Mr. Zeit, meet Mr. Geist

I have this mental picture of some guy in a beige cardigan in the fall of 1960, sitting in a small tract home in Rancho Park in front of a Philco, glowing incandescent in black and white. He's watching Huntley and Brinkley, hunched forward on a low slung Milo Baughman couch. He's maybe 35 or 40 years old, single, listens to jazz and drives a new Corvair. Very hip guy. A Democrat who has suffered through the 1950s, likes the fact that he lives near UCLA, that hotbed of radicalism. Goes to lectures there on occasion. He's enjoying the election coverage, and he's projecting all these positive things that are going to happen if Kennedy wins [which was by no means certain on election night that year.]

So he wakes up the next day, listens to the radio or picks up the paper and reads that Kennedy, indeed, has won. He's a happy cat. An extra bounce in his step. Refills his Corvair with Hi Test, just as a lark.

What he doesn't realize is that when Kennedy won, something much larger than a political shift happened [In fact, the paper-thin difference between the moderate Republican Nixon and the conservative Democrat Kennedy is, in retrospect, laughable.] No, what happened on that Fall night, in the wee hours of November 9th, 1960 was that a new zeitgeist occurred. Which is a bit like saying that a nuclear bomb "occurred" in Hiroshima in 1945. The values of an entire culture shifted overnight. And our hero, from then on, despite his good intentions, his contributions to UNICEF, his tolerant attitudes, his Munsingwear shirts and his jazz patter, would became a relic, a footnote, a sad little man who from then on would be working on a combover that would never quite cut it with the chicks in Westwood Village.

That same wind is blowing in America tonight, folks. Do you feel it?