My annual trip back into the thick historical gruel...

...of the JFK assassination has begun, courtesy of The History Channel's latest installment of the British documentary series, "The Men Who Killed Kennedy." I only caught the last two of the three--the ones that could be boiled down to:

1) Don't date Lee Harvey Oswald; and

2) Don't fuck around with LBJ.

Did anyone see the first one? I need that rule to live by, as well.



I've been told that I can be tiresome on this topic, so I'll keep it (somewhat) brief. At this point, what one believes happened on 11/22/63 is much more indicative of one's own worldview than anything else. There is enough evidence to buttress any reality. The Kennedy assassination inhabits the shared space between historical inquiry and a cootiecatcher-style personality test.



Being interested in Roman history, nor sold on the idea that Americans are any more virtuous than any other group of humans, I think that a conspiracy was fairly likely. And, as I have pointed out many times to horrified friends of my parents, that's the current stance of the US Government, as well. (The last official investigation of the JFK Assassination, undertaken by the House Select Committee in 1978/9, concluded that there was a high degree of probabillity that more than one person was shooting at the motorcade that day. Thus, conspiracy.) Now if the US government doesn't care enough about the sanctity of the democratic process to get to the bottom of what happened, that's another issue, and one that I think strikes at the very heart of our continued national fascination with the JFK assassination. It is a fissure in our democracy, a point where the shared dream of popular rule falls away to reveal the much more limited reality.



Given what we know about the behavior of people in power--for example, the arrogance, risk-taking, and disregard for morality that people assign to JFK's sexual escapades with such relish--can we really say that political skullduggery doesn't exist in the U.S.? In the case of the Kennedy assassination(s), the physical evidence points in that direction rather relentlessly. When you couple that with the tendencies of power to corrupt, conspiracy strikes me as the only sensible conclusion.



A recent poll says that most Americans believe there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. This belief has been so persistent, from the 1960s on, that I think it's the apologists for the Warren Commission who are the wild-eyed crazies at this point. There is a desperation to their belief--a willingness to say "how preposterous" and leave it at that--that one has to question. Certainly President Kennedy could've been killed by a lone nut, but many, many things suggest that he wasn't. Certainly Oswald could've been a mixed-up drifter, but once again, many, many things suggest that he wasn't. Everybody's entitled to their opinion, but I'm not convinced that this willful naivete (much more common in the Establishment, at places like The New York Times, than in people at large) doesn't constitute a real danger to America and, by extension, the world.



Mature countries understand that power corrupts and take steps to lessen its impact. In the Venetian Republic, for example, they randomized the selection of the Doge (top leader) as much as possible. As we consider switching to computerized voting, we would do well to keep in mind that current-day Americans are no more virtuous than ancient Romans, or medieval Venetians, or 1960s mobsters/oilmen/spooks. There are no monsters under the bed; but there are people who will kill for money, and fame, and power. Anybody who denies that is, well, a crackpot. So there!