I saw this 50th Anniversary coming up several months ago and began to dig the shelter. I knew what was coming: A deluge of goofball, paranoid idiocy, raised to the level of attempts to "answer the questions."
Robert Ariail says it. The eternal flame, as in "flaming and gaping."
I was in eighth grade when Kennedy was shot and, yes, it was a turning point in how we all saw things, but, of course, eighth grade is a turning point anyway. Even without the assassination, my innocence was about to start hitting some rocks and going through some rapids, so who knows what the precise impact on me was?
And it wasn't an isolated moment, but rather a peak in a whole range of smaller traumas in which Americans did unspeakable things to each other: The murder of Viola Liuzo, of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, of Medgar Evers, of Malcolm X, the beatings of Freedom Riders, of young people in Birmingham, of young people in Chicago, the riots of Newark and of Watts, the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and of Martin Luther King, and the ongoing tragedy of Vietnam ... and more ...
I wasn't traumatized by JFK's assassination, but it stands out as among the first of these assaults on the order. And maybe that's why it has attracted so many delusional, ahistorical nincompoops.
A couple of years ago, I went to Dallas to do a teacher workshop and the Dallas Morning News put me up in a hotel near Dealey Plaza. I was in and out of town too quickly -- and was too busy while there -- to get into the museum itself, but I did walk through the plaza and see the scene of the crime, and it came as a shock to me.
It ain't that big, folks. I'm not joining in the delusion by launching another conspiracy theory and I don't think anyone got together and agreed to make it look bigger, but, when you see it in photographs and on video, it looks a lot wider and deeper than it is.
And I looked at the Depository window and I looked at where the car was and I said, "I grew up with at least a dozen guys who could have made that shot."
Even without resting the rifle on a box.
Now, bear in mind that I grew up with at least a dozen guys who could pick flies off a wall at 150 yards with a deer rifle. It wasn't an easy shot. But it certainly wasn't impossible.
So here's this guy selling conspiracy crap on the street and we got to talking. He was a Vietnam vet working for a friend, so his investment in the conspiracy was primarily financial and he readily admitted that there were guys he served with who could have made the shot.
"But look at all the other things that had to come together ..." he said, and, as it happened, I had gotten a Sacajawea coin out of an airport vending machine on the trip in, so I took it out and told him the story of how this Indian girl, kidnapped from one tribe, living in another, married to a French trapper and then brought back up the river as part of a white man's expedition, is asked to translate in a critical bargaining for horses -- and discovers that the chief of this band of Indians happens by chance to be her long-lost brother.
Shit happens. And sometimes it doesn't.
January 30, 1834 -- An assassin pulls a pistol on Andrew Jackson at point blank range. It misfires. He pulls out a second pistol. It misfires.
October 14, 1912 -- An assassin shoots Theodore Roosevelt in the chest. The bullet is slowed by his glasses case and the folded text of his speech. It penetrates his chest, but he makes the speech before getting medical care. The bullet is too near his heart to be removed, but he lives another seven years before dying of something else.
And, for that matter, if anyone had wondered sooner how a man with his hand wrapped up in a bandage expected to shake hands with William McKinley, Roosevelt wouldn't have become president.
We wouldn't make Squeaky Fromme jokes if things had come together for her, and Hinckley came closer to success than we thought for years.
Shit happens, and sometimes it doesn't.
And here's part two: Kennedy was assassinated in the real world, not on a TV detective show or in a mystery novel.
The pieces don't all fit together for the simple reason that, in real life, the pieces don't all fit together. As many authors have noted, the reason that "truth is stranger than fiction" is that fiction is required to make sense and truth isn't.
Moreover
The latest bit of flaming coverage is announcing the percentage of people who believe the assassination involved a conspiracy.
You might as well announce the percentage of people who believe that diamonds are forever or that Budweiser is the king of beers or that America has talent.
And if the percentage of people who believe something is how we judge truth, does that mean that evolution is not a fact? Because they've also been announcing the percentage of people who don't believe in that.
Look: The pieces don't fit in the assassination of Martin Luther King either. And if the CIA and the mob and LBJ were all behind the JFK assassination, why was Oswald in custody within three hours while King's assassin -- presumably working alone -- had two months of freedom and got all the way to London?
If there's a conspiracy afoot, it's the one over why we don't see a kabillion TV shows and books about that.
Introducing a new meme: "No dear"
I still believe in the Prime Directive, which is that we don't single out inept cartoons here. But I'm introducing a new meme with which to comment on entire flurries of single-minded conceptual ineptitude, based on this 1921 Frank Reynolds classic:
For example:
And:
Don't make me use it again. You know who you are.
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