WASHINGTON, Nov. 22 (UPI) -- The 41st anniversary of President John Kennedy's assassination passed on Monday a lot more quietly than the 40th one did.
The outcome of this year's presidential election may even have had something to do with that, and certainly it reflected in its profound symbolism the way America has shifted over the past generation. For a former twice-elected Republican governor of Texas, the state where JFK was shot dead on Nov. 22, 1963, decisively defeated another liberal Catholic from Massachusetts. Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate this year, even had the same initials as Kennedy.
Kennedy's memory, his achievements, scandals and his dramas remain a vivid presence in American life more than four decades after his death, but they are finally fading to a more remote mythic quality.
It might well have been different if Kerry had won on Nov. 2. Like President Bill Clinton, the most recent Democratic president, Kerry worshipped JFK in his youth. and both men appear to have modeled parts of their lifestyle as well as their political philosophy on him.
As recently as 1993, little more than a decade ago, when Clinton entered the White House, he eagerly asked top aides to check secret government files to see if they could throw new light on the controversies surrounding Kennedy's assassination that bright November day in Dallas.
JFK's murder was without question a dramatic and tragic turning point in American history, comparable in its drama and intensity to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in April 1865, the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the second "Black Tuesday" of Sept. 11, 2001, when al-Qaida terrorists flew hijacked airliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and also mauled the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.
JFK's assassination was rapidly followed by the descent into the Vietnam War, race riots, the explosion of long-developing social pathologies in American cities and a succession of four failed presidencies over the following 17 years. Only with the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 did an era of stability and confidence return for the next two decades to American life.
In the late Sixties and especially through the troubled Seventies, the great controversy over whether Lee Harvey Oswald alone fired the fatal shot or whether he was part of -- or the patsy for -- a far wider conspiracy obsessed millions of Americans. Even through the Eighties and Nineties, books offering new claimed revelations about the conspiracy or claiming to put it to rest once and for all remained a predictably prosperous staple of American publishing.
Such books still occasionally appear, but even compared with a few years ago their frequency has lessened and the interest surrounding them has clearly dropped. The debate over whether Oswald did it, and even if he did, whether he did it alone continues in some circles, but the tone of it is now more reminiscent of the debates and reinterpretations that still surround the Lincoln assassination or conspiracy theories about whether Franklin Roosevelt knew in advance about the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The debates have become a historical curiosity or whodunit. And like the endless arguments over the identity of Jack the Ripper or renewed searches for the Loch Ness Monster, there is a sense that there would be a widespread, deflating sense of disappointment if the remaining mysteries were finally laid to rest one way or another.
This year a bizarre new Internet game reflects the way 21st-century Web geeks are reconceptualizing the assassination. The exceptionally tasteless game offers participants the chance to try and assassinate JFK online themselves, using the same Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that Oswald used according to the Warren Commission report.
The Scottish company that produced the game justifies it by arguing that they are making available to millions of Web users the opportunity to test the Warren Commission conclusions and prove that they were correct: Oswald, the game suggests, could indeed have fired the number of bullets he was required to and enjoyed the possibility of sufficient accuracy to carry out the killing exactly as the Warren investigation concluded.
The new computer game is therefore not merely tasteless: Revealingly, it is reassuring and typically contemporary at the same time. One more highly controversial and immensely important historical event has been recast as virtual reality. In the video game, it is removed from the realm of historical controversy and relocated into the vastly more familiar and popular one of virtual reality.
Yet the game's assumptions and conclusions are not in the least revolutionary or disturbing: They resurrect and support the conclusions of the establishment commission of the mid-Sixties that concluded Oswald did it by himself and the search for blame and responsibility need go no further. Therefore, no further unsettling or uncomfortable questions need be asked. It is therefore the perfect game to symbolize a passive, voyeuristic and conformist America that is moving towards unity in the face of menacing external threats rather than angry criticism or doubt about the direction in which the nation is going.
Perhaps not too much should be made of this: After all, the game, while obviously created with an eye towards the American domestic market, comes from Scotland. But it certainly appears in harmony with the zeitgeist, the spirit of the time.
Kennedy himself would not have approved. He can be seen as a truly heroic figure, or alternately even as a cynical and fraudulent one: But he was never complacent or passive. His great public speeches and declarations of policy were always aimed at awakening the American people to finally confront long-standing problems or galvanizing them to meet and overcome unprecedented new challenges. He saw himself as ending a time of complacency and passivity and replacing it with a new era of adventure and achievement. The last thing he would have wanted was to be finally reduced in the public imagination to the passive target of millions of online game players competing to see how quickly they could blow his head off.
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