Sunday Morning Reflections - and Sadness for America

A group of us went to see the movie "Jackie" last evening.  The movie was very well done and I can now understand the talk about Natalie Portman perhaps receiving an Academy Award nomination.  Being of an age where I remember first hand watching the news and TV coverage after the fateful day in Dallas in 1963, the movie brought back some of the emotions from that time.  But it also had me constantly thinking "what the Hell has happened to America"  that a crude, narcissistic bully and demagogue like Donald Trump will soon be the resident at the White House.   John F. Kennedy certainly had his faults, but he challenge America to be its best and seemingly cared about making things better for all Americans.  In contrast, with Trump we have a would be authoritarian leader who won office by appealing to hatred and bigotry and who through his cabinet nominees seems poised to erase the progress in equality that has occurred over the years since 1963. 

The reality this morning is that racist, homophobes and those who would destroy public education and the social safety net are ascendant.  This Friday, a would be fascist who cares nothing about upholding and protecting the U.S. Constitution will be sworn into the presidency.  Worse yet, there are serious reasons to believe that Trump is either subject to Russian blackmail or colluded with a hostile foreign power to win the 2016 presidential election. Compounding the nightmare, Congressional Republicans for the most part are seeking to turn a blind eye to possible treason and seek to wage war on average Americans, literally pursuing policies that will lead to premature deaths of many, many Americans. 

The movie "Jackie" ends with the vision of the Kennedy White House as "Camelot" - an image Jackie Kennedy sought to plant and maintain.  Now, with Donald J. Trump soon to be the titular president - I will NEVER recognize or respect him as such - it feels as King Arthur has been slain by Mordred or akin to Rome being sacked by the Visigoths.  I have little faith in American intelligence services to take down Trump  - and hopefully Pence too if he was complicit in Trump's dealing with Putin - as needs to be done.  It seems that our only hope may be that Britain's MI-6 or other allied intelligence services get the goods on Trump and release the information to the foreign media.  My faith in the American media that gives false equivalence to the reprehensible and untruths to do the job that the Founding Fathers envisioned.

Darkness is descending on America and it must be resisted.   

The JFK Assassination - 50 Years Later

I was a few months past 11 years old on November 22, 1963, when I and classmates returned to school after a short recess and witnessed the stunned shock and disbelief of the teachers and school staff to the news that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.  The shock extended to everyone we knew and over the following days people remained glued to their televisions watching the unfolding drama of a nation in mourning and the president's funeral.  A doubt few who lived through those days will forget the experience. Now, it's 50 years later and I still vividly recall that November day and the events that followed.  A piece in the Washington Post revisits the scene of the crime, if you will, and the Texas School Book Depository - now a museum that a dear friend and historian here in Hampton, Virginia helped create.  Here are highlights:

DALLAS — Dealey Plaza is a depression. It’s a shallow basin on the western edge of downtown, framed by concrete structures called pergolas and peristyles that were built by the Works Progress Administration. Designed as a gateway to the city, the plaza is more of an ode to the automobile, because the broad lawn is sliced by three streets: Elm, Main and Commerce. They slope from east to west and converge beneath a rail line in what is known as the triple underpass.

That’s where President and Mrs. Kennedy were headed, on Elm, when the ghastly thing happened.

On the north side of the plaza is the famous grassy knoll, where the second shooter supposedly lurked. There’s actually a second grassy knoll on the south side of the plaza. And the grassy knolls aren’t actually knolls (as in, a hillock, a mound), but rather are just slopes on the rim of the plaza.
The place hasn’t changed much since Nov. 22, 1963. Some signage is different. Skyscrapers loom in the distance. The live oaks are bigger. Otherwise, it’s remarkably preserved, including the building on the northeast corner of the plaza, which in 1963 was a warehouse known as the Texas School Book Depository. Up there, behind a pile of boxes in the southeast corner of the sixth floor, Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger.

“It’s smaller than I thought it would be,” Kimberly Feare, 52, of Redwood City, Calif., said of Deal­ey Plaza on a recent Saturday afternoon. “But maybe it’s dwarfed by the incident itself. It’s such a huge thing.”

There, off the cuff, from a tourist, is the central tension of the Kennedy assassination.  This was, as she noted, a huge thing, a moment routinely and almost numbingly cited as an end to our innocence, as the termination of postwar conformism and the beginning of the chaos and madness and rage of the 1960s. It killed the first television president, his death captured on film. The assassination has been, ever since, the subject of obsessive investigation. There is always more to learn, always another factoid to gnaw.

The conspiracy theorists have one advantage: They don’t have to have all the answers, merely enough questions and doubts to shatter the mainstream consensus. The Lone Nut orthodoxy is essentially a closed narrative — it all but says “Keep moving folks, nothing to see here” — while the conspiracy theories are self-sustainingly open-ended, branching infinitely, a perpetual-motion mystery that will be with us forever.

And they do one more thing: They bequeath the assassination a deeper layer of meaning. This is an institutional murder. The bad guys are powerful people in the shadows of our civilization. This is not some small event — it’s an epic struggle between enlightenment and evil.

For many of us, what we see at Dealey Plaza says a lot about who we are. It reflects a worldview. It reveals how we process information. It even becomes part of our identity, like party affiliation or religious belief. And thus, as we study the facts, and scrutinize the images, and examine all the angles and trajectories, we are vulnerable to confirmation bias. Believing is seeing.