God, human folly and laughter
A bit of JFK's wisdom engraved on a silver tankard inspires some personal reflections
“There are three things which are real: God, human folly and laughter. The first two are beyond our comprehension, so we must do what we can with the third.”—John F. Kennedy
I don’t recall precisely when I read these lines for the first time, but since that day, long ago, the words have never left me. From time to time I’ve wondered about the context in which Jack Kennedy spoke them, and was surprised to learn recently of their origin. They were written, not spoken, and were inscribed on a silver mug presented as a birthday present to a friend, Dave Powers, Special Assistant to President during the Kennedy administration, on his birthday in 1962.1
As a Massachusetts boy raised in the Catholic tradition, with an Irish mother, I was keenly aware of Kennedy and the challenges he faced in winning the presidency. Family members provided us children with campaign buttons; one of them read “If I Were 21, I’d Vote for Kennedy.” I don’t recall actually wearing them, particular not to school in our overwhelmingly Protestant town on the South Shore of Massachusetts. At school our young classmates echoed the prejudiced words they no doubt had heard at home about “the Pope running the country.” They even asserted that a tunnel would be built between Washington D.C. and the Vatican to facilitate the Pope’s takeover of the U.S. At a time when named telephone exchanges still existed, a frequently voiced joke was that the White House phone number would be changed to “Et cum Spirit - 220.”2
In retrospect, Kennedy’s election and the reality of his incomplete term in office did not eradicate such prejudices. I was at home, sick, the day of Kennedy’s assassination, but when my siblings returned home they reported that the reaction to the announcement at school of the President’s death included cheers from some of their classmates. Still, the issue of Catholicism as a barrier to national elected office does appear to have been eliminated in the aftermath of Kennedy’s demise, the remnant of these days being the moral/political question of abortion.
Kennedy was from a wealthy family, and it was common knowledge in Massachusetts that not all that wealth had been earned simply through hard and honest work. However Jack Kennedy and his family claimed the high ground culturally, and his time in office came to be characterised as “Camelot”—a time of glamour, of progressive thinking and bold new endeavours, and a celebration of the arts.
I think of the words Kennedy had inscribed on the gift to his friend frequently.
When I think of human folly now, the connection with politics is paramount. What folly to deny what Mother Nature tells us, in ever more desperate tones, that we are destroying out planetary home? What folly to promote hatred over love, anger over reason, greed over human equality and need?
I also question myself: is it folly to allow oneself to become attached, as observer or contributor, to the daily onslaught of assertions, ripostes, and indignation? Is it folly, to succumb, fret or respond as one can? Or is there perverse succour in such engagement?
I worry actively about the state of our world and the state of the country where I was born. It might be foolish to suppose it makes a difference, but I share my views from time to time on the issues that concern me most—above all the tragedy of healthcare in the United States and the culture that has incubated and cultivated it. It need not be that way, if only we could, as a society, contemplate our human condition and value empathy over wealth, and place the common good above selfishness.
I worry, too, about education in the United States, at all levels. Adult reading levels are of deep concern, of course;3 the disappearance of civics in school curricula and a lack of understanding of the functions of government has visible consequences. But should we not worry equally about the decline of the humanities? Many areas of the humanities have fallen victim to fiscal belt-tightening, and indeed to the notion that they do not contribute tangibly to workforce development. I say that is true folly.
Engagement with the humanities—including the arts—teaches us to pause, reflect, contemplate and evaluate, fostering critical faculties that provide moral clarity, enable critical thinking, and the capacity to contemplate the best that human creativity has given us. They bind us to our human past, to its glories and to the depths it too often sinks. They give us the ability to focus, to sustain attention, to appreciate. Does not the ability to reflect and perceive beauty and meaning have some relationship to the capacity for empathy, for caring, and to want some sense of community and shared common values? To enable us to interpret and better understand political speech and screed? To enable us to recognise our common humanity and to behave accordingly as individuals and as a society?
Laughter. I grew up with laughter. My father was a remarkable man for his wit and humour; he loved to laugh and to make others laugh with him. My grandfather’s wry humour, his laughter, and his stories resound with me still. The whole family told stories and laughed together, and the funniest stories were those where we laughed at our own folly.
