HOME
Message Board
CURRENT COLUMNS
- Editor's Corner
- Blogfest 2005
- Commentary
- Commentary Too
- Down The Middle
- Faulking Around
- Global Warning
- This guy walks into a bar...
- Investing 101
- Faulking Opinions
- Off The Rail
- Words
ARCHIVES
LINKS
CONTACT US
 | |||
This guy walks into a bar and says... - Sep 13, 2005 - Printable Version
- Sometimes, Mommies Cry
by Ken Shade
My father was being a killjoy, I thought. I was five years old, so I often thought my parents were capricious tyrants, bent on keeping me free from the corrupting influence of fun. Notwithstanding the facts that we were in Dallas to go to Six Flags Over Texas, and that this trip was solely for the entertainment of my brother and I, I was angry.
My anger flared as we were on Houston Street, headed straight for the Texas School Book Depository. My father pointed to the building ahead and said "Boys, that building was where Oswald was when he shot President Kennedy."
My hair stood on end for two reasons.
The first reason was that that day, November 22, 1963, was the day my light switched on. I was not quite four years old, but I will never forget it. I have memories from before that day. In fact, I have memories of being a tiny baby with no teeth, and being fed warmed Gerber by my beautiful aunt, Carolyn. (She looked like Mary Tyler Moore.) The difference November 22 made was that it was the day I realized that there was a world beyond the walls of my home, and that it mattered what happened there. I learned that because I saw my mother cry. She was standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room at my grandmother's house, rubbing cotton between her fingers as always, watching the constant television news coverage and crying as she repeated "My God, why would anybody do that?"
When you're small, you're sure of two things: There is a Santa Claus, and your parents aren't supposed to cry.
Seeing my mother cry brought home to me in ways that I had no words for that my world was not just my family and my house. My world, our world, was large, confusing, and sometimes frightening.
The other reason I got shivers when my father pointed at that building was that, even though I had seen Oswald shot on TV, I jumped to the conclusion that he might still be running around in that building with police in hot pursuit. The child brain is a world in which a man can be shot dead on television, yet still evade detection in a warehouse full of cops for nineteen months.
"Is he still in there, Daddy?"
"No, he's dead."
"Oh, yeah."
"Can we go in there and see where he did it?"
"No, we have to get to Six Flags. Besides, it's just full of people working."
That's when I got pissed.
I'll digress here to let you know that this is not the first manifestation of my passion for visiting actual historical sites. That was probably the day, a few months earlier, when I wandered away from one of my brother's baseball games and came to a small field that was covered with stones. I had been listening to Bible story records every night, so it was easy for me to immediately grasp that this must be the same "field covered with stones" where Cain killed Abel!
I did what any three-year-old with a passion for history and forensic science would have done. I began looking for a rock with blood stains on it. When I found a boomerang-shaped piece of sandstone with a dark spot on it, I excitedly ran to my parents to tell them of my Howard Carter-esque find. They, and all of the adults around them failed to see the magnitude of this discovery, and smiled at how cute I was.
I was at once angry and humiliated. I didn't want to be smiled at. I wanted to be taken seriously.
I learned to be careful about sharing my revelations with grown ups, who smile and make the magic fly away, but I never lost my passion for being in the actual place where something famous happened.
I have paid a janitor to let me into the Litherland Town Hall so I could see the stage where the Beatles were performing on December 26, 1960, when the screaming started, and from which they never looked back.
I dragged my poor wife all over the squalid, urine-drenched streets of Whitechapel so I could visit the spots where Jack The Ripper's victims met their gruesome ends.
I stood in front of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles for more than an hour, trying to feel the night Robert Kennedy was killed there. (I still want to see that pantry before they tear the place down.)
It took my breath away when the guide at Arkansas' Civil War Cave showed me where Robert E. Lee's desk sat. (When my father pointed out that Lee was never in that area during the Civil War, and that the guide was lying in order to make this small, fetid grotto seem like something a person would pay to see, I was crushed.)
The cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, The Pearl Harbor Memorial, Sirhan Sirhan's childhood home, 10050 Cielo Drive, Stuart Sutcliffe's grave, the Circus Maximus, the Carthage Jail, the small library in Harry Truman's home, Yankee Stadium, the gallows at the Tower of London, the ruins of the Oklahoma City federal building, Mountain Meadows, the little roadside turnout in West Virginia where Hank Williams died in the back seat of a Caddy, the burial chamber of the Popes beneath St. Peter's and Der Feldenhalle, among many others, are all places I have felt moved by powerful connections with history and the people who made it.
It's deeply satisfying, and I hope I never change.
I guess I wanted that feeling when I asked my father to take me into the book depository, but I didn't get it until many years later.
By the time The Sixth Floor Museum was opened in the Texas School Book Depository, I didn't want to go anymore. I didn't want to go because I knew that there was a second shooter on the grassy knoll. I knew that the bullet fired by that shooter was the one that actually killed the president. I knew that the assassination was the result of a conspiracy within the government. I knew all these things because I had read books about it. A lot of books. I had read the "CIA theory" books. I had read the Warren Report, and believed it to be a diaphanous and shoddy cover-up. I had read the "Mafia hit theory" books. I had read the "French hit team theory" books. In fact, up to the time The Sixth Floor Museum opened, I had read seventeen books purporting to explain the conspiracy. At the time of the opening, I was a supporter of the "altered body theory" put forth by David Lifton in "Best Evidence."
With all this arcane knowledge, esoterica and passion for truth in my mind, I had no intention of going to a museum which, I was sure, was going to flog away at you with single-bullet-fired-from behind-by-Oswald-alone nonsense. I was way beyond all that. I knew that only a simpleton could accept that as a valid explanation of what happened in Dealy Plaza. I felt security in my vast knowledge, and ego strength in my ability to wow my friends and family with it. Every conspiracy book I read added detail and texture to my ever evolving view of what must have happened behind the scenes. Often, I would come across a theory that I considered ridiculous, but I always learned valuable particulars which no previous author had brought to my attention.
Once, I stood in Dealy Plaza with my friend, Steve, and showed him all the important features: The knoll, the picket fence, the former location of the Stemmons Freeway sign, the place Zapruder was standing, the triple underpass, etc. I scarcely mentioned the book depository because it was, as far as I was concerned, as relevant to the assassination as the koi pond in the Japanese garden in Ft. Worth.
It was foolish to be doing this because it was the night before the Oklahoma-Texas game, and downtown was teeming with intoxicated college students. As I was pontificating on trajectories, a white Pontiac full of them raced past. A 16 oz. beer can came flying out the window of the car window and hit Steve square in the chest with a sickening thud.
The can was full and unopened.
I'm pretty sure that can was meant for me. When you're morbidly obese, you get used to insults, beer cans, wet diapers, empty make-up containers and other things flying out of car windows at you.
Anyway, the can opened on impact with Steve's sternum, and our only satisfaction came from the fact that the car had Texas plates, and Oklahoma won 44-9.
No, if I was going to go to a museum about the assassination, I was going to go to one where they told the truth.
I found it at a kiosk in The West End Marketplace, not far from Dealy Plaza.
As I recall, it was called the JFK Assassination Information Center. It was staffed by volunteers and minor authors who knew even more, and burned with even more passion, than I.
Hanging around with these folks was fun!
Well, it was fun until I made a terrible mistake.
There was a woman in Dealy Plaza on November 22, 1963, named Jean Hill. Jean Hill was standing right next to the President's limousine at the moment the fatal head shot struck. Any documentary about that day will feature a famous interview given to a local TV reporter only minutes after the shooting. Usually, one only sees small portions on the interview. If you have a tape of the whole thing, as I do, you will see and hear Mrs. Hill describing some rather odd things. The one I always considered the most fun was her assertion JFK and The First Lady were in the process of petting a small dog when the President's head flew apart.
There was no dog in that car, but Jean Hill saw one.
Well, I mentioned this fact to the people at the West End kiosk, and laughed.
