The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [93]
Killing the Kennedys—What’s Your Alibi?
Someone could reject any one, or even all, of these positions on complicity. I will concentrate on the combined notion since it includes the other two and makes the most sense of saying that we are all more or less complicit in large acts of collective evil. But, we could only say that if complicity makes sense to begin with. “Sympathy for the Devil” provides an argument that it does. Consider the lines concerning the Kennedy assassinations:
I shouted out:
“Who killed the Kennedys?”
When after all
It was you and me.
Since he’s willing to proudly confess to so much, it’s not surprising when our narrator, Lucifer, accepts direct moral responsibility for the murders of both John and Robert Kennedy. Since responsibility is not a zero-sum game, Lucifer can still look around for compatriots in the Kennedy homicides. Lucifer, being the devil that he is, blames us all.
How could this be possible? I myself have an airtight alibi simply by not having been alive in either 1963 or 1968. The surface reading makes no sense. What if, on the other hand, we thought of the Kennedy’s as the symbolic representation of all that is positive about the 1960s? What if we saw them, as some people did, as the individuals who were bringing about the utopian Camelot in the US? If we see them as a symbolic ideal, then our inability to continue their legacy, our failure to protect what they stood for, our falling into the entanglement of the Vietnam war then, and similar wars now, all represent our collective complicity in their metaphorical deaths.
Washing the Evil off Your Hands
There is, though, another point of view on complicity. One man’s infamously washing of his hands perhaps best represents the point of view of the complicity-skeptic. Allow The Stones’ satanic narrator to explain:
And I was ’round when Jesus Christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain,
Made damn sure that Pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate.
Pontius Pilate’s hand washing suggests skepticism about the very idea of complicity, as if by washing our hands we could also wash away negligible traces of accountability. Pilate, who—at least in the Bible—is reluctant to execute Jesus, does so anyway at the pleading of the Jewish authorities. Since those authorities demand Jesus’s execution, Pilate feels he can wash his hands of the affair. Pilate figured that once responsibility has fixed onto someone, everyone else’s hands would be clean.
Complicity is a controversial idea. Why should I have any residual stain on me for something that I’m only tangentially related to? Consider my “involvement” (if it can even be called that) in the drug wars. I may have purchased some songs online, but I had no choice in how the rock stars used that money. And those rock stars had no choice in what the drug dealers did with their money. We shouldn’t be at all accountable, declares the skeptic. It is the other people—the kingpins, dealers, and assassins—that need to account for the wrongs done! Why invent a new ethical concept to lay any accountability on me when I didn’t directly do anything? Pilate’s got a good objection: if others are truly responsible, why can’t we just wash our hands and move on?
The Stones, given this stanza, don’t seem to agree with Pilate’s take. The final “his” in the stanza is ambiguous: “Washed his hands and sealed his fate.” Whose fate? Jesus makes sense, but isn’t grammatically accurate. We learned in elementary school that a pronoun whose referent is unclear attaches to whomever was named most recently—in this case, Pilate. Pilate’s hand washing shows his complicity since he’s trying to downplay his part in the murder: he allowed it to happen. We’re often complicit for wrongdoing precisely because we do nothing to stop it. Pilate, who’s complicit for allowing the murder to happen, cannot