"Back...and to the left."

[ceebeegee]

I've been watching all these specials this week about the Kennedy assassination. I've never known too much about the murder itself but the family has always interested me--there are some parallels between Dad's family and the Kennedys: lots of kids (Dad has 7 siblings overall, vs. nine Kennedys), big smiles (which I've inherited--thanks, Dad!), lot of blondes, a "hidden" child (Dad's youngest sibling, my aunt Maudie, who died at 6 months vs. Rosemary Kennedy, the third child and oldest sister who was developmentally disabled--I surmise because she was born in 1918, the year of the Great Flu Epidemic), both wealthy families. Of course we are not Roman Catholic (Episcopalian) and we are not Irish (English, Scottish, and a bit of Norwegian). Anyway. Always liked to read about them. But I don't know much about the assassination and have always been a bit put off by the cottage industry that has sprung up about it. But from watching these specials, and especially the films that were shot during the motorcade, it's unbelievable that anyone accepted the single gunman theory (the Warren Commission). All the films clearly show JFK's head/body being pushed to his left--and Oswald was behind and above him. That alone seems to invalidate the single gunman theory. Why hasn't the government followed up on this more? I can see why they didn't in the immediate aftermath but surely 20 years later was safe enough.

As I watched these specials, I thought about a line I read in an article about Hitchcock's Psycho, about how horrifying that shot was with the swinging lightbulb and seeing Mrs. Bates for real. The line (in the article) said something about how it made you realize for the first time how horrifyingly random the universe is--we think there's order and structure but it's really just chaos, and how we have to suppress this knowledge to stay sane. ("No human can survive long under conditions of absolute reality--even larks and katydids are supposed by some to dream..."--The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson)

JFK landed at Love Field around 11:00...and three hours later he was a corpse in a dark coffin being loaded into Air Force One again, and there was a new President. Three hours later. He steps off the plane, this handsome man, leader of the Free World, his beautiful wife by his side, seemingly all the forces of...whatever...working for him--and three hours later he's nothing. His naked body, missing most of his brain, is being manhandled at the foot of Air Force One, its electrodes and energy slowly dying off little by little, cells are dying, reflexes are shutting down, the brain and body, the human vessel that little more than a year earlier led us through the Cuban Missile Crisis is gradually starting to decompose...and the nation is starting to fall apart, as it gathers for a storm both literal (it rained incredibly hard that night, all over the country--my mother, living in New Orleans, said their doorbell shorted out and could never be fixed) and metaphorical.

I can't stop thinking about that--how the world could change so much in three hours. That's nothing. That's no time at all.

Comments

[darksheik.livejournal.com]

I saw some of the CNN special too. I had never seen the live footage of Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot. It was creepy as hell, and it was amazing trying to see the journalists keep their composure after they just saw somebody get killed five feet in front of them.