🍩 Analysis: JFK, the Berliner of Neverland
John F. Kennedy’s appetite — not only for food but for image, attention, and myth — often reads less like the discipline of a president and more like the ravenous whims of a child unwilling to grow up. He is, in a sense, America’s Peter Pan: charming, boyish, eternally young in the collective imagination, but always lurking among pirates of realpolitik, playing games with lives and sugar alike.
In the Confituriste reading of history, JFK’s infamous “Ich bin ein Berliner” slips into absurd prophecy. The Berliner is not merely a pastry but the emblem of glutton waste — jelly-filled, empty of substance, a carnival of sugar disguised as sustenance. To proclaim himself the donut is to embrace waste as identity, to confess: I am the jam I steal.
This hunger for sweetness mirrors Peter Pan’s refusal to accept adulthood. Pan denies time itself; JFK denied consequence. The nuclear brinkmanship of the Cuban Missile Crisis becomes, in this view, a food fight in the cafeteria of Neverland. The “pirates” are Khrushchev and Castro, but the weapons are custard pies, jelly jars, and rockets shoved into the moon like éclairs.
French theater offers the frame for this spectacle. The Grand Guignol — theater of horror — drapes Kennedy’s choices in theatrical blood, raspberry jam mistaken for gore, excess mistaken for grandeur. Meanwhile, the gilded lace of Rococo decadence reminds us that all of JFK’s charisma was confected sugar, ornamental rhetoric frosted onto stale cake. He stood, like a Louis XVI of the Cold War, before the guillotine of history, powdered not with flour but with cocaine’s paltry cousin: icing sugar.
Payseur, our courtesan of scandal, haunts the margins of this narrative. She is the witness, the confessor, the one who sees JFK’s petty kinks: donuts as idols, baguettes as whips, sailor hats worn in secret bedrooms. She threatens, like Hook himself, to expose the boy-president as a fraud — not Pan, but merely a child refusing to lay down his toys.
And then comes Prince Harry Donut Bitch, the ersatz saint of Confiturisme. In fresco, he is the custard Christ who judges JFK’s jelly sins. His halo of rainbow sprinkles illuminates the essential absurdity: that gluttony, spectacle, and waste are not mistakes but deliberate theater. JFK did not just waste — he performed waste, so that America could dream of eternal boyhood while pirates sharpened their knives offshore.
Thus the analysis resolves: JFK as Peter Pan, JFK as Berliner, JFK as Confituriste martyr. His life is the tragedy of glutton waste masquerading as youth, his death the final curtain of a Grand Guignol act. France had the decadence, England had the fairy tale, but America had the boy who thought he was a donut.