I discovered that one does not laugh at Jean Hill if one wants to remain part of the club. My joke was met with icy stares and cries of: "Wait a minute! Jean is a nice lady!"
I just thought she was a silly fruitcake.
I started to go back over my books to discover why these people revered Mrs. Hill so.
It didn't take long to find out.
Jean Hill was interviewed for most of my books, and she told a different story whenever the wind changed. I am quite sure that, if you had gone to her with a theory that alien pod people fired the fatal shot from an overhead saucer, she would have suddenly remembered seeing one. She was so pleased in her accidental celebrity, and so eager to please, that she would support with "personal memories" any theory an author interviewed her about. The authors were thrilled to have an eye witness supporting them, so it was a tidy symbiotic relationship. To criticize St. Jean was to criticize the theorists.
I resolved to stay away from crackpots, and keep research rooted in scientific and historical method.
The first cracks in my world view had shown, but I still knew about the conspiracy, and that didn't depend of the hallucinations of the late Mrs. Hill.
Another historical subject to which I have devoted a lot of study is the series of murders attributed the person or persons unknown called "Jack the Ripper." I've read more than twenty books on this case, and I think it's fair to say that I know quite a bit about it. I used to know even more about it, until I realized that I knew a lot of things that simply weren't true. I realized this after reading "The Complete History of Jack the Ripper," by Philip Sugden. Sugden is a historian, unlike all the other "Ripperologists" I had read. He applied proper historical method to the case, and uncovered a vast mythology with had taken root as fact in the 100 years since the killings ended. He went back to source materials with no ax to grind, and found that many of the most compelling, famous and lurid "facts" about the case had never taken place at all. It was illuminating and thrilling, but a little disquieting as well. I had to ask myself: "On what other subjects do I know a lot that just isn't so?"
I started rereading a lot of my books of historical speculation and mystery solving through new eyes. Having seen Sugden in action, I applied his methods and questions to books I had once accepted as hard fact.
This is not the kind of thing you want to do if sleeping at night is important to you. I say this because I didn't sleep well for a while. I was up poring over my old books, writing questions in the margins, making notes, and reading the source materials I had found in a university research library during the daytimes. I spent a lot of my time awake at night feeling angry. Nothing makes me angrier than realizing I have been naive, or realizing I have accepted the word of people who do not really know.
Well, one thing makes me angrier, but we'll get to that later.
I was still sure there had been a conspiracy, but now I felt like I was back at square one, like the idiot who wrote the Oliver Stone movie. (I'm sorry. That was gratuitous, but I just couldn't resist. I just checked the Internet Movie Database and discovered that the idiot who wrote the Oliver Stone movie was Oliver Stone. Anybody who makes a hero out of a scum bag like Jim Garrison deserves the epithet "idiot.")
I decided to look for Kennedy assassination books like Philip Sugden would have written.
Before I could do that, however, I had two other life and viewpoint changing experiences. The first was serving on a grand jury.
If any of you ever have the opportunity to serve on a grand jury, I strongly recommend you do so. I served for a little over a year, and I wish it had been a lifetime appointment. I learned a lot there about people, life, crime, heroism and the law. The most important things I learned, though, were how to weigh testimony and evidence. I immediately saw how this knowledge was going to help me in my avid amateur historical study and sleuthing.
I learned that sometimes a witness says something happened a certain way simply because they were not asked the right question.
I learned that human memory is assembled, not recorded and recalled, so that testimony, even that of eye witnesses, is pretty far down the evidence ladder.
I learned that an ounce of science is worth a pound of words; that documents are dry, but exciting if you want to put the bastard in jail.
I learned that I had been paying attention to many of the wrong things as I tried to unravel what happened in the past.
Then, the nail in the coffin of my supposed knowledge: I spent time with real forensic scientists. How I arrived at this opportunity is a long and irrelevant story, so I won't go into it. The important thing is that I learned properly, for the first time, how the scientific method, and not just scientific data, could paint a clear picture where only chaos had appeared before.
