2. I occasionally mention fringe beliefs more out of an
interest in how the brain works than out of the expectation the beliefs are
true. I admit I bought a book about
Bigfoot during my recent trip to DC to see my fellow Novak Fellows, but it was
Graham Roumieu’s amusing illustrated Bigfoot tell-all: Bigfoot:
I Not Dead.
I also considered getting an anthology of the great comic
strip T-Rex
Trying (he is very large but has very small arms). Rest assured I also bought a copy of Orwell’s
Homage
to Catalonia, though. But then,
it’s not just stupid, crazy people who think, for instance, that there was a
JFK assassination conspiracy. Only about
a quarter of Americans think Oswald acted alone -- and one of the first people
to write about his doubts about the Warren Commission account was philosopher
Bertrand Russell.
3. Most people have long since taken the agnostic/ironic
route on the whole question, though the makers of Robot Chicken may
have it all figured out.
4. One of several reasons I’m a bit more worried about next
year’s X-Men: Days of Future Past
movie than I expected to be is that they’ve apparently ditched the idea of
having it take place one year after the last ensemble X-Men movie (in which the
U.S. government nearly killed Magneto and other mutants during 1962’s Cuban
Missile Crisis), with Magneto causing the “magic bullet” to kill JFK in
1963.
Given that the film’s main plotline is taken from a comic
book time travel plot that hinged on a political assassination, this would have
been a great opportunity to fuse these elements. Instead, it appears the “past” segments of
the film will take place in 1973.
Farewell, JFK?
5. Speaking of time travel, Doctor Who should certainly tip
its hat to the assassination at some point (if it hasn’t already), given that
the show debuted the day after JFK (and Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis) died.
6. The inimitable libertarian/Republican campaign veteran
Roger Stone has his own theory about what happened that day, as suggested by
his new book, The
Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ (I read that on the way
down to DC, so I went straight from that to Bigfoot:
I Not Dead). The big question the
book raises for me is: who didn’t
want John F. Kennedy dead?
Without finding a smoking gun, the book distills many
existing arguments for an assassination conspiracy but, perhaps more usefully,
also recounts the numerous proven ties between the Mob, the CIA, and multiple
politicians of the day, including JFK, LBJ, and even Stone’s own ex-boss,
Nixon.
Heck, my own grandmother has been calling the Kennedys
“gangsters” for over fifty years, and she is of course entirely correct (she
should know -- she married into the family of familiar-looking
bootlegger/pirate turned customs enforcer “Roaring
Dan” Seavey, after all). Government,
as the saying goes, is organized crime. There’s
even one bonkers theory out there that Gov. Connally shot JFK from within the car. This ex-Secret Service man
who thinks a Klan-sympathizer did it, by contrast, sounds fairly convincing.
Stone’s synergistic theory, by contrast, revolves around the
fact that JFK had betrayed more dangerous associates (of all stripes) than you
can shake a stick at. These included not
just crazy Marxists but:
•the Mob (who had been longtime associates of JFK’s
bootlegger dad, had substantially aided the Kennedy presidential campaign with
the help of mutual associate Frank Sinatra, and had helped the Nixon campaign
to boot),
•the CIA (who weren’t happy about JFK’s failure to back the
Bay of Pigs invasion nor his
assassination of a president -- namely, the authoritarian but anti-Communist
president of South Vietnam),
•and Lyndon Johnson, a brutal and uncouth sociopath who may
well have had a hand in several prior murders and had at least one convicted
hitman associate.
We can’t be sure they all had a hand in his death -- as was
suggested in that hilariously complex rant by the Joe Pesci character in Oliver
Stone's JFK -- but this much of Pesci’s
rant is not crazy: There really were (and in all likelihood still are) huge
areas of overlap between the Mob, the CIA, and the publicly-acknowledged
activities of politicians. Those
politicians also spend a great deal of their time pressuring businessmen and
other politicians into providing them with money, women, and other favors. These are not people we should be surprised
to find involved in the occasional assassination, though the public, for its
own emotional wellbeing, likes to keep treating such revelations as aberrations
instead of the main stuff of real-world politics. That naivete may be dangerous.
But partisan that he is, Stone seems to have different
standards of evidence for the politicians he likes and the ones he
doesn’t. As with most conspiracy
theories, most of the book is guilt-by-association (and the ties are undeniably
interesting). Yet despite Nixon being
described as literally partying with the other purported members of the
conspiracy -- and even though two of the mysterious “three tramps” photographed
near Dealey Plaza look uncannily like Watergate
burglars, including E. Howard Hunt, of whom we have audio
recordings on his death bed confessing to the crime -- Nixon somehow
emerges from the book looking like an innocent, or at least as innocent as a
man can be while consorting with Mob fundraisers and dropping numerous joking
hints that he didn’t think a lone gunman offed JFK.
And Nixon really had an election stolen from him by JFK,
recall. I’m not saying he did it -- just
that I’d think a pro-LBJ writer could as easily piece together a case for Nixon’s
guilt as Stone has for LBJ’s. Hell,
maybe everyone was in on it. (Have you
seen that video of the elder Bush laughing during
Nixon’s funeral while mentioning the lone gunman who shot JFK?)
