JACKIE

"But Charley doesn't have our problems.  He doesn't belong to a species clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live in peace with itself"--Travels With Charley

Thursday night I saw Jackie at the Yonge & Dundas. (I hoped to make it into a History Discussion Group event, but nobody else was interested.) It was pretty depressing, really--I basically got out of it what I put in.  Natalie Portman wasn't bad in the title role, considering that she was stuck with the job of imitating the inimitable.  I couldn't help noticing that the early 1960s was a very sexist time, when women were expected to be "charming" and "feminine."

John F. Kennedy strikes me as an oddly overrated president, along the same lines as Obama.  Maybe he did have a plan to get out of Vietnam, but if so he hesitated fatally.  You can only judge leaders by what they actually did while they had the chance, and he seriously escalated the Vietnam conflict in his time.  He's been praised for proving less hawkish than his advisers during the Cuban Missile Crisis, yet a better president wouldn't have surrounded himself with hawks in the first place! (The same applies to Ronald Reagan 25 years later.)

As for Kennedy's assassination, I'm an agnostic (on this as on many other things). For all I know Lee Harvey Oswald may have acted alone--I'm no oddsmaker--but we'll presumably never know.  As a motive for conspiracy, mafia payback seems more plausible than keeping the U.S. in Vietnam.  Anyway, Kennedy was no angel himself!

Last night I dreamed of watching a movie about a serial killer, with this one closeup of a woman he's about to kill who's wearing dark glasses, and we see in the reflection of her shades a car that she thinks will save her, but it drives away and we see her expression as she realizes she's about to die!  Why do I have such sicko dreams? (At Christmastime, yet!) It isn't like I'm a horror fan.