory”, 2000, 74-77). En resumidas cuentas: El guion o texto de una película se compone de un lenguaje pertinente al entorno social y temporal en el cual fue escrito; y que el proceso de realización de un guion o texto a la imagen en pantalla comparte grados sistemáticos semejantes a esos que existen entre el lenguaje escrito y su manifestación verbal.

      La traducción, contrario a lo que muchos creerán, no es la mera búsqueda de equivalencias de un texto en otro idioma; es mucho más. Conlleva a un intercambio intercultural donde el mediador (o traductor) se rinde ante la negociación infinita con el texto fuente para así procrear un texto meta “conveniente” para su público. Y, de misma forma en que no existe tal cosa como un escrito inocente, las traducciones tampoco lo son. Estas también van de la mano con lo que el teórico André Lefevere llamó el <<universo del discurso>>; o sea, “el conjunto de objetos, conceptos, conocimientos, creencias y costumbres que comparte una cultura en una época determinada” (Moya, 2007, 157). Por lo tanto, la traducción como acto de reescritura conlleva la intención de elevar el lenguaje (y sus convenciones) del texto fuente hacia un estado moderno, sincrónico; de domesticar un universo extranjero. 

      Tomemos como ejemplo el filme Red Dawn, originalmente del 1984 y reescrita para el 2012. En la versión del ‘84, debutada durante plena Guerra Fría, la nación norteamericana es invadida por una coalición entre rusos, cubanos y nicaragüenses (las naciones “rojas” en aquél entonces). El preámbulo establece que la invasión fue posible debido una serie de eventos hipotéticos como la expansión de la Unión Soviética y un golpe de estado en México, lo cual resulta en el abandono de los Estados Unidos ante la OTAN. En el reescrito, los invasores fueron canjeados por los norcoreanos y el preámbulo se basa en eventos que ocurrieron en la vida real como las amenazas de Corea del Norte, la recesión económica y el aumento en tropas norteamericanas en el Oriente Medio. Sin embargo, el factor que más distingue ambas películas son los lugares donde se realizan las escenas de acción. Mientras que la primera basa sus explosiones y tiroteos lejos de la ciudad, entre montañas y bosques, la nueva versión gira alrededor de la infraestructura urbana y su destrucción. Y es que aunque la intención del primer filme fue de “traer la guerra a casa” como establece (cosa que nunca se había dado), tal cosa no fue posible visualizar hasta después del 11 de septiembre de 2001. Desde entonces, la industria de entretenimiento se ha lucrado del tema a través de todos sus medios, particularmente con videojuegos como Call of Duty. Como dato curioso, en el remake, un joven expresa lo mucho que extraña jugar estos juegos y otro le responde: “Dude, we ARE living Call of Duty, and it sucks.” (Hermano, estamos VIVIENDO el juego, y apesta) 

      Sin embargo, no todos los cambios que se hacen son perceptibles u obvios. Ese es el caso de la comedia inglesa Death at a Funeral (2007), que tuvo múltiples adaptaciones como Daddy Cool (2009, Bollywood) y de nuevo Death at a Funeral (2010, en Estados Unidos). Esta vez, el tema de la película que gira alrededor de los problemas familiares y el tabú de la homosexualidad hicieron eco en culturas (y subculturas) donde el elemento de la familia prevalece socialmente. Entonces la adaptabilidad del tema y la característica común de los públicos meta permitió que el escrito no sufriera cambios mayores excepto por la localización del escenario y sus actores; hecho que aún es parte de la traducción. 

