Dallas 1963: Context and Questions

Dallas 1963 (Twelve, 2013), by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis, takes the reader back to the city of Dallas and to the years before that fateful day on November 22, 1963. In this 50^th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, this important book raises several fascinating questions.

To what extent was Dallas already the “City of Hate” before the assassination? What role did conservative figures play in creating this paranoid milieu? How does this environment in part mirror current conservative attacks against President Barack Obama? Did the hateful environment in Dallas contribute to, or encourage, or explain Kennedy’s assassination?

The Dallas of 1960 is a city where the Ku Klux Klan once had its national headquarters, the current mayor had once been an unabashed KKK member, and important statues celebrate Confederate heroes. The Dallas Morning News is led by publisher Ted Dealey, who refers to Washington, D.C. as “nigger town” and joins oilman H. L. Hunt in supporting the belief that the United Nations is creating a world socialist system. For them, JFK’s support of Medicare is tantamount to “sweeping dictatorial power over medicine” and will create government death panels. This is Obamacare’s déjà vu.

Joining these powerful citizens is Rev. W. A. Criswell of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, who sermonizes that JFK’s Roman Catholicism is a “political tyranny” that threatens the very fabric of the U. S. of A. Meanwhile, General Edwin A. Walker resigns from the military, finds Dallas politically hospitable, and gives speeches to adoring local crowds where he exhorts unleashing nuclear holocaust on the Soviet Union, even at the price of millions of casualties stateside. Super-patriot Walker wants to overthrow the “totalitarian regime” of Kennedy, and files to run for Texas governor in February of 1962.

Stirring this toxic stew, and exploiting it, is Representative Bruce Alger from Dallas, the lone Republican in the Texas delegation, and an arch conservative. During a visit from Lyndon B. Johnson on the eve of the 1960 election, Alger leads a “mink coat mob” that attacks LBJ and Lady Bird Johnson. A sign in Alger’s hands reads “LBJ Sold Out to Yankee Socialists.”

Later when U. N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson visits Dallas in October of 1963, Frank McGehee, the Dallas founder of the National Indignation Convention, adopts the tactics of conservative intimidation by leading a mob to disrupt Stevenson’s speech. One protester, a Dallas insurance executive, slams a placard on Stevenson’s forehead.

Oddly, Lee Harvey Oswald is a relatively minor figure in this book, a Socialist sympathizer who nearly assassinates General Walker in April of 1963 and later kills Kennedy. This is odd because Dallas 1963 repeatedly hints that the hateful conservative milieu in Dallas somehow portended JFK’s assassination. But how exactly? Was Oswald drawn to Dallas because of its conservative fanaticism, and so he decided to combat it there? Why did he turn the rifle instead on JFK? These questions and any others explicitly linking the right-wing hate in Dallas to what happened on November 22, 1963 (at least the official and most likely version of events) are not answered in this book. We are left to make these links somehow on faith.

Dallas 1963 is a meticulously researched book that brings you back to a place and time beset by a mass or even class psychosis, where innuendo and wild accusations gain currency, where zealots sound reasonable, and wild and murderous ideas are taken seriously, and acted upon. The dark side of democratic rule, too often, is the rule of the mob. When that mob has power, money, news media, and well-spoken leaders, then the most inhumane acts can be perpetuated by societies in the name of what is ‘right.’ Dallas 1963 will help readers gain a perspective that resonates with the caustic politics that have unfortunately become the norm today.

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(This book review originally appeared in The El Paso Times on November 3, 2013.)

First Week of College

I traveled 477 miles from New York City to Lawrence, Massachusetts, and back, to revisit Northern Essex Community College (NECC) last week. This time I was visiting the Bridge Program, a free primer for entering students to help them acclimate to college. These students, all Latino and mostly Dominicano, remind me of who I was over thirty years ago: a poor kid from the U.S.-Mexico border with no clue at Harvard. Coincidentally, this was the same week when my wife Laura and I dropped off our son Aaron at Yale, for the start of his freshman year.

One of the issues that stuck in my mind at NECC was this: how do we identify and help those poor kids who are driven to move up, who are ready to sacrifice for themselves and their families, and who are pulling themselves up by their boot straps, awkwardly, tentatively, but with an undeniable hunger? Because that’s how I was.

In the United States, we spend so much effort militarizing the border, throwing money at the border security industrial complex, and giving air-time to fear-mongers only too eager to bash poor people and their neighborhoods. Imagine if we spent the same billions of dollars on identifying those children of undocumented workers with stellar school records, with the right family values to succeed, with the framework to be the best of citizens. Imagine if we helped these young people become productive college graduates and taxpayers.

Imagine if we made the effort to know poor Mexicano neighborhoods like Ysleta, where I grew up, to understand which families had disciplined parents, which families refused food stamps, like my own family, because the parents thought it was shameful. Instead of vilifying poor families as the parasites of society, instead of attacking these convenient and awful abstractions in pseudo ‘arguments,’ imagine making careful distinctions. Imagine doing the hard work of practical thinking, and implementing this as policy.

In class at NECC, we discussed my novel From This Wicked Patch of Dust, and then I went to lunch with the students, administrators, and teachers of the Bridge Program. I spoke to one young woman who made an impression on me. Kiara was focused and intelligent, she wanted to be a radiologist, her father was a taxi driver, and her sister had already graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, after attending NECC. I had a long conversation with Kiara, and I could tell she was going places.

