I’d like to salute in advance the election once again, 48 years later, of a young Democratic president with the vital help of the shady machinations of the Chicago political machine and a certain Richard Daley. Obama is even going to upstage the Republicans on the religious angle: we will be going from a president who listens to God to one who is one. And in his messianic quality he also strangely parallels JFK. Kennedy’s reign was surrounded by miracles, although befitting our age of weak and helpless men his miracles were performed for and against him by the more mighty, for example his election, when the voters of Chicago were raised from the dead to vote for him, or the Magic Bullet that killed him which, like the Trinity, was both one and many.

Ah, what selfish cheaters, these miracle-workers, tearing apart the laws of space and time to get ahead. It’s a wonder they haven’t made the universe collapse. A beach could be a mountain, after all, if every grain of sand didn’t want to be the peak. On the other hand, the value of these miracles shouldn’t be presumed too quickly, since it’s not clear whether Kennedy or Kennedy’s assassination was the greater leader in the ’60’s. Of course preventing the world from being destroyed in the Cuban Missile Crisis probably could not have been managed minute-to-minute by the dead, but on the other hand the death of Kennedy, in the hands of a superior manipulator like Johnson, became an unanswerable argument for the Civil Rights Act. How strange it is that a person’s wishes, generally ignored when they’re alive, become a gainsay-less mandate upon their death, at the very moment they cease to know or care what happens.