"Ask not what your country can do for you"

The BBC have recently been showing a profoundly disturbing advert, as part of the promotion for their thoroughly ill-judged 'Britain's Got Talent' style search for the next great orator. Disturbing, first, for the shift between the ordinary voice of a child and the voice of the corrupt mayor of Springfield, Joe Quimby. But also disturbing in its content - the end of John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, in which he beseeches his citizens not to ask him for things ("ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country).

JFK is seen by some as a lost liberal hero - his assassination an attack on a reforming politician by the forces of reaction. The unimpeachable Marvin Gaye and Bill Hicks fell down on this camp (in fairness, Hicks had reservations). He was none of these things. Like Tony Blair, he took it upon himself to be more hawkish than the hawks, sending troops against Cuba and Vietnam. Two major invasions in just shy of 3 years is an impressive record.

The section of his speech chosen by the BBC to highlight great oratory is in fact apocalyptic, nonsensical and platitudinous. He tasks himself with "defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger", assuring the audience that "I do not shank from this responsibilty". Of course, this proved not to mean the freedom of Cuba and Vietnam to determine their own futures, although both of them managed to achieve an impressive degree of self-determination faced with the greatest military force the modern world has known. Aside from these churlish objections, what can Kennedy mean about freedom being in its hour of maximum danger in 1961? Surely we can agree that was, in modern history, when Hitler's armies had an iron grip over the vast swathe of continental Europe, with Kennedy's father's full support?

After dropping this millinarian clanger, he tries to sweeten his audience by praising their generation - "I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation". This is, over human history, largely true - the fact of technological progress, and the impossibility of time travel make exchanging places with other generations both undesirable and impractical.

But the most arresting phrase, and the most infuriating, is his call for Americans not to ask what their country can do for them, but what they can do for their country. The state behaves, at its most basic level, as a parasite. In the feudal era, the state acted as a protection racket, demanding taxes, and punishing those who refused to cough up. Fortunately, things are less one-sided now, following demands on the state to provide essential services, and a degree of security. Arguing for self-sacrifice in the name of the glory of the nation, must have, should have, sounded slightly kamikaze to an audience of people, many of whom had been detrimentally impacted by the struggle against oriental despotism.

Given that the rise of Obama is clearly the impetus for the BBC's search for an orator, the choice of this speech is highly ironic - Obama's arguments are almost opposite to those of Kennedy. Obama argued against fearful patriotic fervor in the form of the Iraq War, and for state intervention to help create jobs and widen health-care provision. Not counting the incongruity of JFK's nasal, Bostonian tones issuing from the maws of clearly British children, the speech hits the wrong notes.