Now I was ready. Now I was brave enough to pick up the book I had been dreading.
I had assiduously avoided reading Posner's "Case Closed." At first, I avoided it because of the title. It seemed pretty arrogant. How could he have the balls to say "Cased Closed" when there was so much evidence of conspiracy widely known by so many Americans? After all, 70% of the citizenry believed in conspiracy. The facts were out there.
Later, I avoided reading "Case Closed" because I had seen an interview with the author, and he didn't seem all that impressive as a speaker. To make me buy a book like that, you'd have to come off as strong, cool and smooth as Morgan Freeman, and Gerald Posner didn't.
For a while, I didn't read the book because I was afraid I would find it more valid and compelling that I wanted to. I avoided flirting with the realization that I might have wasted a lot of intellectual and emotional energy in the service of foolishness. Nobody wants to be called a fool, and it's ten times worse if they suspect in their heart that it is probably true.
After the grand jury, though, I began to feel like a fool for not reading it.
So, I read "Case Closed," by Gerald Posner, and it made me feel like a fool, but also like a man who finally had some idea what was going on.
It was a thrilling, if not always enjoyable, experience.
John F. Kennedy is Jack the Ripper. His case is so overgrown with the moss of fantastic and exciting "facts" that aren't true that the truth seems prosaic and dull by comparison.
Now, I am not going to go into all these "facts," and how they muddle the collective mind, but there's no room here for that. Besides, those for whom conspiracy is an article of faith, and there are millions, would feel duty bound to argue the case in the pages of The Faulking Truth.
Those who wish to argue, or assert their sophistication, conspiratorial hipness and superiority over me will be provided with an email address to do just that at the end of this article.
No, I'll just mention one aspect of the case, one witness, free from the complicated forensic science that supports his story, to show how we've been lied to by people who want to sell books.
Howard Brennan was 90-100 feet from the infamous sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, and he saw Oswald firing the shots from that window. One can learn about him in the Warren Report. One cannot learn about him from most of the conspiracy press because they don't mention him. They don't mention him because, unlike Jean Hill, he never changed his story, and that story does not support what they want you to believe.
One conspiracy book that I recall, Lifton's "Best Evidence," does go into some detail about Brennan. Lifton deliberately does not relate Brennan's vivid description of the shooter, his facial expression, his clothes, the gun, the stack of boxes on which it rested, or anything else. The detail he goes into is in stating that Brennan had terrible eyesight, so his story must be discounted.
Well, it's true that Brennan had terrible eyesight. What Lifton deliberately neglects to mention is that Brannan was far-sighted. He was very far-sighted. At a distance of 90-100 feet, he could see details that the rest of us could not possibly perceive.
Lifton gets points for mentioning Brennan, but he loses points for deliberately not mentioning details that make him out to be wrong. So, he is not only wrong, he is a liar. He is a liar I believed for years.
That is the thing I alluded to earlier that makes me angrier than anything. I hate being lied to.
"But," I can already hear some of you who are now like I was saying, "Brennan failed to pick Oswald out of a line-up."
Buckle up, readers. Brennan did not fail to pick Oswald out of a line-up. He refused to pick Oswald out of a line-up. Anybody who bothers to read his statements, instead of just trying to do away with his existence, will find his honest and lucid statement that he decided not to point out Oswald because he feared reprisals from possible co-conspirators (Nobody knew, on that first day, just what might be happening.), and anyway, the police already had him. He didn't see the sense in putting his neck out to implicate a man against whom the police already had a lot of evidence, and who was already in custody.
Now, Brennan was only one of the people who saw that gun protruding from the window, and saw the fire coming from the barrel. But you'll never hear about those other people from the conspiracy crowd, either.
I never did.
So, after my change of heart, I finally stood on the sixth floor of the Texas Scool Book Depository, staring at that corner window. I cried a little, partly out of frustration that nobody walked in that day and kicked that weasel in the face before ge even took aim. I was deeply moved by thinking of the profound changes in the world that started when Oswald pulled the trigger three times. I tried to picture events unfolding there in slow motion, so I would not forget a single detail. I felt connected to a brilliant young man of so much promise who rode by below me not knowing that he had about five seconds to live.
