Lest We Forget

Mazurland will not let the day pass without remembrance of the events that occured on this day 42 years ago. President John F. Kennedy was killed by a lone madman on this date in 1963. It is one of those events where everyone who was alive and aware at the time remembers exactly where he was, what he was doing, and what he felt the moment he heard the awful news. The murder of Kennedy was a sad and horrible event that has been mythologized into an epic national tragedy, the end of a golden age and the dawn of a darker, more chaotic one. But this myth is where memory fails. Kennedy was a good President who is remembered by liberals for almost none of the things he was good for. He was himself not knowledgeable about economics, but his tax cut was the last good thing any Democrat ever did for the economy. He believed in the goodness of America and was an ardent anti-Communist. He was an optimistic witness for the good America can do in the world. He held out an outstretched hand to the developing nations, but was also a proponent of a muscular foreign policy. He was almost...Reaganesque. And all of this is lost in the memory of many liberals and Democrats. The style, the rosy hues emanating from Camelot, remain. The substance is forgotten.

The surreal forgetting is still with us today. September 11, 2001 is the most recent event that was at one time considered one that every American would remember forever. Its importance has also been forgotten, denied, abandoned, or mythologized, first by leftists, then by liberals, and now by almost all Democrats.

There is another event that occurred 42 years ago today. Aldous Huxley, on his deathbed the previous night, had requested and received from his wife an injection of LSD, with which he had experimented extensively in order to heighten his experience of the spiritual. He died the next morning. Huxley was a member of the famous Huxley family that had made many contributions to late 19th and early 20th Century science. Aldous was not himself a scientist, and was wary of the possible misapplications of science in human life. He was a brilliant and wide ranging essayist and author of works in poetry, fiction, travel literature. In his novels and essays, Huxley examined and critiqued social mores, societal norms and ideals. He became involved in what was to become the Human Potential Movement, which investigated the untapped potentialities of human beings by all means. His investigations of heightened perception and awareness included experimentation with psychedelic drugs and forays into spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and mystically based philosophy. Despite these investigations, Huxley's mystical philosophy was divorced from contact with a personal god, and was in many respects the end result of the exaltation of the self. His intelligent, generous, inquiring, and humanistic spirit led him to write one of the great dystopian novels, Brave New World. It shows a world which enshrines science in order to provide pleasure. It predicts the divorce of sex from reproduction, as well as eugenic technologies to manipulate the kinds of humans that are produced. People perfect their lives through pharmacology, allowing them to have enhanced experiences of gratification, and to delay aging. The world is stripped of love and devoid of humanity. Though the book can be viewed as an eerily prescient warning of what happens when science is stripped of humanism, it perhaps unwittingly shows what happens when humanity forgets God.

Finally, Clive Staples Lewis died on this date 42 years ago. C. S. Lewis was arguably the greatest Christian apologist of the 20th century. His death on this date was overshadowed by Kennedy's assassination. But Lewis, beloved and influential during his life, has grown more so with every passing decade. And Lewis is poised to become even more influential, and probably a new target in the culture wars.

Lewis gained fame for his wartime radio broadcasts on Christianity. His easy but intelligent and non-condescending style made this reclusive Oxford (and later Cambridge) don very popular in his lifetime. His books covered a breadth of styles from science fiction to children's literature, and topics from joy to grief. Perhaps his best-loved and most influential writing is his seven book series of children's classics, The Chronicles of Narnia. These books are great adventures and deep expressions of Christian morals and beliefs. Disney is releasing the first of these stories, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, on film this Christmas season. First reports indicate that the story has not been 'Disneyfied', but is true to the book in every way. The influence this story can have on the children who will see it is undeniable. The knives are already sharpening among atheist and secularist culture warriors. We should not forget what is at stake.