It’s November 22, 2013. We were doused with an endless barrage of JFK affiliated news today. Endless array of images from that fateful day. We heard Walter Cronkite tear up as he announces the death of John F. Kennedy.. we saw a scene here and there of President Kennedy’s head exploding in Dallas Texas..
Johnson did it.
The limo driver did it.
Oswald acted alone. And then he did not.
A second shooter, double snipers..
Three shots.
Four shots. Five shots. Six shots. Aliens did it. Russia did it. The CIA did it. Connally was the target. Jackie saved the brain. Robert stole the brain.
We have been through a grand fifty years of conspiracy theory—and often conspiracy fact. There are millions of people who did not live through the Kennedy assassination—me included—but have lived with the aftermath. And in a sense, regardless of whether we were born by 1963 or not, we all have seemed to live the assassination over and over, and over and over, and over and over again. Like the endless loop of the “back and to the left” scene in Oliver Stone’s JFK..
All of them claim something different, all of them shed a little more light—sometimes a little less—on the events that took place 50 years ago this Friday in Dallas.
Everything is murky when it comes to this story..
Three shots, with multiple entry wounds and exit wounds—and three people being shot? Possible. Probable? Magic Bullet Arlen is gone to his grave, but he said it was a lone assassin with a lone miracle bullet, twisting and turning in the wind and the bones of a deceased President..
There are times during these anniversaries that we glorify an exhausted leader. But Kennedy was flawed, may have at least attempted to steal an election in 1960—then again, Nixon did, too. His now praised actions in the Bay of Pigs affair really didn’t go the way history tells it exactly did....
There is so much allure of Kennedy—so much grandiose praise.. so many conspiracy theories.
But Stephen King perhaps summed up best, perhaps, in his book 11/22/63. A section went:
“For a moment everything was clear,and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don’t we all secretly know this? It’s a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dream clock chiming beneath a mystery glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. . A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.“
How true..
How very true.
On to the news of the day—normally worse no matter how much better we want it to be.