      Terrence Hawkes, resumiendo el postulado sobre escritura de Tzvetan Todorov, escribió que “All writing takes place in the light of other writing, and represents a response to the ‘world’ of writing that pre-exists…” (1977, 101) Todo escrito toma de o se inspira en otros textos y responde a una experiencia particular. Para el traductor, esto brinda una cantidad innumerable de opciones cuando le toca fungir como mediador intercultural y le permite crear un texto como cualquier escritor. Tanto la visión del autor del texto fuente como del traductor quedan plasmadas en los resultados porque, como dijo Moya, “… tanto el escritor que cuenta una historia como el reescritor que la traduce ponen algo de su propia cosecha…” (2007, 157) Y es esta “contaminación” bidireccional lo que hace que un escrito perdure y evolucione al pasar de los tiempos. Un escrito necesita la reescritura de misma forma en que la traducción requiere a un texto fuente si desea sobrevivir. Sin embargo, a diferencia del punto de partida, el meta tiene que al menos reflejar algo de la esencia del trabajo de partida y en ese sentido el cine no es muy distinto. El elemento visual permite que ciertas cosas se digan o expliquen sin usar palabras pero como quiera se realiza a través de (un) lenguaje. El remake, como la reescritura, es y será, una herramienta necesaria del sistema lingüístico.

The Twilight Zone and Kennedy-era Optimism: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Sixties

by Gabriel Alejandro

"Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself."
-John F. Kennedy inaugural address (January 20, 1961)

     The fifties’ last couple of years witnessed a shift in perspective that contrasted with the doom and gloom that had plagued the U.S. since the end of World War II and its subsequent lead-up to the Cold War. The transition peaked when a young Irish Catholic was nominated for the presidential ticket by the Democratic Party and later won the 1960 elections. A Harvard graduate, John F. Kennedy represented a “warmer” alternative to a nation whose domestic dispute resembled its foreign one; cold.

      One of the main objectives in Kennedy’s domestic agenda involved the reconciliation between the arts and politics, a relationship that the past decade had thoroughly tarnished. Hollywood Blacklisting and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunt had pushed many entertainment workers into exile during the forties and early fifties, leaving those who stayed behind without stable employment and in fear of persecution. But now, gone were the days McCarthyism and the House of Un-American Activities Committee, and in their stead were Kennedy’s youthful and progressive prospects. This meant that every writer, actor, director, producer and composer could venture freely into their craft without worry of whiplash by the government which, in turn, had set a precedent for the American audience:

     He [Kennedy] was…the first presidential candidate to mount both a literary and a television 
     [emphasis added] campaign for the office, the only one comfortable in both media, and 
     the perfect man for a time when Americans were teetering on a balance point between image and
     word. (Thurston Clarke, Ask Not, 2010; P. 115)

Television, a medium that had been persecuted for its then-rapid widespread and informative capabilities, was becoming more and more common in every household. This, along with a young president’s embrace of the medium, catapulted the industry’s creativity into experimenting with never-seen-before themes and techniques.

      One program in particular that emerged during this era was Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. Originally presented as a fantasy/science fiction anthology series, The Twilight Zone constantly touched on subjects that reflected the worries and aspirations of the times. The show’s first episode aired on October 2, 1959, three months before Kennedy began campaigning for the primary elections (January 2, 1960) and was cancelled in late January 1964, less than three months after his assassination (November 22, 1963). But the program’s five-year-run would be enough for it to leave its mark in television history. By exploring different aspects of the human psyche such as that of a soldier’s during war, the possibility of life in other planets, and giving new angles to historical events, The Twilight Zone ventured into territory that would have been deemed unsuitable for television would it have aired some years earlier.
 

      In “Where Is Everybody?,” the first episode that formally aired under The Twilight Zone brand name, we meet an amnesiac Air Force pilot roaming in a deserted town. After much scavenging and self-questioning, the man finally collapses after running from a shop and into a street crossing pole. We then see that the man is not really in a desolated town but in a test chamber, and a group of military personnel observes the unfolding of his delusion. He is a test subject in a moon trip simulator, completely isolated in a town was just an illusion. After being carried out by medics, he gets a glimpse of the real moon and says, “Hey! Don’t go away up there! Next time it won’t be a dream or a nightmare. Next time it’ll be for real. So don’t go away. We’ll be up there in a little while.”

