***POST BY DENNIS McDOUGAL***Martin Luther King Jr. would have turned 78 last week, and the questions that linger over his murder have me thinking once more about America’s strange failure to demand the truth. Even now, more than a decade into the Information Age, most everyone suspects conspiracy but nobody wants to find out for sure.
This uniquely U.S. schizophrenia didn’t start with James Earl Ray, but the idea of a single crazed killer has become as American as motherhood and apple pie. The Lone Gunman is the flip side of the Lone Ranger: the villain/hero who acts on his own to bring his version of truth, justice and the American way raining down on the rest of us. If you don’t believe me, pay a visit to Virginia Tech. But it didn’t start with Seung-Hui Cho or even with the MLK assassination -- and sadly, I doubt that it will finish with them.
PBS’s American Experience weighed in last week with another of those tantalizing retrospectives on the JFK assassination that I suspect I’ll be seeing every few years until the day I die. This one, “Oswald’s Ghost,” zeroed in on the mystery surrounding the 24-year-old whom the official history has saddled with the dubious title “Lone Gunman.” The filmmakers revisited every conspiracy theorist from Mark Lane to Jim Garrison to Oliver Stone, but after one and a half hours, the audience was left as baffled as ever. Who really killed JFK? The Mob? The CIA? Castro? Woody Harrelson’s old man?
Unless Oswald left his widow a cache of secret documents or was debriefed by the KGB in an as-yet undisclosed Russki confession, we’re not likely to ever know the truth. However, it is revealing (perhaps the most revealing stat in the entire documentary, as a matter of fact) that more than 70 percent of Americans don’t believe the Warren Report or any of the attendant hokum the government has tried shoveling down our throats ever since. Roughly the same percentage that now thinks Iraq is lame and the Bush Administration, lamer, also believes Kennedy was offed by someone(s) or something bigger and badder than an angry punk with a mail order rifle.
I remember where I was the day he was shot; we all do. It’s a cliché seared into our national psyche like 9/11 or the Challenger disaster. The difference is the federal government got busy and found out who was responsible for 9/11 (Osama and the Crypt-Kicker Al-Qaedans) and what brought down the Space Shuttle (crappy O rings). Yet, when it comes to murdering Presidents or national political figures like King, our tax dollars seem better spent on corporate bailouts, Halliburton, or phony baloney oil wars. How much would it cost to hire a real Warren Commission with real investigators and a real CSI team to get to the bottom of all of our assassinations? A billion dollars? We spend twice as much to keep up appearances in Iraq each week. I’d wager we could have the best gumshoes and forensic specialists in the business for a tenth that amount.
And what would $100 million buy? Reason. Logic. Maybe even truth. As it stands, the most notorious true crimes ever committed in America remain unsolved because no politician on either side of the aisle wants to open that can of worms. For all his crackpot paranoia, Jim Garrison tried to do it and got hounded to his grave for his trouble. When Oliver Stone finally buys the farm, you can bet some doofus on CNN or Fox News will dredge up JFK as an example of bad conspiracy theory, despite Stone’s sustained protest that it was – and is – a “what if” work of fiction.
The assassination of JFK was a watershed in more ways than one. While three out of four Americans believe Oswald did not act alone, those same citizens will not take the time to write their congressman and demand a full, public and publicly-financed investigation. Something inside us as a people chooses not to know. We had the Church and Stokes committee reports in the 70s, suggesting that there was a whole lot more to the murders of JFK and MLK than we had been led to believe, but the mainstream media sloughed it off, George H. W. Bush’s CIA stonewalled, and, soon enough, America was once more sleepwalking through history. When the original Alzheimer’s President was elected in 1980 and told us not to pay attention to the man behind the curtain, we clicked our heels three times and found ourselves back in Kansas.
And thus we coexist with these ghosts. Oswald. James Earl Ray. And, more recently, the enigma of Timothy McVeigh – all “examined” closely by mandarins in the FBI, CIA, and DOJ who know better than the rest of us how to keep Justice blind and skeletons buried.
