Damn, this was one of my favorite songs when I was a boy.
It came out in 1963 when I was six years old.
When Kennedy got shot. When I saw my father cry for the first time sitting in the old chair grimly watching the flag draped coffin in the grim motorcade with the mournful music on the old black and white TV.
I remember where I was when I heard it. I was in a parking lot of a store. Then we were in the store. They shot the President! They shot the President! Everyone was running around this way and that, not making sense. Nothing was making sense. There was chaos everywhere you looked. The radio was turned on in the store, droning away with the brutal staccato newsmen’s voices. We went back out to our car. There was news, the same news, on every station and nothing else at all. It was in the afternoon, that’s all I know.
Everybody who was alive back then knows exactly what they were doing when they shot the President.
When democracy died. When the dream of America died with the Deep State coup. When the joke of American democracy was shown as the pathetic sham it’s always been, a think veneer for Deep State and oligarchic rule, the very story of America itself.
But this song was always nice. There was always something hauntingly beautiful about it. It’s a silly little kids song, but if it doesn’t warm your heart, then you don’t have one to heat up.
Listen and enjoy. From 1963! The concert, live from 1965. Dig those haircuts!
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Love that song. My daughter hates it because it makes her cry.
Lol. My mother would sing “My Favorite Things” when I was little and having existentialist midnight crises. Not helpful.
11/22/63. First grade. My teacher instructed the class to draw a picture which represented the words to “America the Beautiful.” I was in the midst of coloring my mountains purple when the principal announced over the PA system that the President had been shot and school was leaving out early. When I arrived home and walked in the back door, my mother was doing laundry in the basement. I announced that I was home and she asked me if I had heard the news. I told her that I had, and she told me that my father would soon be home from work. He worked at the local Air Force base as a civilian electrician. All the men were told to go home to their families. How vividly I remember that day and my purple mountains.
This was also my favorite song when I was 6 years old. It was 1982, and my first real memory of any kind of music playing. How I loved playing my little record on my little record player!
I remember listening to this song on Captain Kangaroo. I think the pictures would appear on the Magic Drawing Board.
“Everybody who was alive back then knows exactly what they were doing when they shot the President.
When democracy died. When the dream of America died with the Deep State coup. When the joke of American democracy was shown as the pathetic sham it’s always been, a think veneer for Deep State and oligarchic rule, the very story of America itself.”
The day the music died.
Eisenhower warned in his farewell address of a dangerous military-industrial-scientific elite; he’d separately spoken of the CIA’s “legacy of ashes.”
Over the following three years, Kennedy, a womanizer and drug user who very likely owed his victory to vote fraud in Chicago, (1) engaged in back channel contacts with Khrushchev and Castro (the public didn’t know, of course, but doesn’t the charge sound familiar?) (2) turned down the Joint Chiefs’ Operation Northwoods Plan to use false flag attacks (a precursor to 9/11) to justify an invasion of Cuba (3) refused airstrikes in support of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion (4) fired CIA director Allen Dulles and his top deputy (5) refused a first-strike nuclear attack during the Cuban missile crisis (6) secretly agreed to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviets pulling their missiles from Cuba (7) told associates he would splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the wind, etc.
The Deep State was mightily pissed with Kennedy, and Kennedy knew he was in danger.
The same Deep State still runs things of course, and they are much more open in their hatred for Trump than they were with Kennedy (Hillary was the Deep State/Establishment choice, beloved by the intelligence agencies (at least the people at the top), Goldman Sachs and the other big banks, the EU, the Bilderbergers, the CFR, the Chinese, Rupert Murdoch and most other billionaires, the Bushes, etc. etc. The same media types that covered up for the real assassins of the Kennedys and MLK (and continue to cover up subsequent Deep State crimes) are even more rigidly controlled now than during the days of Operation Mockingbird, open in their allegiance to their Deep State masters.
You don’t have to like Trump to consider that he, like Kennedy, has made some excellent enemies.
Peter, Paul, and Mary were good, and I even saw them in concert once, as well as at Newport. But the song that gave me chills in 1963, and still today, was Dylan’s Masters of War.