I'm sitting in my last class of the morning at Pasadena Community College, an older 24 year-old student, a veteran, returning to school. Two absurdities bring me to this classroom on this day at this hour. I should be at UCLA, working on my BA in English, but there's been a problem with transferring units from my previous college work at Cal Tech. Tech is on the quarter system; UCLA is on the semester system. Consequently I have 2.25 units in some classes requiring 3 units of credit -- I have to repeat the courses! This sucks. To save money, I'm repeating these classes at the community college.
The second absurdity is that I'm sitting in an Intermediate Russian class. One year ago, I was a Russian Linguist in the Army Security Agency, translating and analyzing the communications of the Russian Army in East Germany. For this service, UCLA has not given me enough credit to satisfy their language requirement. Oh, yeah? I ask. So what if I take a college Russian course then? Do it, they say. So here I am, trying to pretend I don't already know everything being taught. Perhaps out of guilt, I volunteer to tutor students having trouble. The professor thinks I'm one of the best Russian students he's ever had. Duh.
So here I sit, bored, waiting for class to end so I can have lunch. Sitting in class next to me is one of the students I'm tutoring, a foreign exchange student named Sirhan Sirhan.
Suddenly the back door bursts open. "The President has been shot!" a teacher yells.
Our teacher wanders into the hallway to see what is going on. He comes back and dismisses class. President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas. This is serious stuff.
I roam the hallways, trying to find out details about what happened. Is he still alive or what? I run into my English professor and simultaneously we mention a poem by W.H. Auden we've been studying this week, the one about Icarus falling from the sky while a farmer plows his field, about how tragedy always happens on just another ordinary day. No shit, Dick Tracy.
Musee des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
-- W. H. Auden
Like most of America, I fall into a daze. I remember only scattered things over the next several days. I remember Sirhan being part of a small group of foreign students who celebrate this tragedy. Why? I ask him later. Because JFK is a slave of the Vatican and America is run by the Pope, he says.
Much of my time I'm sitting in front of our small black and white TV. I see Oswald shot on live television. Everything is so surreal.
I get a new attitude toward history. I knew from books that Lincoln had been assassinated, McKinley had been assassinated. This is not a new thing in our history. But this is the first time I feel like I've been kicked in the gut by history. I can't possibly imagine all the other assassinations yet to come. This is just the beginning of my history lesson, on November 22, 1963.
JFK Assassination Resources.
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