On this Martin Luther King holiday, when all but essential government shuts down from coast to coast in memory of the man who did not get to the promised land, I for one pray in the manner of the old Negro spiritual: Knock off the bullshit, Washington, and tell us the God damned truth.
Amen.
This uniquely U.S. schizophrenia didn’t start with James Earl Ray, but the idea of a single crazed killer has become as American as motherhood and apple pie. The Lone Gunman is the flip side of the Lone Ranger: the villain/hero who acts on his own to bring his version of truth, justice and the American way raining down on the rest of us. If you don’t believe me, pay a visit to Virginia Tech. But it didn’t start with Seung-Hui Cho or even with the MLK assassination -- and sadly, I doubt that it will finish with them.
PBS’s American Experience weighed in last week with another of those tantalizing retrospectives on the JFK assassination that I suspect I’ll be seeing every few years until the day I die. This one, “Oswald’s Ghost,” zeroed in on the mystery surrounding the 24-year-old whom the official history has saddled with the dubious title “Lone Gunman.” The filmmakers revisited every conspiracy theorist from Mark Lane to Jim Garrison to Oliver Stone, but after one and a half hours, the audience was left as baffled as ever. Who really killed JFK? The Mob? The CIA? Castro? Woody Harrelson’s old man?
Unless Oswald left his widow a cache of secret documents or was debriefed by the KGB in an as-yet undisclosed Russki confession, we’re not likely to ever know the truth. However, it is revealing (perhaps the most revealing stat in the entire documentary, as a matter of fact) that more than 70 percent of Americans don’t believe the Warren Report or any of the attendant hokum the government has tried shoveling down our throats ever since. Roughly the same percentage that now thinks Iraq is lame and the Bush Administration, lamer, also believes Kennedy was offed by someone(s) or something bigger and badder than an angry punk with a mail order rifle.
I remember where I was the day he was shot; we all do. It’s a cliché seared into our national psyche like 9/11 or the Challenger disaster. The difference is the federal government got busy and found out who was responsible for 9/11 (Osama and the Crypt-Kicker Al-Qaedans) and what brought down the Space Shuttle (crappy O rings). Yet, when it comes to murdering Presidents or national political figures like King, our tax dollars seem better spent on corporate bailouts, Halliburton, or phony baloney oil wars. How much would it cost to hire a real Warren Commission with real investigators and a real CSI team to get to the bottom of all of our assassinations? A billion dollars? We spend twice as much to keep up appearances in Iraq each week. I’d wager we could have the best gumshoes and forensic specialists in the business for a tenth that amount.
And what would $100 million buy? Reason. Logic. Maybe even truth. As it stands, the most notorious true crimes ever committed in America remain unsolved because no politician on either side of the aisle wants to open that can of worms. For all his crackpot paranoia, Jim Garrison tried to do it and got hounded to his grave for his trouble. When Oliver Stone finally buys the farm, you can bet some doofus on CNN or Fox News will dredge up JFK as an example of bad conspiracy theory, despite Stone’s sustained protest that it was – and is – a “what if” work of fiction.
The assassination of JFK was a watershed in more ways than one. While three out of four Americans believe Oswald did not act alone, those same citizens will not take the time to write their congressman and demand a full, public and publicly-financed investigation. Something inside us as a people chooses not to know. We had the Church and Stokes committee reports in the 70s, suggesting that there was a whole lot more to the murders of JFK and MLK than we had been led to believe, but the mainstream media sloughed it off, George H. W. Bush’s CIA stonewalled, and, soon enough, America was once more sleepwalking through history. When the original Alzheimer’s President was elected in 1980 and told us not to pay attention to the man behind the curtain, we clicked our heels three times and found ourselves back in Kansas.
And thus we coexist with these ghosts. Oswald. James Earl Ray. And, more recently, the enigma of Timothy McVeigh – all “examined” closely by mandarins in the FBI, CIA, and DOJ who know better than the rest of us how to keep Justice blind and skeletons buried.
On this Martin Luther King holiday, when all but essential government shuts down from coast to coast in memory of the man who did not get to the promised land, I for one pray in the manner of the old Negro spiritual: Knock off the bullshit, Washington, and tell us the God damned truth.
Amen.
