Fifty Years On

How Long The Memory

The 50th Anniversary of the JFK assassination came and went recently and I found myself in a lot of strange conversations. It got me thinking about where and how I got where I stand on the JFK assassination thing - and where I stand is at supreme agnosticism on the topic. You simply can't know what the hell happened. However I will confess  to one thing - I am big fan of all the weird and wonderful theories that sprung up around the topic, mostly because the Warren Commission explanation remains to this day, contentious.

Although how does one get to agnosticism on this topic? When I was about 5 I said to my mother that it would be cool if my father bought an open top sports car. My mother immediately shot down the idea. She said that's how President Kennedy got shot. And that's how I found out about a President called John F. Kennedy who died in a open top car. Being 5, I sort of imagined this man leisurely driving an open top sports coupe and out of some forest some guy with a rifle blew his head out. I pictured it in some random bush road somewhere - it probably had red sand like the expansive ares outside Perth.

Of course my mother also told me some actor called James Dean died in a crash driving an open top sports car, so open top sports cars were obviously a no-go zone. My father never bought anything like that - He bought a Chrysler sedan.

Being Gen-X, (we're born after the fateful event in Dallas) the JFK Assassination is all a bit fairytale-like for this reason. It's all bedtime stories told by our parents who experience the event. My mother can recall where she was when she found out Kennedy was killed. She was in Hong Kong and the cleaning lady came rushing to tell her. She's got a description of the cleaning lady so the moment must have stuck with her. My father was in transit, he says he only found out when the plane landed. he too has a vivid description of the airport scene as people found out upon landing, what had happened halfway around the globe.  If it was a heavily veiled story to begin with, then the mists of time have made the explication even more beset with un-reason and speculation.

Anyway, this is all just to explain how I came to be interested in the Kennedy Assassination thing. When my generation were growing up, it was a given that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone. We grew up with the joke in 'Annie Hall' where Alvy's second wife Allison Portchnik protests that Alvy is using the Kennedy Assassination as his excuse to avoid physical intimacy. The point is, the shadow of an imagined conspiracy loomed large over our generation simply because the banal explanation lacked closure or meaning. The conventional explanation as per the Warren Commission was that 3 round were fired from the sixth floor of the Book Depository- 1 missed, 1 went through Kennedy and Connally, and the third bullet was the kill shot that blew open his head.

Of course this account came to be hotly contested by the Jim Garrison investigation which claimed that the second bullet was somehow a magic bullet that made no sense. you can pretty much boil down the litmus test of those who see a conspiracy and those who don't, down to whether they think the second bullet really did all the damage with which it is credited, or not. the Oliver Stone movie 'JFK' remains the sine qua non of the cinema when it comes to this topic with the impassioned (for Kevin Costner who is always so understated, that is) explanation of the magic bullet.

There have been some expert reconstructions that allegedly show that the bullet was not magic, it makes perfect sense. A lot of these arguments seem to want to slam the door shut and bolt it down with the explanation that Lee Harvey Oswald was indeed the shooter and there was no conspiracy. Except of course they didn't exactly catch Lee Harvey Oswald at site. So at best you could say whoever did the shooting did a great job with the second shot.

In any case, he whole Kennedy Assassination thing has become a parlour game of who can mention the most cognitively dissonant things against those who steadfastly hold to the notion that Lee Harvey Oswald fired 3 shots on his Manlicher Carcano rifle, killing John F . Kennedy - and that Jack Ruby really was a Patriot and a Kennedy fan and that is why he went and killed Oswald. The going joke about the Kennedy Assassination is that it is the third rail of Conspiracy theorists - touch it and your credibility dies a humiliating death. And even then I still keep going back to the Kennedy Assassination as a moment of fissure where the facade of normalcy fractures and reveals something; it's just that we can't recognise the true form of what it reveals.

If the Warren Commission was correct and it really was Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone, then we're left with a monster that looks like the one that still stalks America, from Columbine to Sandy Hook, the awful blight on the American cultural landscape that dare not raise its name: The Gun Culture. What's interesting is that the kinds of people who want no gun control in America are the most likely to support the 'Lone Gunman Theory'. It is as if there is the subtext, "hey *I* could have made that shot too!"

But if it wasn't Oswald and he really was the patsy - like he told us - then there is no choice but to conclude there was a conspiracy, in which case then there is no telling what exactly we are looking at when we pore over the anecdotes and contradictory accounts. What we see in the fissure then, is a lot more troublesome, and even a resonable person can see quite a lot of things through the fissure.

Thus, the recent argument that it was a Secret Service agent's AR-15 that went off accidentally that delivered the shot to the head can be seen as a retroactive move to acknowledge two things: 'Lee Harvey Oswald' as we know him couldn't have made the third shot in time given the limitations of this weapon, and that there must have been a second shooter of some description given the evidence of the different bullets found. One, the magic-like bullet that pierced JFK, then mayor Connally twice, lodging in his thigh almost unchanged in shape, and the exploded round that took off the top of JFK's head.

The "Secret Service agent's fuck-up" theory is meant to be backed by ballistics, but even this is actually quite suspect. For this to be true, the Secret Service end up being patsies three times: once, for losing the president, twice for being the accidental shooter, and the third time for being the agency for the cover up. Yet it yields the second shooter without having to assign motive because if there were a second shooter with the same motive as the first shooter, then there is clearly a conspiracy ("duh").

If this theory were true, then why does Lee Harvey Oswald even have to say "I'm a patsy?" In fact when you look at what remained of JFK's skull, it's hard to figure anybody can actually determine anything given how dramatic the wound.  Quite a number of people have been writing articles about how unreasonable the conspiracy theorists are but if reasonableness is the yardstick, it ignores how unreasonable it is to staple down the blame on Lee Harvey Oswald.

While I do not wish to be a conspiracy theorist, I am part of the crowd that feels an immense cognitive dissonance when people try to pat down the whole thing. Sure, it was an accidental bulls eye from a misfired gun. There is no deeper meaning in any of this. If you can accept that, you can accept any bit of propaganda. The truth is, there are so many strange things that just don't fit the Warren Commission narrative. And some of those files from the commission are still going to be locked away until 2039. That's such a long way off, it's enough t make you wonder what it is they're hiding.

All the same, the most overwhelming feeling about the Kennedy Assassination on the 50th anniversary was just how distant that 50 years has turned out to be.