THE PROPER USES OF NOSTALGIA

A DISCOURSE BY

REV. ROBERT EDDY

DELIVERED PANAMA CITY, FL.

Jan 4  “The Proper Uses of Nostalgia”

There were  times during the campaign when, as one columnist put it, “the race was between  John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.”  Being the 40th anniversary of 1968 we  saw a lot of “histo-babble” being used to rally the troops to one flag or the other.  How do we keep our “longing for a past that never was” – i.e. nostalgia – from destroying our ability to learn from the past.?

“R E A D I N G”

ARTHUR:

It’s true! It’s true! The crown has made it clear.

The climate must be perfect all the year.

A law was made a distant moon ago here:

July and August cannot be too hot.

And there’s a legal limit to the snow here

In Camelot.

The winter is forbidden till December

And exits March the second on the dot.

By order, summer lingers through September

In Camelot.

Camelot! Camelot!

I know it sounds a bit bizarre,

But in Camelot, Camelot

That’s how conditions are.

The rain may never fall till after sundown.

By eight, the morning fog must disappear.

In short, there’s simply not

A more congenial spot

For happily-ever-aftering than here

In Camelot.

Camelot! Camelot!

I know it gives a person pause,

But in Camelot, Camelot

Those are the legal laws.

The snow may never slush upon the hillside.

By nine p.m. the moonlight must appear.

In short, there’s simply not

A more congenial spot

For happily-ever-aftering than here

In Camelot.

S E R M O N

On the last day of 2008 I finished reading  Ted Sorensen’s memoir, subtitled “A Life at the Edge of History.” Sorenson, now 80, then 24,  joined the staff of John Kennedy in January 1953 when representative  Kennedy became Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy.  He quickly became Kennedy’s major speech writer and eventually counsel to the president.  They were an odd couple, the Nebraska Unitarian and the  Massachusetts Roman Catholic.  Sorensen was accused by JFK’s enemies of actually writing JFK’s books and speeches.    Soon after the president’s assassination the Kennedy family asked him to write the official biography. You saw him on TV. recently endorsing Barack Obama.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hupgC1d-St8

The book should be required reading for all UU’s who want to know how “one of us” – he often in the book proudly proclaims his religious affiliation – became a major factor in the universalization of our national policies.  In a recent C-Span forum  and in the book (p 327) Sorensen pointed out that  the aim of the Kennedy  administration was not to “make the world safe for democracy” the claim of nearly all administrations since Woodrow Wilson.  The goal of the  Kennedy administration was, in the phrase Sorensen may have coined,  “to make the world safe for diversity.”   When Carolyn Kennedy endorsed  Obama it was at American University where President Kennedy delivered the world changing speech that contained that phrase on June 10, 1963, when he called on the Soviet Union to work with the United States to achieve a nuclear test ban treaty and help reduce the considerable international tensions and the specter of nuclear war .  Carolyne Kennedy chose that place and repeated that phrase:   because she believed that to ” make the world safe for diversity” will be the  foreign policy goal of the Obama administration.  I hope so too for the world will not be safe for democracy or anything else until it is first safe for diversity.  And there will not be peace in  our own nation until all major groups agree that an acceptance of diversity is the precondition of domestic as well as international peace.  Obama understands that which is why he invited the Rev. Ric Warren to deliver the invocation at his inaugural.

There is, I think a real danger in seeing the Obama administration as the  continuation of the Kennedy administration – no not the continuation of the ACTUAL Kennedy administration but the “past that never was” which his widow and friends – including Ted Sorensen – perpetuated.  The myth that you heard sung by Julie Andrews and Richard Burton earlier this morning.

Though admitting to  hero worship, toward the end of the book (p 525) Sorenson writes,

“John Kennedy’s administration was a golden era.  Nevertheless … it was not Camelot.”

Which brings me to the question I posed in the announcement of this morning’s exploration:

How do we keep our “longing for a past that never was” – i.e. nostalgia – from destroying our ability to learn from the past.?

The mythification of Kennedy’s thousand days as president was no accident.  A week after JFK’s funeral in a Life Magazine Article accompanying the iconic photo’s of Jackie Kennedy at the funeral, Theodore White wrote that

“at night before bedtime, her husband had often played a recording of Camelot, or asked her to play it, on an old Victrola in their bedroom.

Theodore  White quoted Jackie  as saying:

“And the song he loved most came at the very end of this record, the last side of Camelot  . . . ‘Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.’

And again White quoted her as saying,

“. . . There’ll never be another Camelot again.”

Jacqueline Kennedy, though only 33 years old at the time was determined to mythologize her husband’s legacy.  It was she who requested the interview with Teddy White, not the other way around.  White  commented in a book he wrote fifteen years after the LIFE story  that

“Mrs. Kennedy seemed determined to “rescue Jack from all these ‘bitter people’ who were going to write about him in history.”

SOURCE: The Arlington Cemetery site: http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/jbk.htm

Nostalgia distorts history which, ideally, “tells it the way it really was.”  “Just the facts.”

But, in fact, such history is impossible;  until we have time machines and ubiquitous video cameras and computers with infinite  memories and instantaneous computing speeds there will be no completely  objective histories.  There will still be HIS-STORY, and HER-STORY and THEIR-STORY AND OUR-STORY AND MY-STORY AND YOUR-STORY.

They’re all stories and stories which  have a beginning, a middle and an end.  Stories have heroes and villains.  Stories have mysteries and machinations and conspiracies and social, economic, geographical, and ten thousand other hidden forces – perhaps even metaphysical  forces.   History, no matter how scientific or objective has to show some structure. Human affairs, however,   may – in fact – actually –  be chaotic: or in the popular phrase “just one damn thing after another.”  Portentous changes can be brought about by the individual decisions of one person like Lee Harvey Oswald or Serhan Serhan but the very process of writing a history imposes order where none may exist.  And that applies not only to the big story, the tales of the powerful and famous.  It applies also to our own individual history making.