      Aside from the nuclear tension that characterized the Cold War, the space race against the Soviet Union comes in close second. This competition would not have only granted technological supremacy to its victor, but it would have also awarded ideological superiority to the winning nation. The U.S. audience had been fantasizing about space travel since the early years of film and television. But for a while any public “space talk” was avoided amid fears of Russian spies acquiring classified information. That lasted until May 25, 1961, when Kennedy, before a joint session of Congress, gave his "Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs” speech in which he urged the Nation to set the goal of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” A year later, on September 12, 1962, he gave another speech, later known as the “Moon Speech,” at Rice Stadium in Houston, Texas. This time he expressed how the trip to the moon would spur an aftermath of technological innovations similar to previous achievements such as the printing press and the steam engine. Even though the goal was set to be long-term (before the end of the decade) and the Russians had the advantage, the Nation had been rallied up and felt that the task at hand was within grasp for the first time.

      Other well-known episodes from the first season such as “Time Enough at Last” and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” (both airing between November 1959 and March 1960) also carried the spirit of the epoch in more than one form. In the first one we meet Henry Bemis, an avid reader surrounded by uncultured people. He is an admirer of Robert Frost (who, coincidentally, recited a poem during Kennedy’s inaugural) and is mocked by both his boss and wife for his passion for literature. The subject of anti-intellectualism was well-known at the Kennedy camp. A lover of words and history, Kennedy believed past administrations had strayed from establishing an intellectual core and compensated by opening the doors to intellectuals in his administration. Furthermore, in “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” the topic veers from current or future events into the near-past. Maple Street is your typical 1950s portrait of an American neighborhood until bizarre incidences take place after a shining object is seen in the sky. Since the residents do not know the cause of these occurrences, they begin to single out each other by creating conspiracies fueling the idea that a monster dwells among them. It is a clever reimagining of Communist paranoia and its blind fervor that stalked the government under Senator McCarthy. The episode ends with a conversation between the culprits, two extra-terrestrial beings who observe the events from afar, when one says: “… I take it this place –This ‘Maple Street,’ is not unique?” To which the other one responds: “By no means. The world is full of Maple Streets. And we'll go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves. One to the other...One to the other...One to the other...” (The “monsters” in the title referring to human beings instead of actual monsters or aliens).

      In conclusion, one could spend countless pages and ink counting the parallels between history
and fiction in every Twilight Zone episode. For many, Kennedy embodied the spirit of the people which sought to distance itself from the practices and ideologies of the past. This resulted in a large manifestation of arts and academic work in government affairs and vice versa. The constant mirroring and exposure of political subjects in television and movies resulted in the “de-stigmatization” of some elements but also in the further expansion of others. In one hand, the possibility of reaching the moon and its advances was tangible; but on the other, the bomb and other scare-tactic representatives were still ever-present in every household. Nonetheless, this did not halt the television and film industries from maintaining the flux of interesting proposals throughout the decade. And even though creativity persisted, the early sixties’ optimism, along with Kennedy, ceased on November 22, 1963.

Playing 9/11: or how video games redeem American history in the twenty-first century

Ricardo A. Serrano Denis

            It is September 11^th, 2012, and I have just led a select team of American Special Forces through Wall Street and into the New York Stock Exchange in an attempt to disable a Russian jamming tower that keeps the city’s skies under foreign control. The conflict? The Russo-American War of 2016. The battlefield? A Sony Playstation 3 console holding one of the most successful video game franchises in recent history on its disc drive, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011).

            Whether we like it or not, the struggle between history, myth, and remembrance has now acquired a new front of discursive contention, video games. Jeremy K. Saucier, in his article Playing the Past: The Video Game Simulation as Recent American History, speaks to this by stating the following:

Driven by new research, new technologies, and new markets at the end of the twentieth century, video games, with their ever-growing narrative and visual sophistication, stand posed to rival the art forms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like other cultural products, such as film, literature, or music, video games express cultural tensions and anxieties. Their subjects and narratives speak to a particular society’s place and time and are thus important sources for historical work. Video games are potentially the most powerful storytelling medium of the twenty-first century.

