Art of the Gnostic Gospels
A Donut's date with destiny
#1 of 20 from the Yaldabaoth’s Witnesses postcard set
During the tense blockade crisis of West Berlin, John F. Kennedy gave a now famous speech in which he used the phrase "Ich bin ein Berliner" to demonstrate solidarity with the people of the beleaguered city. He meant to say "Ich bin Berliner"; "ein berliner" is slang for a local variety of pastry. Perhaps his misguided attempt at stirring rhetoric boomeranged later when, not unlike a donut, he squirted jelly all over the streets of Dallas.
This piece asks questions about symbols. Kennedy tried to use symbolic speech in Berlin and failed to humorous effect. Oliver Stone used Kennedy’s assassination as a symbol of corruption and made a lot of money for himself in the process. Gay groups protested the depiction of gay conspirators in the film as too effeminate, etc.
Kennedy is, to many people, a Christ-like symbol of everything good about the Presidency, despite his numerous affairs, the Bay of Pigs and his role in our involvement in Vietnam. The entire event has passed from history into myth; apparently no speculation is now off limits as too far-fetched or unlikely.
As a corollary to this mystification of the Kennedy assassination, one notes also the degree to which art about "ordinary" assassination has lost much of its taboo status: witness the relative mildness with which Washington art critics greeted Jesse Helms’ recent spoken-word piece "Bodyguards," in which the Foreign Relations Committee’s venerable chairman warned that Bill Clinton would "need a bodyguard" in North Carolina.
Disclaimer: Even if the sexagenarian Senator’s provocative prose had been well received (it wasn’t), common sense would still seem to dictate that a sitting president makes an extremely poor choice of subject for this brand of political parody.
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