Lee Harvey Oswald bringing us into the Postmodern era

As I sat watching the PBS Frontline episode on who Lee Harvey Oswald was one question kept popping into my mind: How the hell did they get so much of footage and information on the guy? Seriously it's like from every episode in his life historians have been able to find photographs and stories about him, even video footage of him during some points. And it's not even government surveillance that we see, mostly it's either photographs that he himself took, or it's photos and videos that were taken by the people around him. Really this is only surprising to me because of the historical era that it comes from. In our contemporary setting it goes almost without saying that if someone wanted to find a huge amount of voluntarily recorded material on just about anyone it would be available. Social Media plays no small role in this, but mostly it's simply an effect of how widespread cameras and recording devices have become in our society. In Oswald and Kennedy's time however, the amount of digital records of a persons life were way down.

Or at least up until that point in history it certainly was not the case that so much information could be drummed up on an individual. I've heard the Kennedy assassination described as the event that changed the way Television was viewed and I like that idea because it shows how shockingly connected and people had become compared to previously in history. Gopnik in his New Yorker piece describes how "The accepted division of American life into two orders--an official one of rectitude, a seedy lower order of crime--collapses under scrutiny, like the alibi in a classic film noir". The mention of the film noir seems like an especially interesting comparison, given the ties that the mystery genre has to Modernism and how differently the Kennedy case has gone compared to the generic detective story. Where there is a set method and end result for the detective to find in the story, in the Kennedy case there is almost an infinite amount of questioning and intrigue. And as stated above this isn't because of a shortage of facts, quite the opposite. If we knew less than we really do about the case I think it would be entirely more likely that people would accept a single explanation. In reality, the abundance of factual evidence available is what allows conspiracy theorists to raise the questions they do.

I think also this sense of "seeing is not necessarily believing" is another aspect of the Kennedy assassination that seems so linked to the postmodern mindset. Again I would say that in our contemporary setting it wouldn't be at all unreasonable to have suspicions about the extent to which the Media and the U.S. Government are keeping details hidden, or even fabricate them. In addition to this we've also become accustomed to the sense that there can be multiple sides to any given story and all seem true. In this way I find it a fairly compelling argument to think of the assassination of JFK as the major catalyst for the beginning of the postmodern era.

Kevin's white privilege

Inspired by Mr. Mitchell's post at the beginning of reading of Kindred that involved a segment from Louis C.K. on the freedom that white people would have when time traveling to the past I began thinking about what that added to trying to describe the sometimes elusive idea of white privilege. I don't think I have to explain to anyone what it means, but the idea of white privilege is an idea that goes against the official idea that racism and race inequality was done away with during the Civil Rights movement. Apart from obvious socioeconomic examples of race disparities there are more subtle examples of the ways in which white people can remain comfortably out of touch, a capacity granted to them solely by the color of their skin. White males are the obvious pinnacle of this phenomenon, suffering from neither racial nor sexual discrimination. In Kindred we get the taste of both worlds from Dana as our narrator, but also get a taste of what their absence is like through Kevin.

On the whole Kevin is an extremely sympathetic character, if every white guy in the U.S. was like Kevin I think everyone would be quite a bit happier. Regardless of this we still get a crucial cringe-worthy scene where we see the crucial difference between Dana's experience in the slave holding South and Kevin's. He says on page 100, "Weylin doesn't seem to pay attention to what his people do, but the work gets done" to which Dana responds, "You think he doesn't [ay attention. Nobody calls you out to see the whippings". He later claims, Wait a minute, I'm not minimizing the wrong that's being done here" And Dana says, "Yes you are. You don't mean to be, but you are [...] You can go through this whole experience as an observer". This sense that Kevin doesn't quite get the situation the same way that Dana does, that somehow it's dulled down for him, is a pretty good representation of how his physical appearance protects him from these issues. If we view acting as an ability to maintain a comfortable ignorance from the realities of slavery it proves an acting job Dana is unable to maintain indefinitely. Kevin on the other hand has much more luxury to stay removed. Not to say that he comes away unscathed, but where he comes back with a scar on his forehead Dana endures hundreds of scars and loses an arm. In general I think that Kevin provides a good metaphor for what white privilege means: an ability to stay comfortably far removed from racial conflict if so desired, and even an inability to appreciate it in its fullness. 

Race relations linked through time

One of the main criticisms I've heard of Kindred is Butler's use of obvious plot developments to convey her ideas. Personally I think the most ingenious part of her writing is the way she manages to set up compelling scenes. Perhaps it's not hard to tell what she's trying to accomplish with things like time traveling, or explicitly going back to the slavery era, but I find that they still convey very powerful and moving messages. One of the most compelling aspects of the novel to me is the way that Butler manages to bring so much of the focus of the novel onto a reflection of the way that slavery and race issues still reflects itself in our current times.

The most striking example of such to me is the way in which Butler creates a critique on the status of modern day race issues through the constant flickering of Dana's perception of Kevin versus Rufus. Now I don't mean to suggest that at any point does Dana equate Kevin with Rufus, but her state of being often reminded of the physical similarities between the two is no accident on Butler's part. We're given the impression that no matter how far Kevin can try to distance himself from people like Rufus there are literal physical limitations to this in the form of Kevin's skin color. In addition to this we still get a few strangely blundering scenes on Kevin's part that suggest he's not quite as open-minded as he'd like to think. Both he and Rufus find it an appealing idea to have Dana do their letter writing for them, a scene that conjured conflicting images of a supposed ownership from Kevin. In addition to this there's always his somewhat less than adequate attempts to reconcile his admiring statements of how much less brutal slavery seemed.

Despite this I think that on the whole Butler delivers quite a positive message about where we are right now (perhaps even unrealistically so). While somewhat subtle comparisons between Rufus and Kevin reveal a situation more complex than history books may reveal, the overall comparison between the slave era white man and the contemporary white man and there respective relationships to Dana is stark. Where Rufus takes Alice in whatever way he wants at his will, Kevin wins over Dana's love. Where Rufus is slowly crafted by the slavery system into a man capable of horrible things, Kevin resists for over six years remaining true to his ideals. In simple the progress made can be summed up in Rufus' claim that Dana and Kevin can have each other in their time, whereas it's impossible in his. To say that Butler presents a gruesomely accurate and moving portrayal of all the horrors that happened in the slavery era and how they continue to be a big part of our contemporary setting, she simultaneously manages to remind us of the staggering advances that have happened.