I have been watching Mad Men recently, and I was really struck by the scenes when MLK or JFK were assassinated, and everyone was sad. It really struck me as, kind of fake or unrealistic.
National grieving seems to me like kind of a forced pretense, like politicians and reporters would get on TV and say "we are all very sad" for a few days and compete to see who can be more mournful.
I may not be the average American, but it seems completely incongrous with current experience. People talk about the boston bombing and stuff, but it's not like anyone's crying. something bad happened somewhere far away in a country of 300 million people. It just seems kind of far fetched to me that there would be crying housewives everywhere.
Is that a show taking artistic liberty or was there this very real sense of national identity (deeper than just the empty patriotism of campaign speeches) that seems lost in modernity, or at least lost on me?
Posting from phone so please apologize if I my spelling and grammar are off:
Here is the problem with your analysis from a historical view; first, you are imposing realities of the present onto the past, and in turn skew your perspective with presentism. You cant say this is how people act today so therefore that must be how they acted in the past. Secondly, and more importantly, you are comparing apples and oranges. Really there hasnt been a national figure as important as JFK or MLK assassinated in recent memory. Perhaps the idea of everyone on the streets mourning is a tad silly, but there was certainly nationwide grief about each of those events. If you are old enough to remember 9/11 that would be a far better comparison. After that event there was a revival of national unity and a sense of national grief. In a similar way most people will be able to tell you were they were when MLK or JFK were shot, so at the very least you can say that eachs death is embedded within national memory historically.
You bet there was national grieving. I was too young to participate in it when FDR died, but I remember the grief of my parents--of every adult I met. There was a glum silence--and fear--that lasted for weeks. JFK's death also provoked national grieving. The movie theaters closed and most sports events were canceled. The newspapers and television discussed nothing else for what seemed like weeks. Everyone watched the funeral and I"ll bet they all remember John-John saluting his father's casket. It was like a hammer blow to the heart. Kennedy's youth and Jackie's beauty compounded the feeling People were miserable and it took months for the feeling to truly dissipate. There was an intense sense that America--and you, personally--had lost something exceptionally valuable, that something had happened that just couldn't be absorbed, couldn't be accepted. The world had gone wrong. I STILL feel remnants of that grief and find it difficult to watch TV shows that feature JFK. I refuse to look at the Zapruder film again. And I know many people who felt as I did. It seemed to me that everyone did.
Martin Luther King's assassination affected me differently for two reasons: 1) while I supported and admired him, I'm a white man, so his death wasn't that personal to me; 2) The possibility of his assassination had been so widely discussed--assumed--during the last ten years of his life that it came as no surprise.
RFK's death came as a terrible surprise, however. We hadn't bargained for that. But by then, we felt a certain numbness. It felt as though the good things in the world were doomed, as though hope itself had been damaged. When Obi Wan Kenobi sensed a terrible disturbance in the Force after the death star destroyed a planet, he was talking about this kind of feeling.