As soon as I picked up the phone, he began, in his trademark high screech.

“It’s a world gone mad, Dope! A world gone mad!”

“He” was the only person it could be — Eric “The Hysteric” Lund.

I’ve known him since college and he hasn’t changed one iota: Always in panic mode, always either trying to recover from his latest horror, or looking forward to his next one.

Eric is one of those guys who thinks news is important. Or more exactly, he thinks HIS paying obsessive attention to it is. He reads the New York Times and the Washington Post daily, cover to cover. He subscribes to Time and Newsweek and for all I know The Ladies Home Journal. He watches the news channels, and listens to NPR, probably at the same time. And he never, not for one second, thinks what he’s doing is maybe just a wee bit weird.

He acts like if he doesn’t immerse himself in every “newsworthy” detail of humankind, the Martians are gonna invade, thus he and he alone is preventing our obliteration. So even though he drives me nuts with his nutty news-a-holism, I always listen to him. After all, that’s part of what friends is about, plus given the psycho-spiritual austerity of my existence and my lack of a TV, it passes for entertainment.

“OK, Eric,” I say, “what’s going on now?”

“You know what today is?” he says.

“Uh, could it be November 24, by any chance?”

“Exactly!” he shouts.

“And? So?” I say.

“So you know what two days ago was?”

“Um, if my math is up to snuff and my memory serves me correctly, it was November 22, the day JFK was killed.”

“So you know that, and I know that, but guess what?” he says.

“What?”

“My grandson DOESN’T know that,” he says. “Matter of fact, he barely knows who JFK was.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I asked him on Saturday if he knew what happened on that day in 1963 and he just shrugged,” he said.

He paused to catch his breath.

“Then I asked him if he knew who JFK was and he said he was a president,” he said. “Next, I asked him what else he knew about him and he said, he thought, ‘he got shot or something.'”

He paused again.

“Can you imagine that? ‘He thought he got shot or something’? He didn’t know anything else about JFK. Not his politics, his war record, his family, not even his wife’s name!”

“I not only can imagine it,” I said, “but it’s perfectly understandable to me.”

“How COULD it be? It’s our history, for pete’s sake! We need to keep it alive.”

“Look,” I said, “history gets lost, and always has. We’re not going to keep any of it alive.”

“How can you say that?” he said.

“Well, because it’s just a fact of life, whether you want to accept it or not,” I said.

“But, but, but …” he sputtered.

“Do you know how long ago JFK got killed?” I said. “I’ll tell you — sixty-two years.”

“Yeah? So what?”

“And we were seniors in high school then, right?”

“Right.”

“And do you know that sixty-two years before then, almost to the month, William McKinley was assassinated?”

“Of course I knew he got assassinated, but didn’t realize it was 62 years before.”

“And when we were seniors, other than he got killed, what else did you know about McKinley?”

There was a pause.

“He was president during the Spanish American War,” he said.

“What else?”

There was a longer pause.

“Do you know his politics or his war record or his family or his wife’s name?” I said.

“No,” he said. “Why would I?”

“And why would your grandson know anything about JFK?”

“Because he was a much more important president that McKinley,” he said.

“To us,” I said. “And that’s only because in 1963 we were of age when he was around and we saw the assassination almost in real time. At the same time, McKinley had been pushin’ up the daisies since 1901 and so was as unknown to us as JFK is to your grandson.”

And then I went into a tirade, maybe not unlike Erik’s.

“Yet his death had great historical importance because it made his VP Teddy Roosevelt the president. Roosevelt was a radical reformer who signed the Pure Food and Drug Act, created the U.S. Forest Service, and fought to protect our natural resources. Essentially, McKinley’s death changed our national landscape and outlook — almost none of which anyone knows anymore.

And if some earth-shaking event happens in your grandson’s lifetime, 62 years after that, it also will have faded into the woodwork. It’s not unusual, it shouldn’t be unexpected. It’s just one more damnable fact of life.”

“Yeah?” he said. “Well, I don’t like it.”

“Guess what?” I said. “Neither do I.”

And I don’t.

The war between think and feel

I can be fairly objective about his grandson’s ignorance of JFK when talking to Eric, because I’d slipped into my teacher mode and was trying to educate him. Plus, it was the truth — at least in an objective sense — and you can prove it by looking it any basic source. But I think there’s something you could call an emotional truth, which is something you FEEL is true, even while you KNOW it isn’t.

He was a riveting figure, a fine speaker, a quick wit, and a first-rate charmer. I also know as a politician, his record was pretty much so-so.

But that’s not how I FEEL anytime I see pictures of him, or even just think of him and an image pops into my mind: The Golden Boy who just stepped down from Olympus. My memories of him are vivid, powerful and ineradicable. His loss was so traumatic I still can’t look at videos of the Dallas motorcade. In fact, even still photos make me cringe. And when I’m in that place, the idea of kids not knowing who he was, not having Clue Number One what he meant to the folks of that time, seems downright sacrilegious. As in, How DARE They? But at the same time, I understand, rationally, how they dare.

So every year when Nov. 22 rolls around, I find myself alternating between mild confusion and mild outrage over why the headlines aren’t full of JFK stuff, with articles, programs and ceremonies aplenty in his honor. Of course I FEEL like that because it minimizes JFK, himself, while at the same time I understand how and why that happens.

But if I’m brutally honest with myself, I know it’s because it also minimizes me, my feelings and my whole LIFE at that time. It’s a purely emotional reaction, not at all a logical one.

And there you have the essential contradiction of our species: We are rational enough to believe we’re thinking creatures, but we’re far too emotional to actually behave like them.