The title I first used when I began thinking about this subject was “Is Nostalgia a Dangerous Disease?”  It rose out of my attempt to write an honest autobiography.   I found that my recollections of what happened – the facts – were often at odds with the contemporaneous documents.  I’ve always been a pack rat.  Since I was a child I’ve kept copies of letters I wrote.  When I go back and reflect on the boy and man who wrote those letters, I do not appear the hero I would like to believe I was.  And events I thought I remember clearly were very very different than my memory of them.   Nostalgia had altered the facts.

Nostalgia is a coping mechanism. It helps protect us from unbearable remorse.

Let me repeat that: Nostalgia is a coping mechanism. It helps protect us from unbearable remorse.  “The bittersweet memory of a past that never was.”   Bittersweet because we know at one level that our stories are figments of our imaginations.

Can we stand to look at our personal and collective pasts through undistorted lenses?  Or must we die as deluded believers in our own sanctity?

Whenever a culture celebrates a new year it looks back as well as forward.  Trying to penetrate the fog in both directions.  Trying to see a road ahead by noting the trend of the path behind.  In the Jewish tradition this involves a time of confession and restitution but also self examination.  It’s a custom I recommend to each of you today and tomorrow for every day is the beginning of – yes I know it’s trite to say it – but it’s true – as every day is the first day of the rest of your life so every day is the beginning of a new year. And I would add a not so trite saying to the question that inevitably arises when one engages in self evaluation.  The question, “How much longer do I have to live?”   The answer, “Long enough to make a difference.”      Rick Masten gives credit to an unnamed fellow cancer sufferer.

We all  have time enough to make a difference.  It’s not just the president elect but each one of us to the best of his or her ability.  But we must  work hard to avoid substituting Nostalgia for History.  But the “common folk” – to quote again from Camelot – are encouraged by our media mired culture to ignore history and engage in a war of competing nostalgias.

Columnist Kathleen Parker pointed this out last  January 30, 2008 She wrote:

“Americans finally have narrowed the presidential race to two front-runners: John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.

Too bad they’re both busy chatting up Guinevere and Galahad, respectively, in the ultimate Camelot, where the climate really is perfect all the year. Eternally.”

When Kathleen Parker wrote those words the Republican and Democratic parties had not chosen their candidates. But she was right, he 2008 election was be between a mythical Kennedy and a mythical Reagan.

Nostalgia is a big business these days Public Television seems to be raking in the pledges from every identifiable market with retrospectives of the  50’s 60’s 70’s & 80’s often with the original performers tottering onto stage to pretend they’re still young.   2008 seemed to be the year when everyone tried to relive 1968.

How many here remember 1968?  I do.  It was the year Martin Luther King was assassinated;  the year Bobby Kennedy was assassinated; the year the Democratic Party’s convention was pre-empted by rioting in the streets.  1968 was the year when the first baby boomer turned 20.  It was the year when the high schools were filled with boomers and the colleges were beginning  to be taken over – literally sometimes – by these children of “The Greatest Generation.”

And it was  year 5 in the post Kennedy reign of Lyndon Johnson.  1968 was in mythical time 5 years post Camelot.  For those of us who had  high hopes of an end to the cold war after Kennedy’s American University speech were in morning.  We had seen  only the cold war turn hot in Vietnam and Afghanistan.  We had seen Bobby Kennedy who promised to restore Camelot assassinated.

And in 2008, only 40 years later we can, if we are foolish, expect a “restoration of Camelot.”  Some even see the crown princess – and I do not mean this disrespectfully – being groomed to take the throne in 2016.

We have good reason to be hopeful.  Our soon to be president is certainly the most intelligent and talented man to hold that office.  Perhaps the most gifted since Thomas Jefferson.  But he is no messiah.  He is no king Arthur.   This  is not Camelot – nor was it ever – nor will it be – ever.  This is a nation with high ideals that were nearly lost and could be lost again.  This is a country that seemed not able even  to see that others in the real world did not see us as we saw ourselves,  much less question whether there was any truth in the way they saw us.       Let us hope that as a nation we have learned to see ourselves a bit more realistically.  Barack Obama is both the most idealistic and pragmatic president since Abraham Lincoln.  And he is faced with challenges as great  if not greater than those that awaited Lincoln seven score  and eight years ago.

He and we may be able to advance the causes of universalism and justice in the years ahead if we can accept the way we were – really – and realistically envision the way we can be.  America can be, as Barack Obama reminded us “better than that.”   And in the real world the important goal is not to be perfect – it is to be better than we were.

But to do that we must abandon Nostalgia and accept ourselves, both as individuals and as a nation as we were.  Not saints or demons – just fellable human beings who even with the best of intentions can create the most hideous messes.  Just look around.  But also look up.  Our new president made us do that and I thank whatever gods may be that once more we have good reason look up, to hope, to dream “impossible” dreams and hope for “utopian” futures but also, with feet firmly and resolutely planted on the real, sweet earth, move forward step by step to whatever future may be.  We thought we could;  now we know:  WE CAN.

AMEN: MAKE IT SO!

CLOSING WORDS:

The last Paragraph of Sorensen’s book:

“I’m still an optimist.  I still believe that extraordinary leaders can be found and elected, that future  dangers can be confronted  and resolved, that people are essentially good and ultimately right in their judgments.  I still believe that a world of law is waiting to emerge, enshrining peace and freedom throughout the world.  I still believe that the mildest and most obscure of Americans can be rescued from oblivion by good luck, sudden changes in fortune, sudden encounters. I believe it because I lived it.”

END