An Intolerable Spiritual State

In eighteen day’s time it will be 50 years since John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, TX. On that day, the shrill voices of the conspiracy cottage industry, spawned the same day JFK was pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital, will dominate forums and news programs, pointlessly smug in their abject ignorance, screeching as always about a sinister conspiracy that took the 35^th president’s life. 50 is a round number, and JFK is still the most popular American president, so in an effort to drive up ratings, major media outlets will pander to the lowest common denominator, giving paranoid-obsessive conspiracy nuts the biggest soap box in the world for one day. Maybe even a whole week.

Thankfully, it’ll be over by 2014, but even then we go back to a painfully embarrassing status quo: a vast majority of adult, functioning Americans – many with educations – certain that John F. Kennedy was assassinated in broad daylight in front of dozens of people by a cadre of evildoers, within and without our federal and local governments.

It’s depressing enough that the assassination of a first-term President with enormous potential was caught on film, a ghastly color relic of one of the darkest, saddest day's in the Union's history. And then, once the technology was available, digitally cleaned up so we can all sit in the comfort of our homes, ghoulishly watching JFK’s final moments in an endless loop on our DVD players, processing it more as entertainment than for what it is – the gruesome, harrowing murder of the man entrusted by voters to lead their country.

But what is even more depressing is our inability to finally, fifty years later, come to grips with reality. It’s a measure of the pervasiveness of mental illness in American society that dozens of new books are being published to coincide with the anniversary, all purporting to have uncovered new “evidence” definitively proving a conspiracy. At last count, there were 35 on amazon.com, some already out, some coming out towards the end of November.

And – as has always been the case – many have wholly different conclusions. They all claim to be the final word, but they can’t agree amongst themselves. Who killed JFK? Was it LBJ? Castro? The Mafia? The Joint Chiefs? The CIA? Evil homosexuals from New Orleans? There are as many JFK conspiracies as there are flavors of ice cream.

And all of the books tread over the same worn-out ground that every other conspiracy book written since 1963 has trod on unremittingly. The author of Ecclesiastes 1:9 might as well have been addressing all the conspiracy books written in the last 30 years. Their writers have, to borrow from Rob Salkowitz, “beaten the horse to death, then performed a voodoo ritual to exhume the carcass and started beating the zombie horse.” The preposterous “theory” that LBJ had Kennedy assassinated goes back dozens of years. As do the theories of CIA and Mafia involvement.

It would be easy to laugh all of this off as the confused ramblings of colorful, misguided, eccentric minds on the fringe, but it’s mainstream thinking, brought to us by mainstream personalities. Oliver Stone’s whitewash of history JFK, a stunning piece of political propaganda that distorted, twisted, and flat-out lied about the events of November 22^nd and it’s protagonist, the disturbed Jim Garrison, was an international hit. Director Alex Cox, whose Sid and Nancy and Repo Man have seen special editions released by the esteemed Criterion Collection, just wrote the conspiracy book The President and the Provocateur: The Parallel Lives of JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald. American journalist Ron Rosenblaum, who has written for Harper’s, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times Magazine, recently wrote for slate.com: “I’ve written frequently on JFK theories, recurrently changing my mind on that morass of mystification; to my current belief Oswald was a shooter, though not ruling out the possibility of a second one, or silent confederates egging Oswald on to do the deed.”

But what Rosenbaum and the rest of the conspiracy culture simply can’t fathom is that there is no “morass of mystification.” It’s just an old-fashioned smokescreen, conjured up by 50 years’ worth of conspiracy literature. And like the proverbial house of cards, it teeters precipitously on a nonexistent foundation, ready to collapse at the first sign of rational, coherent thinking.

Every last scrap of evidence points directly back at Lee Harvey Oswald. No evidence points anywhere else. It has always defied credulity that anyone other than Oswald shot at the president on November 22^nd, 1963. The only person ever prosecuted in connection with some far-fetched conspiracy theory was New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw, whose sham trial was staged by the aforementioned New Orleans Distract Attorney Jim Garrison. In less than an hour the jury found him not guilty. “When Jim Garrison conducted his whole charade in New Orleans,” said investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein, “it showed how easy evidence could be manipulated, and how dangerous it was to listen to what various authors and demagogues had to say on this subject.”

But the demagogues have always stood front and center in this discussion. This is largely because sane people realized all the way back in 1963 that there was no conspiracy and got on with their lives. Obsessive-compulsive conspiracy buffs are incapable of such circumspection. Their mission is to destroy anyone who doesn’t agree with their bizarre version of events. They bide their time, lying in wait until another scholarly, well researched book is published (Posner’s Case Closed; Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy), at which point they spring from their dark holes, using all media at their disposal – books, blogs, youtube videos – to bring their ad hominem attacks to a naïve populace only too willing to swallow their delusional missives hook, line and sinker.

“Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy,” Norman Mailer once wrote, “we have been marooned in one of two equally intolerable spiritual states, apathy or paranoia.” Conspiracy buffs find themselves marooned in both states, doggedly apathetic towards taking even a halfway sincere look at the research of bona-fide journalists and writers, and paranoid that anyone who even remotely suggests that JFK’s death was not the result of some grand conspiracy is, at best, brainwashed, and at worst, and agent of the Illuminati.

It is the duty of all United States citizens to be thoughtful and well-informed about their culture and history. The truly mentally ill are excused from this, and are free to write books like Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics: Revelations from CIA Records on the Assassination of JFK (Peter Dale Scott) and Carlos Marcello: The Man Behind the JFK Assassination (Stefano Vaccara). For everyone else, there are no excuses. Seventy percent of Americans are consciously shirking this duty. It is time - finally - they lived up to the ideals set forth by the founding fathers.