Laughter, together with the creative arts, is what makes us so distinct as a civilised species, when we are at our best.
The folly that underlies so many contemporary events, tragedies and polemics is, as Kennedy wrote, incomprehensible. Without mitigation it is also destructive of the human spirit. I feel it, and I struggle against it. Laughter can help us find some balance, as can contemplation and the arts, so what I write attempts to share some humour and some experiences of creativity as well. Without these things I believe we would lose our humanity to anger, despair and hopelessness.
Kennedy also refers to God. No, I won’t write directly about that—doing so would be, well, sheer folly. And I also won’t make the mistake of confusing the concept of God with religion, which would be foolish, too. I’ll try to stick to only what is uniquely human—our folly and our laughter.
“Dave Powers: First Museum Curator,” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum https://www.jfklibrary.org/about-us/about-the-jfk-library/history/dave-powers-first-museum-curator (consulted 10 Jan 2025)
For Catholics unfamiliar with the Latin rite, and for any others, too, the Latin Mass uses a traditional Catholic greeting: “Dominus vobiscum,” meaning “The Lord be with you,” to which one replies “Et cum spiritu tuo.” or “And with your spirit.”
The Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy estimates that 54 percent of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 read at less than sixth-grade level. “Literacy Gap Map [overview]” https://map.barbarabush.org/ (consulted 13 Jan 2025)
Wow, this story really impressed me.
Both for how well-written it is and for what you write about.
I love it when you say you grew up with laughter. I grew up in a house were laughter was rare, precious, and momentary, so I learned to treasure it. Today I try to fill the house of my chosen family with as much laughter as I manage, no matter if we laugh about stupid puns or trivial things, as long as I hear us laughing, I feel safe.
Another peculiar thing is how raw and real the reciprocal mistrust (is hate too strong of a word?) between Protestants and Catholics used to be (or still is?). I live in Italy, here everybody's Catholic on paper, almost no one in real life, and no one really cares. Isn't it weird?
Great story, I really enjoyed it.
I grew up in a University community on the South Side of Chicago. Chicago was dominated for a long time by the Irish-Catholic Daily family politically, who was said to have helped to put Kennedy into the White House. I grew up thinking of Kennedy as a good guy, and he was greatly mourned as was Martin Luther King Jr. when they were murdered. It was not just a Catholic city, but the Democratic machine included the Black South and West sides of the city, and Kennedy was respected by most of the Black community regardless of their religion.
I agree that the destruction of Humanities education is a worrying thing. As a former teacher I made sure to teach history, culture, and civics. A lot of this was done through simulations. We would have a class mayor, governor or president, and then a legislative body, who would meet with me to make the rules. Typically our executives would always have an environmental platform. In later years I developed a curriculum with classmates that included an election simulation with made up candidates, but we would focus on the platform planks of the winning candidate, which would have been developed by the students in teams. This we did in 3-5 grades.
We also held a Veterans Day assembly where students would teach about the different branches of the military, and heroes of different genders and ethnic backgrounds. This included inviting families and vets, and interviewing vets in our community and putting up their pictures, with their details and then inviting them to be guests of honor at the assembly. We also went to the VA hospital and sang to them and brought cards made from our entire school. A drive I would organize each year. When there were disasters we would make crafts to sell and fundraise for them. There is so much to civic involvement. We would study the part of the world affected. By getting children involved in helping one teaches them agency in the face of tragedy, and to be good neighbors and good citizens of the world.
I taught in a school founded by the educational philosopher John Dewey, and he believed in learning by doing. The literature we chose to read we used to help us understand ourselves and the human condition. I used literature to address culture and teach all sorts of complex aspects of life in our society. Divorce, loss of a family member, two same gendered parents, adoption, poverty, racism, sexism, being gay, and just different lived experiences. Many of the books mixed in humor as well as other emotions.
I cannot imagine life without the humanities, but I have been hearing from my daughter studying linguistics and literature in Germany, her classes according to her are 90% female. That is concerning. She still has male professors so that is encouraging. Still, I am not sure how to get more males involved in the humanties. It also means that the women who study humanities do not meet many men who are not in their classes. So, the devaluing of the humanities has bigger social implications as well.