JFK Still Dead, Baby Boomers Still Self-Absorbed

In a new
column up at The Daily Beast, I look upon the avalanche of books
about John F. Kennedy coming out to mark the 50th anniversary of
this assassination and despair.
Here’s a snippet:

Each fall since November 22, 1963, regular programming is
pre-empted and whole rainforests are clear-cut to bring us books
filled with the latest minor (and often delusional) variations on
who killed Kennedy and why; the supposedly transformative effect of
the “Camelot” years on contemporary geo-politics and, more
plausibly, the hat-wearing habits of the American male; and
counterfactuals about just how awesome—or awful—JFK’s second term
would have been.

Whatever emotional immediacy, contemporary relevance, and news
value this all once inarguably possessed, can we now admit that the
topic has grown thinner than the post-1963 resume of Kennedy
impersonator Vaughn Meader? It now lives on mostly as a sort
of repetition-compulsion disorder through which the baby
boom generation (born between 1946 and 1964) seeks to preserve its
stultifying cultural hegemony even as it slowly—finally!—begins to
exit the stage of American life on a fleet of taxpayer-funded
Rascal Scooters.

Read the whole thing.