The writer finds it a hard thought to have that he should have been more active in politics. Writers are drawn to the great addresses defining moral issues and policy, the Second Inaugural, JFK at American University or Amherst, the candidate Robert Kennedy's speech on all that goes into the GNP, his earlier one on South Africa and the 'tiny ripple of hope.'

Look what discourse has fallen to. John Boehner preaching the new religion of no new taxes and tax cuts, as if that allows us to remain a first-rate nation in our schools and public services.

It's as if robber barons and the industrialists have been reincarnated, pushing everyone and everything they can into the factory for greater productivity regardless of the human, animal and environmental costs, whatever version of child labor they can shape and advertise to make stomachable. Just like the cow that used to pasture on grass, but now is fed along the lines of production, on anti-biotic laced corn grain as it stands in its own waste. How can one fight them, when he too is caught in the never-ending factory?




And as I read this later, I hear a ring of John F. Kennedy's literary voice, soaring as he spoke it, paced through this, calling on cadences to be just so.


I am reminded, as if by past lives, that John Kennedy (and we all read so much into him) was a writer who saw a need to go into politics (yes, this is true) and who, as largely a writer, made a success of it. He was as an actor, acting what he wanted to be, wanted, out of wisdom, for the world. He gave us a new model for the political world, including it, tying it to education and capital investment in the lives of a society's work force, as an even practice of liberal arts.

People do things because they get a high of them, a happy feeling, a right feeling. Instead of all the time we are feeling that we haven't done everything/anything right. Speaking aloud, always a high. Writing something as you wanted to, no easy task, just like an attending whistle.

There's a point in A Hero where the young man, Eastering over at his grandparents home, away from the college, 'doesn't feel like looking over the picture book of President Kennedy...' He goes out for a walk, and alone on a rural country properly New England road to absorb, after being distracted all day, his night before meeting the nurturing Jackie Princess... He goes out on the quiet road and thinking of the wonderful experience beyond wonder, he has this thought, as if he were about to take over from President Kennedy with his words... There are many things about it that make this an awesome moment in the literary habit. The golden kid I look back on, it speaks of him.

And JFK, all his speeches really said everything, the basic touchpoints of a morality, except the stuff of inevitable death. He had been through its outskirts before, himself.

A new form is always an old form.