Abrams' adaptation of King's '11.22.63' should be very interesting

I was 10 years old when John F. Kennedy was elected president and 13 when he was murdered in Dallas.

11/22/63

It was the day the world changed, and it never changed back. The day our young, energetic president was replaced by an old, grandfatherly type.

Lyndon Johnson did some good, especially on the domestic side, but he got us so deeply entangled in Vietnam that by the time the war ended late in the Nixon administration more than 58,000 Americans were dead.

If there's one thing that has been constant over the last 52 years, it's people wondering how different things have been if President Kennedy had not died in Dallas and had served out two full terms in the White House.

George Bernau took a shot at it in "Promises to Keep," a novel in which a Kennedyesque president is shot in Dallas but survives a terrible head wound. History changes, but not as much as you might think. Bernau had another novel, "Candle in the Wind," that questioned what would have happened had Marilyn Monroe not died in August 1962.

But it was Stephen King who took the most interesting look at the situation. Instead of writing about what would have happened if Kennedy had not been killed, he wrote about the possibility of someone going back in time to prevent the assassination in the first place.

As with most of King's larger works, there's too much story here to fit into one movie. "The Stand" was a four-part miniseries and "It" was done -- and not particularly well -- as a two-part TV movie.

"Under the Dome" was overdone more than could even have been imagined, with 39 one-hour episodes over three seasons on Amazon. The story was expanded and changed, making the original story almost unrecognizable.

King's "11.22.63" is getting a similar treatment, although it might just be nine episodes and one season. James Franco has the lead as the time-traveling teacher and Chris Cooper is the diner owner who discovers the route into the past.

Franco and Cooper

King handles the idea of time travel and all the possible paradoxes like the pro he is. What's especially interesting is the idea that the bigger the change, the more difficult the universe makes it to accomplish.

One real irony is that Kennedy himself once said no assassin had ever changed history. Whether that was ever true, it's difficult to imagine that JFK in office until 1969 would have left the country in the same shape credibility-wise that Johnson did.

And even if he had been killed in 1963, it's still difficult to imagine Richard Nixon winning in 1968 if Bobby Kennedy hadn't been killed in June in Los Angeles.

Of course none of that happened, but just as it's interesting to speculate, it will be interesting to see what King and filmmaker J.J. Abrams do with it.

It's nice to have something to look forward to.

There always seems to be someone Americans are afraid of

What's the biggest evil ever perpetrated in American history?

Certainly the genocide of Native Americans would be way up there, and chattel slavery is right there with it. But people are quick to dismiss those, saying sure they were bad, but both of those things ended long before any of us were born.

America, 1942

But 1942 wasn't that long ago, and even if most of us weren't alive then, it was a modern enough era that there are plenty of radio broadcasts and movie newsreels still in existence to remind us of what happened.

We have never been a particularly tolerant nation when it comes to other races and ethnicities. Many of us are descended from the British, who for all intents and purposes invented racism.

We justified what we did to Native Americans by saying they were savages, even though in some ways they were more spiritual than the average settler. We justified slavery with a Biblical fable about Noah's duskier son gazing on him when he was naked and passed out drunk.

Maybe it's unfair to call it racism. Maybe more than anything else it's just xenophobia. Nearly two-thirds of Americans have never traveled outside the U.S., and well under half even have a passport.

It isn't just about us not traveling either. Large parts of this country aren't big tourist destinations for international travelers. Folks living in Nebraska or West Virginia aren't likely to encounter tourists from Japan, Italy or Nigeria. So their knowledge of people from different cultures is limited to what they see on television.

Is there a way to deal with radical Islam and still have religious freedom?

Who would have thought that as we learn more and more about our world and our universe, religion would be dragging us closer and closer to the eve of destruction?

As I write this, there are terrorist attacks ongoing in Paris with more than 140 people dead, and it certainly appears that radical Islam is behind them.

Friday evening in Paris.

Theoretically, radical Islamists have one advantage the rest of us don't in this war or sorts.

Osama bin Laden explained it when he said Americans could not defeat Al Qaeda.

"They want to live. We are not afraid to die."

It's similar to what John F. Kennedy said when he said no president could ever truly be protected from an assassin. If someone is willing to trade his life for that of the president, the odds are very high that he will succeed.

A lot of people don't understand that we lost a lot more than people on Sept. 11, 2001, and it was all part of the plan. All you have to do is look at the Patriot Act and at all the NSA spying going on and you see that bin Laden succeeded in making us surrender a significant amount of our freedom.

One of my favorite travel memories is from 1990, when I was covering college basketball for the Reno Gazette-Journal. I was driving from Moscow, Idaho, to the Spokane airport when my rental car skidded off the road and got stuck in a snowdrift. By the time I got pulled out, I had 24 minutes till my flight was scheduled to depart and 23 miles to cover -- on snowy roads.

Spokane Airport

Thankfully, it was a small airport. I arrived with 2 minutes left, tossed the keys to the car rental people and sprinted to the gate. I got there with the door to the plane half-open.

Thanks to bin Laden, nothing like that will ever happen again.

But I've gotten away from my point. If there are a billion Muslims in the world, and only 1 percent sympathize with terrorism, that's still 10 million people. And if only 1 percent of that 1 percent actually participate in terrorism, that's still 100,000 terrorists.

That can make for a lot of Parises.

Of course we have more problems in this country than just Islam, although being Americans, most of the others don't seem to want to destroy property. We've got fundamentalist Christian preachers who apparently have enough influence to attract three Republican presidential candidates to a rally where they call for the death of gays and lesbians. We've got another candidate, Ben Carson, who has said he would go back in time to kill Baby Hitler if he could, but he would not kill Hitler by aborting him in his mother's womb.

Then there are the super-Orthodox Jews, who won't seem to give an inch in a possible compromise for peace in the Middle East. It's tough to blame them too much, because there doesn't seem to be any give from the Muslim side either.

The thing that may be the toughest to solve here is the problem just might be religion itself.