The narrative power of video games stems from an already established popular culture that accepts the consuming of history in uncontroversial packets of memory as filtered through myth. In other words, we like our reality mythically cooked. And what better way to cook reality than with a simulated work of fiction whose control rests in the actual daily consumer of history, video gamers. This contention makes sense once we realize that 9/11 quite simply exposed mainstreamed conceptions of the world we live in as being governed by the politics of film and its representation. What was the fall of the Twin Towers if not a real life repeat of Independence Day or countless other end-of-the-world scenarios put in celluloid form. This is not to reduce the September 11^th terrorist attacks to an event solely popular in visual culture. But one can argue that Americans, movie-goers par excellence, were subjected to imagery not unfamiliar to them when the towers collapsed. In effect, September 11^th proved we live in a movie-made world. A quick glance at video games after the event contributes to the understanding of such an idea.

            According to Tom Engelhardt, in his book The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire, Americans “were already imagining versions of September 11 soon after the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.” With the advent of Hollywood through the newly popularized genre of the war film, post-1945 America became enthralled in a visual culture that gave sense to an event that only a select part of their society experienced. Values and morals in wartime became universal because film mass produced images accepted as war truths. Consequently, war as we know it today had to be re-experienced through film first in order for its meanings to be fully encrusted into the official national narrative. It can be argued that war is a movie experience first when it comes to the common knowledge of it for people that didn’t experience the conflict first-hand. Which brings us to twenty-first century gaming.

            Experiencing war outside of itself remains an endeavor of imagination mediated by popular culture. Now, what is interesting about imagination today is that it has become resoundingly dangerous in representing the past and its present tensions, and repercussions, given the expansion of mediums that play out fiction. And within those mediums, video game consoles are amongst the more powerful.

            Popular culture finds enduring meaning in analogies that employ simple metaphors that mirror reality in an effort to make fiction easily recognizable. Take, for instance, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. As explained above, this video game pits players against a Russian invasion of the Western World. The plot is intricately interwoven with ideas such as home grown terrorism, foreign invasion concepts mediated by Cold War history, and destruction imagery specific to a post-9/11 world (meaning city warfare, a heavy emphasis on building destruction by large scale objects like missiles or planes, and dust covered streets littered with civilian casualties). Players get lost in the detail of faithfully recreated weaponry and military lingo, weapons have their official real-world name and technical designation and they are modeled after their newest incarnations.

While this type of information is an interesting phenomenon in itself, it is the conscious attempt at an uncontroversial plot line that stands out as dangerous. Creating a global state of war (the main marketing line for the game was that Modern Warfare 3 waged World War III on consoles) meant for the game’s developers (Infinity Ward) creating an enemy that was both easily recognizable and safe enough to shoot without disrupting socio-political sensibilities. In doing so, they reverted to Cold War enemy stereotypes that actually rescue the Soviet enemy from the recent past and dresses them up in combat fatigues that shy away from Communist red in favor of a more complex shade of gray that projects a sort of historical vendetta, a return to unfinished business that requires an American foreign policy of constant military awareness so as not to repeat new Pearl Harbors.

In essence, Modern Warfare 3’s most dangerous discursive component rests in the fact that they relive historical discourses by fighting specific Cold War battles and situations that remember Soviet enemies and old antagonisms. What is interesting here is that those ideas are still grounded on the 20^th century mindset of war being a stable sphere of American identity. It is here that Tom Engelhardt’s American war story argument comes into play.

The American war story (as explained in Engelhardt’s book The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation) posits itself, in the 21^st century, as a reminder of moral clarity and responsibility inherent in American identity (catering to a sense of military duty after the Second World War). According to Engelhardt, the American war story propels the idea of national innocence in times of war. America is always standing guard at the watchtowers of freedom, seeking out international injustices to squash so long as war never answers to the politics of a first-strike policy (meaning that the United States should never take the offensive initiative). In other words, American war is always a defensive reaction to foreign, and thus evil, aggression suffered on American soil or threatening United States’ national security (see Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, the September 11^th 2001 Terrorist Attacks).

