National Perspective: A future canceled

Forgive me, please, for repeating myself, as people of a certain age often do. I’ve written columns before on major anniversaries of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. But I have just left a remarkable sculpture exhibit in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and found myself walking down Avenue du President-Kennedy, remembering the whole awful episode, 60 years ago this week: the memory that won’t go away, the memory that, in defiance of human experience, somehow gets fresher every year.

The sculpture exhibit is a retrospective on the work of Marisol, the Venezuelan American sculptor who, in small wooden figures sitting below a massive carving of John F. Kennedy Jr. — the 3-year-old in full salute, the way the military men once saluted his fallen father — triggered a flood of memories, none of them nostalgic.