Every generation has its Kennedy moments. From 9/11 to Iraq, history moves on
History may not be bunk, as Henry Ford famously claimed it was. But it is hard not to feel, as the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination nears and the people of Northern Ireland fret once again this week about their divided past, that history is no longer what it used to be either.
As an impressionable teenager, I never needed convincing about the significance of the events in Dallas. I was a sixth-form Dealey Plaza obsessive – though to this day I can't watch the Zapruder film of the killing. I longed for Bobby Kennedy to take his brother's place in the White House. I lived for many years with the belief that the killing of John F Kennedy was the day the world's innocence died, not just mine.
In retrospect, it wasn't really the end of anything. It just felt that way in the first fierce shock of it all. But then other stuff happened and the world went on spinning. And here we are. At a distance of 50 years, it is getting harder to judge how significant Kennedy's murder really was. Candace Allen wrote in the Guardian that his death may, on balance, have helped the civil rights cause. Maybe so. But Stephen King, in 11/22/63 – his time-travel Kennedy assassination novel – foresees Kennedy's survival heralding a violently dystopic 21st-century America. That could be true too.
Who knows? The real truth is that no more than one in five human beings on the planet can remember the assassination of President Kennedy. For the rest of you, that day in Dallas is something your parents or grandparents sometimes go on about. You have to be well over 55 to recall the shooting. So, in a big sense, what happened on 22 November 1963 doesn't matter any more. Collectively, we are losing JFK to history at last. And in a way, that's fine. Let it go. We have today's problems to deal with now.
Even so, it is worth reflecting on the relatively low-key way the Kennedy anniversary is being marked. Every generation has its Kennedy moments. Some of them are massive, like the world war that marked my parents for the rest of their lives. Others are briefer shocks. Some are even moments to cheer not weep: the fall of the Berlin Wall; the ousting of Margaret Thatcher. The people who witnessed them will be marked by them in some way or another till they die.
But the important thing is that the process never ends. These big moments matter most when they occur. From then on they are in decline. As the decades pass they all resonate less and less. And always something new comes along – like 9/11 or the London Olympics – which settles another layer of experience over the jumbled sediment that history has untidily laid down beforehand. There is never, ever, any going back.
This matters. For one thing, it is a reminder that history never stops. History flows on, the world changes, and different questions are posed in new forms until the end of time. That's why it is a dangerous delusion to believe that any single event in the past should hold the present or the future permanently hostage. The 9/11 attacks exemplify this. An angry, even warlike response made sense at the time. But then came Iraq, which became part of a new incarnation of the world's problem. And now even Iraq is receding too.
A second thing to remember is that the dilution of supposedly shared memory never stops either. That process is sleepless too. No one under 55 remembers the Kennedy killing. But no one under 45 remembers pre-Thatcher Britain either, which is why the current Conservative obsession with union power feels like a diversion driven by the past, when most of today's employees have no memory of unions at all, overmighty or not.
And no one under the age of 30 remembers Thatcher in power, or the cold war. No one under 20 recalls when New Labour captured the moment. First-time voters in 2015, born in 1997, won't even recall 9/11 or Iraq. That's not to pretend that appeals to the spirit of the past – whether it's to 1314 for Scots, 1690 for Northern Ireland unionists, 1916 for Irish republicans, 1940 for the Tories or 1945 for Labour, never mind 1966 for English football, fail to stir any response at all. But their experienced meaning inexorably declines over time and is replaced with a construction, even perhaps in the case of the Holocaust, no matter how hard anyone tries to keep the rawness alive. In the end, the political question is never, "What then?" It is and should always be, "What now?"
None of this is to say history doesn't matter. Look at the ongoing row over the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war. Look too at yesterday's response to the suggestion by Northern Ireland's maverick attorney general, John Larkin, that historic Troubles-related investigations should be shut down to help draw a line under the past. Logically Larkin is right. These cases re-open and inflame wounds better left to close. The next generation has even less interest in re-opening them than the current one has. They will never all be solved equitably or to everyone's satisfaction. But the victims' generation can't let go, like the Iraq generation. So this is not yet the time for this particular compromise.
Northern Ireland remains a place where it is often premature to cast off the past completely. So, in another part of the forest, is Gibraltar. But these things are not set in stone. The Irish Republic increasingly shows how it can be done, and there is no disputing that, for all its contradictions and faults, modern Ireland is better for it than either Ulster or the Rock. Each case is different, but not every injustice of history needs to be tidily accounted for in the international criminal court. The Danes invaded and pillaged parts of England centuries ago; but no modern Danish apology is now required. Life would be intolerable if we could not sometimes bury the past.
The German Marxist Walter Benjamin once conjured the tremendous image – derived from a painting by Klee – of the Angel of History, its face turned always towards a past it cannot control, its wings open and forced backwards by a storm that drives it irresistibly into a future it cannot see. History is a mess. Bad things have happened. But there is no going back. There is only the imperfect future and the hope, which is sometimes no more than a hope, that we can do better next time.
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