            In Modern Warfare 3, the American war story is upheld through the idea that the enemy struck first, as seen in the very first chapter of the video game when Russians invade New York City, pushing American forces to take to the streets and take out Russian signal jammers that keep the American air cavalry blind. September 11^th is converted into the appropriate setting for the American war story to manifest itself through given recent memory’s pull to the terrorist attacks. In other words, the war story becomes more potent because it fuses twentieth century history discourses with the aesthetic of the post-9/11 world. In fact, it makes the war story more powerful given that the enemy’s first strike is quite literally on American soil, as opposed to Pearl Harbor when one contemplates the meanings of geographic and cultural distances within codes of identity in American politics. When the Pearl Harbor attack occurred certain sectors of the American public did not know what Pearl Harbor was or where it was located (see John Dower’s War Without Mercy). Modern Warfare 3 skips the possibility of confusion or ignorance by making the warzone easily recognizable. 

What is interesting, and dangerous, is that in making it recognizable, the game’s developer dipped fiction into the ink of trauma. New York becomes a symbol of continued defense with the possibility of redemption given the Americans effectively repel the Russian invasion, a responsibility entrusted to the player. Consequently, American gamers are bestowed with the opportunity to redeem 9/11 by the dictum of ‘Never again’, a call of duty for the twenty-first century. And so, upon completing the game by achieving military victory over the Russians, America ushers the age of the virtual veteran, a veteran untouched by the trauma of killing.

Is Yesterday too Recent?: An attempt at explaining Recent History without heavy theory

by: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis

     This is not a conventional academic contemplation on history. This is an attempt to explain something made very complex in a, hopefully, simple way. The presence of recent history in our more specific dwellings on historical knowledge today makes necessary a sort of comment that tries to elevate its inner debates onto a broader stage. My definition of it goes like this: recent history refers to a past that still bears meaningful impact upon the activities and social configurations that make up identity today. Now, if the memory of the Second World War continues to bear meaningful impact on identity today, can it still be considered recent? What about the Civil War? Is its memory still recent if the nature of contemporary American politics continues to hold true to the North/South division that was initially defined in the 19th century? Or is it just better to scrap the whole idea of ‘recent’ and just accept everything now in past form as history so long as it is put into narrative? The point is to accept that nothing is out of bounds when it comes to creating knowledge, when its purpose is to inform people on the present problems that take up their experience.

     One cannot assume that temporal distance eases the passions of study and renders a more secure objective reasoning behind the making of history. Just look at the examples mentioned above: World War II and the Civil War. These two stories continue to inspire pop culture into using their history and infusing them into contemporary meanings of war and society. World War II has become most predominantly the main topic in the History Channel’s programming when it decides (and it is doing so less these days) to run historical documentaries. Its variations range from Hitler’s link to alien beings and how Nazis tried to use alien technology to win the war to reviving old videos in high definition form and broadcasting them as the ‘definitive’ way to experience the war.

      In the Civil War’s case we come to a crossroads that seems to be less pop in cultural terms than World War II but still manages to seep into the common knowledge areas through other motives. Take Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012). More a film about the abolition of slavery as a means to end the war, Lincoln makes the Civil War a more political source of historical activism that the memory of it originally catered to. The Civil War is most often set in a narrative that exposes the futility of conflict when it is waged between brothers, a metaphor that speaks to the war’s senseless slaughter of Americans by Americans. Spielberg’s signature close-ups (done to death in this film) pushed by the strings of an overtly sentimental John William’s score makes Lincoln appeal to movie-goers through nostalgia and a sense that politics had more moral weight in the past rather than today. By the end of a very long film, Lincoln has already made audiences care about the past as an example of what politics should be today, even if the presence of slavery is quite merely a tool ordered around to make sense out of politics first and slavery itself second.

