Terry Levine | Noggin Advertising | Copywriter | Digital + Direct Writer | Blogging | Toronto | Canada

JFK: 50 YEARS IN MID-AIR

“I'm an idealist without illusions.”

-- John F. Kennedy

 

Time passes more quickly as we age, or it sure feels that way. By 10, I knew who John Kennedy was and his death seemed so long ago, yet it had only been 15 years after his death. Thirty-five years have flown by since I first heard of the 20th century's most inspiring US president and today marks the 50th anniversary that awful time.

Woosh.

Barack Obama is the only president in my lifetime who has made me feel how those who heard Kennedy must have felt. Yet few can say they are as excited five years on. It's not that he's been a bad president. It's just that no one can keep themselves -- or us -- up there for that long.

At 46, Kennedy had the good fortune, if you could ever call it that, of leaving us in mid-flight, before time could ravage him as it has all of his successors, and the rest of us. Time flies but it also eventually wrenches us back to earth.

We all wish Kennedy had lived. But I suspect we wouldn't be looking up to him the way we do if he had.

IDEOLOGY AND THE U-CURVE: MORE THAN 140 WORDS ON 'THE FIFTH ESTATE'

Two books I read recently discuss the inverted U-curve, also known as the Goldilocks principle -- the idea that too little and too much of a good thing can be bad things. In A First-Rate Madness, Nassir Ghaemi writes:

"In biology, it's generally accepted that anxiety is curvilinear [i.e., follows the U-curve]. A moderate amount is good for the organism, keeping it vigilant, ready to defend itself or flee. Too little would make the organism vulnerable to predators or other danger; too much would cause excessive stress, making the organism less capable of handling danger."

The Republican Party in the US is currently dealing with U-curve problems. Where moderate conservatism -- responsible spending and taxation -- is a worthy goal, the party has now been taken over by ideological radicals who believe that if low spending and taxation are good, no spending and taxation are better. They're wrong.

Ideological purists tend to get us in U-curve problems a lot. Religion, for instance, isn't a bad thing if it helps us to be more moral and empathetic. But most religions seem to descend into radical craziness -- see: Taliban, Wahhabi, Evangelical Christians -- where killing the patient to save him becomes the norm. Socialism too is a wonderful idea, in small doses -- universal healthcare, welfare for those less fortunate -- but breaks down when it turns into command economy totalitarianism.

Then there's Wikileaks. Watching The Fifth Estate this weekend I was struck by how Julian Assange took a great idea -- outing criminals, greed and corruption -- and destroyed it with ideological fervor. It's one thing to expose people doing bad things, it's another to recklessly release thousands of documents that put people's lives in danger. Assange's downfall, I think, was his ideological blindless that made it impossible to differentiate between the good part of the U-curve and the bad.