Politics & Power Quote by Lance Morrow

Morrow pegs the 1960s less to a calendar than to a rupture: the day American innocence stopped being plausible. By calling November 22, 1963 the “real” start, he’s mocking the tidy decade-as-brand idea and insisting the era was born from trauma, not fashion or music. The phrasing turns history into stagecraft. An “afternoon” evokes domestic normalcy - lunch hours, TV on in the background - then detonates it. The assassination becomes a switch flipped in broad daylight.

The “malign trap door” is doing heavy cultural work. It suggests Kennedy’s death wasn’t merely a loss of a leader but a structural failure in the floorboards of American self-storytelling: the belief that institutions are competent, progress is linear, the future is managed. Trap doors are hidden; you don’t see them until you’re falling. Morrow’s subtext is that the country discovered it had been standing on a lie.

Then he releases “wild bats,” a deliberately gothic image that sneers at sanitized nostalgia. Bats aren’t random; they’re nocturnal, disorienting, associated with contagion and fear. He’s hinting at the decade’s darker aftershocks - paranoia, conspiracy thinking, state violence, Vietnam’s moral vertigo, the sense that the culture had slipped into an unlit room where old rules didn’t work. The sentence doesn’t argue; it conjures. That’s the intent: to make the reader feel the trap door give way, and to frame the 60s as a haunt rather than a party.