      And yet, audiences supported the film. Lincoln’s domestic haul, according to boxofficemojo.com, steadied at $182,027,677. For a film without Captain America or Batman in it, Lincoln became its own superhero event movie. And this is relevant because it reveals just how much pull the Civil War and its main players still hold with cinema goers, for people who pay for entertainment in the hopes of getting educated, informed, in the process. We cannot kid ourselves with these types of movies. They are there to entertain and tell a story just as much as they are there to provide information about a past that still makes sense today, that strives to impact the contemporary experience. Does this make the Civil War recent history? Does a scene between the mythical President and his son arguing about war service too distant or too close (as is the case when Lincoln confronts his son Robert about not giving his life away to the probability of death in the battlefield)?

      Identity can be a tricky subject. We make up ourselves by that we think identifies us most with a shared past. Film can be too dangerous an agent in providing this. According to J. Hoberman, “a movie would be an idea successfully transformed into an industrially produced collective experience.” If we accept Hoberman’s argument, collective experiences that employ history as a narrative tool make temporal distance irrelevant when contemplating the recentness of the past, for no matter how close or distant the past may be it becomes almost entirely relevant to the way we view ourselves in the present time. It is like Eric Hobsbawm states, “Most human beings operate like historians: they only recognize the nature of their experience in retrospect.” But Hobsbawm never specifies how distant in time said exercise in retrospection should be. In fact, it can be argued that, so long as retrospection is taking place, distance becomes close to irrelevant so long as it is consumed as a legitimate part of historic experience. That is what makes history recent, when it becomes relevant in the process of making sense of the present.

      The situation in North Korea makes an excellent example in this final stretch of the argument. The most interesting thing about the whole North Korean situation still playing itself out (regardless of downsized media coverage…now ceded to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden) rests on the idea that its nuclear contingency is still functioning as a Cold War strategy that mistakenly thinks it is still effective. Kim Jong-Un, the son of previous North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il, has intensified his antagonism with South Korea and the United States in what appears to be a random display of power he does not have. Claiming a strangling on North Korean economy through U.N. sanctions, the situation escalated when Kim Jong-Un ordered military exercises too close for comfort to South Korea, with instances of missiles flying close to specific zones of both civilian and military spaces.

     Now, the threat of nuclear destruction is what makes the situation so imbedded in mass media as newsworthy. Continued coverage has exposed North Korea as a nation looking for legitimacy in the context of a divided land that shares its narrative beginnings with South Korea in the historical playground of the Cold War. In fact, threats of nuclear annihilation seem out of place in today’s world, where drone strikes can be called upon in a matter of minutes and military superiority rests on technological readiness instead of mass mobilizations of military personnel as a reaction to aggression. As of April 5th, 2013, the United States’ stance on North Korea has been one of “strategic patience,” according to the Obama Administration as reported by The Guardian. By the end of March, defense secretary Chuck Hagel ordered America's most advanced plane, the B-2, known as the Stealth bomber, to fly over the Korean peninsula. The Stealth is invisible to radar and has nuclear capacity. The message to North Korea was intended by the Pentagon to be one not of provocation but deterrence: attack South Korea at your peril. The key word here might be deterrence given it being part of the Cold War jargon, but the focus should be that a single plane, almost imperceptible to the technological eye should it choose to be, can end the situation with the flick of a switch.

      Maybe the Cold War didn’t end for North Korea. The 38th parallel still stands as a reminder of that time and territorial disputes maintain their identity through it. In a sense, the Cold War is still recent history for the Koreas, as it can be for the United States (even if the Korean War, known as the forgotten war, came across as diminished in significance for American history). Still, North Korea just made its Cold War history recent. It gave meaning to conflict and inserted it in the 21st century sense of historical continuity.

      The whole point of history is to show, through the telling of researched stories, how humanity has lived throughout time and how it makes us the species we are today. Having said that, isn’t all history recent then? If we take the idea that recent history is that which still holds sway on the way we make up our identities contemporarily, does it not then make most of the past recent? Maybe it’s better to make away with these kinds of classifications and just stick with history as an outlet of knowledge that helps us understand, well, us, without regard on how far or how close the past really is.