7. People who think Oswald was in no way tied to any conspiracy
must still answer two questions (though the answers could well prove mundane):
Why did mobster Jack Ruby want Oswald dead?
Did Ruby have reason to think he’d get away with it -- or be
pardoned? Keep thinking, America. Like three-fourths of you, I’m not confident
we’ve gotten to the bottom of this one (and Stone’s book is not a bad place to
start if you’re wondering what strange other avenues of inquiry still exist on
the assassination).
8. Again, I can’t think of any conspiracy or paranormal claims I actually believe – but purely
as an epistemological and psychological matter, it’s worth reminding ourselves
once in a while that the
conspiracy theorists sometimes have good reason to think they’re the sane ones.
9. One upshot of this is that if any Pauls get elected
president and (in all likelihood) embarrass libertarians everywhere by alluding
to strange or racist conspiracy theories, they will be (as Jesse Walker’s
recent book argues) perfectly in keeping with American political
tradition. There are worse things than
conspiracy theorists.
10. I am eternally grateful to Nick Gillespie for
recommending Chris Elliott’s comedic FDR: A One-Man Show
from the 1980s, which among other deliberate deviations from known history,
makes a baffling, surreal passing reference to FDR being assassinated by
Truman.
11. A question on the minds of some conspiracy theorists
today, though, is whether Matrix sequels and Man of Steel actor Harry Lennix trained Obama to seem more
“presidential” -- by mimicking Lennix.
My theatre connections say: probably (and it’s amusing now to watch
Lennix interviewed and hear how much he sounds like Obama). More disturbingly for the conspiracy
theorists, it’s not the first time we’ve heard stories hinting at Obama being
groomed by powerful handlers far in advance of his election.
But in the end, none of that matters: they’re
politicians. They’re all evil. Let us
turn away from conspiracy theories, then, and toward other political figures.
12. Chris Elliott also played John Adams once, but who needs
a comedian to make Adams funny? Paul
Giamatti is inadvertently pretty
goddam funny as John Adams, if you ask me -- as in this scene showing him
dressing down my friend Michael Malice’s hero, quasi-assassinated Alexander
Hamilton.
13. With Bill Clinton now complaining about NSA spying,
Hillary exiting the Obama administration after Benghazi, and Hillary’s allies
no doubt planning to suggest in 2016 that she’s a perfect middle road between
Obama and whoever the GOP picks, now’s a good time to recall that Hillary,
twenty years ago, wanted an even more bureaucratic, all-encompassing, socialist
approach to government intervention in healthcare than the
technically-incompetent approach Obama has foisted on us.
Maybe you’ve been a Democrat or communist your whole life,
but this is your chance to prove you can learn from past mistakes. Don’t vote Democrat in 2016.
14. On a somewhat more uplifting note, this week isn’t just
the fiftieth anniversary of the JFK assassination: Tomorrow brings the 150th
anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.
For all the horrors of the Civil War, let it at least remind
us that seemingly-intractable systems of control and oppression such as slavery
can be eradicated.
15. The trailers suggest that this week’s Hunger Games sequel will have a
similarly hopeful message, which should reassure some who felt the first movie
was little more than American Gladiators with death.
16. Tonight, though, my entertainment will be a pro-fracking
talk by author Gregory Zuckerman at the bar Half King (505 West 23rd St. at 7pm
-- join me!). I bet there’ll be angry
anti-fracking people in the audience, though, to make things extra-interesting
-- possibly fans of local anti-capitalist performance artist “Rev. Billy,” who
apparently is at risk of going to jail for a year due to taking over a bank
lobby for one of his protest/performances.
Well, jailing trespassers is what property rights are for.
17. Of course, NYC’s new socialist mayor likely disagrees
(h/t Marshall Boprey), given reports he said this to a gathering of real estate
developers: “Everything you heard
about me is true...I am not a free-marketeer...I believe in the heavy hand of
government.”
18. And, you know (as the aforementioned Jesse Walker notes),
today is the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Jonestown massacre. A mass-suicidal/homicidal Progressive commune
with ties to U.S. liberals, its horrifying end-by-poisoning gave us the
expression “drink the Kool-Aid.” Or as
the lovely Malinda Boothe recently put it, “smoke the Kool-Aid,” which I think
is a fine variant, slip-up or not.
One of the Jonestown survivors, incidentally, had been a New
York Assemblyman and wrote a book arguing the CIA killed JFK. Wheels within wheels, man.
19. Toronto mayor Rob Ford has undoubtedly been smoking
something, and his wondrous list of achievements now includes inspiring this mini-opera (h/t Walter
Olson). I think we’re all delighted he
and his brother have a TV show coming, too.
20. Ford may be almost as much fun to watch as these (under-viewed!) kittens.
21. Perhaps even as much fun as this faux-elderly man from
Six Flags inventing dubstep for the children about seven years ago. That is where it started, right?
22. Oh, for the days when kids had realistic toy guns
instead of dubstep.
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