Two political photos on the front page of Monday’s New York Times.
One, at the top of the front page, depicts a billboard in Kosovo, put up by the Serb government to persuade Kosovars to reject independence from Serbia. On the billboard the instantly recognizable, irresistibly handsome, smiling face of John F. Kennedy, with words that JFK once spoke: “A man does what he must—in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers, and pressures—and that is the basis of all human morality.” Apparently Kosovars are somehow supposed to take that to mean that they must remain part of Serbia, despite Western pressure to declare independence; remaining Serbian is the only moral and manly course.
I doubt JFK would have agreed. His foreign policy choices were usually dictated by US political and economic interest, which now—at least according to our foreign policy elite—is now best served by an independent Kosovo, where 90% of the people are Albanians thanks to the US engineered Albanian takeover of Kosovo in the late 90s. But JFK did always see the pursuit of US national interests as a matter of moral challenge, a test of the nation’s—and his own—manhood. The Serbs’ advertising agency picked a quote that caught the essence of JFK’s approach to the world.
Now for that other front-page picture, the one down at the bottom. It depicts two Christmas T-shirts hanging side by side on the rack at a Target store. One is a conventional Frosty design. But the shirt next to it is a homemade job: “The Three Wise Men: Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, and Che Guevara!” The headline tells us that “anarchists in the aisles” are “shopdropping,” surreptitiously sneaking goods into stores, sometimes (as in this case) with political content. It’s hard to imagine these three “wise men” having a very harmonious conversation about much of anything for very long. But someone (an “anarchist,” the NYT headline writer thinks) felt that they all belonged together. And then again, maybe the three original “wise men” didn’t get along very well on their journey to follow that star anyway.
The important point in all this is that a quick glance at the front page of today’s NYT gives us a marvelously rich and complex political story compacted into two juxtaposed photos. It’s as if the NYT layout editor wants to suggest to us (and perhaps to the Kosovars and Serbs?) two profoundly different paths that our society might follow; the one a well-trodden mainstream typified by the heroic figure of JFK, the other a truly revolutionary path (which can actually branch off in many different, unpredictable directions) blazed by the three “wise men.” I’m not sure how Marx would have responded to Guevara’s famous dictum that a true revolutionary is guided by feelings of love. I’m quite sure that JFK would have found it somewhere between amusing and incomprehensible. JFK’s feelings of love seem to have taken him quite completely out of the political arena.
Is there a surreptitious message in this front-page layout, planted by some cunning “fifth columnist” who wants us to spend Christmas Eve contemplating the political, economic, and social choices we might make at this time of year, when our public discourse is torn between pro forma praise of the Prince of Peace and the reality of a last mad dash to the store to buy just one more absolutely necessary commodity? Or is it just coincidence?
