My parents made my sister and I go to church on Sunday. We returned home just in time to watch Jack Ruby murder Lee Harvey Oswald on live television.
I don't know the precise terms describing the psychological processes that occur when people experience a fundamental shock to their understanding of reality, and then just when they're beginning to recover from the first shock " another shock drives them to their knees. I don't know what it's called. I just know what it feels like. So do millions of Americans who repeatedly relived The Assassination of The President story, and then the Assassination of the Assassin story.
After we watched the story, we wanted to know How Could This Happen? We needed to know How Could This Happen? We needed this New Reality to be explained to us so we would know how to go forward in this new world. President Lyndon B. Johnson established The President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy on November 29, 1963. The commission's 889-page final report was presented to President Johnson on September 24, 1964 and made public three days later.
The Commission's findings became the establishment's official version of The Story: The President went to Dallas. Lee Harvey Oswald killed him.
Two years later Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment was published and was the first book to challenge The Official Story. Since then over 2,000 books have been written about the JFK assassination. Some of these "conspiracy theories" go to absolutely unbelievable lengths to stretch the theory to fit the known facts.
The most outlandish of the bunch involved moving one of Kennedy's wounds two or three inches from his back to his neck. And then the rest of the theory's arguments are completely dependent upon the existence of a magic bullet. Here's a tip. You should know your theory's in big trouble when you need to fake the data and come up with a magic bullet to make it work. The problem is -- that's the Official Story.
Warren Commission member Congressman Gerald Ford edited a key sentence of the report about where a bullet entered John F. Kennedy's body. If the bullet had hit Kennedy in the back, it could not have struck Governor Connolly in the way the Commission said it did. So Ford rewrote the sentence, moved the wound up to Kennedy's neck, and made possible Warren Commission staffer Arlen Specter's Magic Bullet: the bullet that caused all the wounds to the Governor and the non-fatal wounds to the President. Seven entry/exit wounds in total. The Commission needed that magic bullet. If all of the injuries had not been caused by only one bullet, the assassination could not plausibly have been carried out by only one gunman. The Official Story needed a lie, and a Magic Bullet, to eliminate the possibility of a conspiracy to murder John Kennedy.
The trauma of November 1963 has never been properly resolved in our national consciousness. We needed the truth from our government. Because without it, our doubt and fears await in the dark, emerging unbidden at any time -- starting awake at three o'clock in the morning or in a canoe in the middle of a lake under an azure sky of deepest summer, because it's been "down there" unresolved for over 50 years.
There are fewer and fewer Americans who can say where they were the day President Kennedy was murdered. In fact, only about a third of America's current population was alive on that day in 1963 -- and less than 30 percent might actually remember. But I believe, as William Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
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I don't like to say "9/11." I don't like the "shorthand" feel of it. To condense everything that happened into a number, a slash, and two more numbers seems to disrespect the horror of it all.
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. After two hours of bombing, 18 U.S. ships had either been sunk or damaged, 188 U.S. aircraft were destroyed, and 2,403 U.S. military personnel and civilians were killed. The American response was to declare war upon the Empire of Japan the next day.
The attacks that occurred on 9/11 killed 2,996 people. We saw the towers collapse in New York, the Pentagon burning, and the wreckage in a field in Pennsylvania. The American response was to declare War on Terror.
In 1941 the U.S. was at war against the Axis powers -- Germany, Japan and Italy. In 2001, the U.S. was at war against what? Fear? -- Violence? The War on Terror became anything the government said it was.
The sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and the German and Italian declarations of war were the reasons the U.S. went to war. But 9/11 wasn't the reason -- it was the excuse the government used to transmogrify the country into a full-blown fascist state.
The U.S. Government and The Mainstream Media capitalized on the events of 9/11 to create fear. Everything we saw and heard fed The Fear. There was no going back. The pre-9/11 world didn't exist anymore. We could only go forward into this new land founded upon fear. Our leaders excelled at whipping up The Fear at every opportunity. Millions of Americans gave up everything for security from fear. But all they really did was -- give up everything.
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