I had made that leap too, from being poor to the middle class, with loving but tough Mexicano parents who taught me to work beyond exhaustion and avoid the drugs and gangs of our neighborhood. I went from being marginalized in society, ignored, and even laughed at (sometimes by other Mexicanos and Chicanos full of envidia, jealousy), to self-education through cultural sacrifice, financial savings through pain, and learning-on-the-fly through fear. I saw a younger version of myself in Kiara. Will others take the time to see this potential in individuals like Kiara? I always have that hope.

This same week I told my son Aaron, as we moved him into Yale’s Old Campus, that if he saw a poor student looking shell-shocked, as if Yale were a different planet from, say, the Chihuahuan Desert, to help that person, to give him or her advice, to be friendly. “Aaron, I was that freshman, I didn’t even know what the Ivy League was, I was too quiet in class, I ate alone in the dining hall, at least at the beginning, I wasn’t sure I belonged at Harvard. I thought they had made a mistake.”

Our son Aaron is a New York City kid, savvy beyond his years. Before this week, he had visited Yale often, as the head of the Model United Nations group at his high school. I would have been intimidated by a freshman like Aaron. I would have marveled at the ease with which he navigated this strange world of the Ivy League. I know Aaron will take my advice to heart and seek out those who need help and who want to help themselves but may not know how. For two years in New York, Aaron volunteered to tutor poor students who could not afford to pay for expensive private tutors. We are proud of both Aaron and Isaac, not only for their intellectual prowess, but also for the good citizens they have become.

What Laura and I have always taught our kids is that we are connected to each other. Even if we struggled and succeeded, that does not mean we should only look after ourselves. We should help those coming up, who want what we have achieved, who have that same drive and discipline to achieve it, who deserve a chance. By helping los de abajo, you improve your entire community. By seeing and understanding those different from you, you remember who you were, you sharpen your empathy, you decide to find out for yourself (and not accept what you are told). By seeking out that ‘other,’ whoever that other may be, you will learn from them too.

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Lost in a Labyrinth of Ideas: Hotel Juárez

Hotel Juárez (Arte Público Press), by Daniel Chacón, is a mesmerizing collection of stories fluctuating between the past and the present, imagination and reality. These 39 short-short stories are linked by details, memories, and obsessions. Certain questions permeate Hotel Juárez: Can imagination relieve childhood guilt and violence? What is the relationship between singularity and abstraction? Do drugs and alcohol stimulate creativity, or destroy it?

In “First Cold,” a boy explores several imaginative loops in his head, from visiting the Tarahumaras to racing through a galaxy of supernovas. The most poignant is imagining he comes back as a respectable man to his startled mother, to tell her everything will be okay in the future. Back in reality, the boy is but twelve-years-old, three years before she commits suicide.

The son of Zachary and Angélica, in “The Framer’s Apprentice,” retells their first meetings, somewhat romanticized.  Then the son remembers his mother screaming at him as a seven-year-old, “You’re the reason!  You’re the one!” that is, the reason she got married. This happens a year before she also kills herself. Meanwhile the young son escapes the present by making his own mathematical symbols, living in his mind.

This ‘living in the mind’ dwells on the messy relationship between singularity and abstraction. In “Green-eyed Girl on the Cover of National Geographic,” the narrator is a young American man studying art in Paris who falls for a Moroccan clerk. The out-of-place Chicano guards against over-thinking the details because this leads to a “singularity of meaning.” What we find out in a later story, “Centinela!  Centinela! What of the Night?” is that the father is telling this Parisian story to their daughter, Mari, but withholds details of their night dancing, because this would “limit the possibilities.”

The reverence for imagination and abstraction and the disdain for details come to a moral head in “The Puppy.” A lonely assassin buys a meek, somewhat frightened puppy, and goes about taking care of Snorkel. He plays with Snorkel, and loves him apparently, until he gets a call to do a job in Mexico City. The assassin then drowns Snorkel in the tub, knowing the dog is only “species first and then breed.” When the assassin is back in town, he’ll buy another dog.

The moral crisis, whether or not Chácon explicitly says it or realizes it, is that over-abstraction can easily lead to inhumane behavior, to not ‘seeing’ the individual in front of you. That is an old problem in Heidegger’s philosophy of being-towards-death, for example, the problem of fetishizing abstraction to such a degree that you start thinking of your death as the only thing that matters in your life. Of course, that’s crazy, or another, more philosophical way to put it is that human beings are more than just minds: they are bodies, they are individuals, they have particular characters. That’s what matters in the moral world.

These issues come to the fore in several stories where drugs or alcohol spur the imagination from a “dull life.” In “Mujeres Matadas,” a fifty-year-old El Paso man is listening to death metal music surrounded by twenty-somethings, when a young guitarist, Mari(a), invites him to see “something really evil” in Juárez, at an underground club. In an old maquila factory, the “viejo” is transported to another world. But was it the music and the spectacle, or the “red pills” they took before she steps on stage? Again, in the last section “Hotel Juárez,” a professor of literature buys crack cocaine and is pursued by his imagination and three boys. He ends up in a seedy hotel room, “his head expanded into a universe of voices and images.”

The literary and philosophical issues at the heart of Chacón’s excellent stories are how imagination can save us, but also condemn us, and how too much abstraction can encourage us to lose ourselves in the beautiful desert world at our feet.

(This book review originally appeared in The El Paso Times on June 16, 2013.)

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