11/22/63

I'm a longtime Stephen King fan, and I either have read, or plan to read, all of his books.

The reason there are several in that latter category is that while I like everything he writes, not everything is created equally -- some take me a little longer to get into. My personal opinion is that he's at his best when he's telling a story, and not trying to exorcise his own inner demons or trying to see how high he can take the body count.

So when I first read the plot to 11/22/63, I was intrigued, because it sounded like a book that would fit in with my King favorites.

And it didn't disappoint.

 The first good sign came in that the story would take King out of a couple of his comfort zones, namely, the main character is not a writer, and while the book starts in Maine, it mostly takes place in Texas. King's writer characters and the Maine settings, I've always thought, are just projections of his own life.

I'm not going to launch into a review of the book here. I liked it. What I am going to do, though, is analyze a little of the politics behind it (if anyone actually reads this blog and might want to read the book, stop here).

Knowing from the books I've read and interviews that King tends to the liberal side (might have something to do with his intelligence), I was interested in how he would handle the politics of this. The overriding premise is that a guy (Jake Epping) goes back in time to stop the JFK assassination and change history for the better. So how would King rewrite history?

First off, the guy had to succeed in stopping the assassination (last chance to stop reading before the spoiler). King's novels are not known for happy endings, and with the paradox of time travel, I knew there was no guarantee he would succeed. But the guy does succeed in stopping Oswald even as the shots are being fired.

The characters in the book surmise that maybe with no assassination, there would be no Vietnam, no Watergate, maybe no 9/11, etc. That's feasible; I think if Gore wins the 2000 election there likely is no 9/11, for example.

So, does a continued Kennedy presidency establish utopia? King doesn't dwell long on the future without the assassination, and that's fair in the flow of the story. To summarize even more than King: Kennedy keeps our involvement in Vietnam on the back burner, but as things continue to escalate, Americans spoil for more involvement. So Republican George McGovern wins in 1968 (after a second Kennedy term), and things get out of hand with the warhawks in charge -- basically, nuclear war becomes a reality of life going forward.

The exact details of King's version are unimportant, and the whole political scenario is disrupted by increased earthquakes (which are part of a plot point about the dangers of changing the past). But what it boils down to is this, it seems: everything politically is an overreaction. Kennedy stays president, doesn't escalate our involvement in Vietnam, so folks overreact and elect warhawks, etc.

While King's portrayal of events is way more cataclysmic and drastic than what you'd expect if you'd stopped the assassination (again, it's complicated by the whole "danger of changing the past motif"), the point it gets at might be spot-on. If Kennedy had served out his term and the cold war have simmered a little longer, would the flash point have been even worse than Vietnam? If there hadn't been war in Southeast Asia in the 1960s, might it have been in the Middle East in the 1970s, with bigger consequences? Possibly.

You can still feel the undertones of King's political leanings in a number of places, but he does seem to acknowledge that the reality is that just because your political party wins the next election, it doesn't mean things are going to be rosy for all eternity.