And the presidential car bifurcates on Elm Street. It rolls slowly. The human rumor is to joy. The President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, is smiling, and he greets the women and men who do the same for him and his wife, sitting beside him. The car drives slowly. Suddenly John Fitzgerald Kennedy sees a man opening an umbrella. And he thinks…
On November 22, 1963, World History could be different. It should have been different. Isn’t the President of the United States one of the most surrounded men? Especially since, assassinations of presidents, the United States had already experienced them. But here it is: History is these images where we see a car drifting towards a shooting booth. A man can be shot if… Since then, so many, in the United States and elsewhere, have been « shot » as they say in French, shocked, stunned, depressed. It is not just a man who was taken from us that day. This is another story. Since then, mediocre and criminals have made the law. The United States has become the most militarized state in the world. They waged war on war. Weapons continue to circulate in many states, as if we were still in the 18th century. The number of deaths per firearm is about 30,000 per year. In this short story, it’s about thinking, dreaming, « imagining »: the presidential car bifurcates on Elm Street. A man holding an umbrella stands ready to open it. But the president sees it and…
This short story comes from the book « Not to be an asshole – Poor France » (1) published since September 2021, in French, and not yet translated into English (2). The English translation of this chapter, published in this form, is explained by the desire to offer English-speaking readers, and especially among them, Americans, access to this brief narrative, which, henceforth, literary categories identify as uchronia. And if… But it is not only a question of conceiving what this other Story might have been (and should have been), but of insisting on what I can call the theory of the ball effect, rather than the butterfly effect. Indeed, the bullets that struck John Fitzgerald Kennedy not only killed a young, seemingly sympathetic, serious President of the United States, but prevented another Story from coming to light, since we have been enduring a permanent night ever since. We have been deprived of (…)