After reading "Case Closed," I had to do a bit of self examination, as well as historical examination.
Why had I abandoned my better judgment for so many years? Why did I not rely on my better intellectual faculties? Why was I so eager to believe their lies? Now, when I read one of those books, I keep seeing contradictions and glaring holes in logic that I used to not notice. I don't consider myself stupid, so what in the heck was I doing?
My answer takes me back to that sad and frightening day in 1963. It became clear during an email exchange with a friend. This friend never met a conspiracy theory he didn't like. He also never met one he didn't want me to check out. He sends them all to me: OWG, Illuminati, Trilateral Commission, Federal Reserve, assassination, etc., etc. He is a good citizen. He reads. He studies. He votes. He cares. He spreads the word about his concerns. He is a good family man. I like the heck out of the guy, so I always read what he sends me, and give it consideration. I often don't agree, but I respect him enough to not reject his missives out of hand. I asked him once, though, why he believed in the conspiracies. He answered that it helped him make sense of the world.
That statement hit me like an electric shock because I immediately knew why I had been so careless on the subject of Kennedy's assassination. I wanted to make sense of the world. After all, chaotic, random, senseless violence from beyond the walls of my little home had made my mother cry. That stuck in my mind. It made more sense, as time went by, to believe that there was a larger meaning to it when bad things happen, and shake up the safety of your world. Something as big as a dead president; a demolished federal building; a generation's hope lying in his own blood on the concrete floor of a hotel pantry; imploding symbols of our nation's economic power; a child's crying mother; all of these stack up so much better against vast dark forces than they do against their actual causes.
No, I don't believe that anybody beside Lee Harvey Oswald had anything to do with Kennedy's assassination.
I don't believe in the Manchurian Candidate, the "girl in the polka dot dress" or the fatigued security guard. Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy to keep him from sending fighter jets to Israel, like he said he did.
Timothy McVeigh and his friends blew a hole in the middle of my home town, not the U.S. government.
The Branch Davidians set themselves on fire.
The people who are supposedly trying to create One World Government are simply trying to make themselves richer and richer. They are ruthless greedheads, but they really don't care who's in charge, so long as they can get more money.
9/11 was not an "inside job," unless by "inside" you mean "inside Saudi Arabia."
The world usually doesn't make sense to us. We are too small to understand it, anyway. If you believe in God, or Karma, then you have to live in the knowledge that there are greater balances, causes and effects that we can perceive. If you don't believe, then you know the world doesn't have to make sense; that we don't live in a cosmic whodunit.
In any case, we don't have to nail down the nature of evil in order to fight it.
We wonder about the conspirators behind globalization, and they poverty they cause, but how many of us sponsor even one child?
We rant about what dark motives may lie behind the dreadful delays in relief to Katrina's victims, but how much do we truly sacrifice to help them ourselves?
We know that the Project For a New American Century neocons have way too much control of the Bush administration, but how many of us make the choice not to buy products made by companies which support them?
We fear global climate change, and rightly castigate politicians who do not support the Kyoto Protocols, but what do we drive? What personal action do we take while we wait for their evil ways to be properly publicized?
We wonder why the world makes those we love cry, but do we extend our arms to comfort them?
Sometimes little men kill big ones.
Sometimes unimportant people make themselves matter in the worst way.
Sometimes, those who could help elect not to.
Sometimes, those who want to help don't know how.
Sometimes, the bad guys win.
Sometimes, the bad guys win because the good guys did nothing.
Sometimes, folks get eaten because they're arguing what kind of bear is rushing them instead of letting their arrow fly.
Conspiracy talk can be fun, like the hidden pictures in "Highlights," but who does it feed?
All arguments in favor of a grassy knoll gunman, or other arguments that do not properly belong on the bandwidth of The Faulking Truth may be directed to KMS1957@aol.com.
Voice your opinion on our message board (you don't have to sign up to post).