After watching the Zapruder film a dozen times tonight...

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Summary: Conspiracy theories popped up like mushrooms in the latter half of the twentieth century. I have some thoughts on them.

BLOT: (08 May 2014 - 10:07:39 PM)

After watching the Zapruder film a dozen times tonight...

Last November happened to be the fiftieth anniversary of two completely unrelated things: JFK being shot and Doctor Who. Because of this, and because JFK's assassination happened just hours (maybe a complete day, but just barely a complete day) before the first broadcast of Who, some of the various writer-types doing things in Who spin-off media have decided to tie the two together. In Tommy Donbavand's Shroud of Sorrow (LGT: my review), the Doctor is actually in Dallas, fighting off a grief-devouring invasion. In Jonathan Morris's 1963: The Space Race (LGT: the product page), the assassination is more a side-story to the main drama. I'm sure there are others, probably even others I've read/watched/listened, but those two were consumed just this past week, by coincidence, and so it got me to looking up information about the conspiracies talked about surrounding Kennedy's death.

Part of this involved me watching the Zapruder film a dozen times tonight. This was mostly me playing the game of "How deep can I go into this rabbit hole?" The answer was "Not very" in that I watched it, went, "That's tragic," and then when I read the theories and people are analyzing shadows of the people in the crowd and glitches on the frame as "edits" where the CIA covered up some gun or whether or not people at the scene would act like they did or if they should have acted in any other way, and I realized I watched the Zapruder film, and they watched The Zapruder Film. My mythical America is not their Mythical America.

Conspiracy theories are creatures born out of a mob and live on the premise that secret truths will be known to those with wisdom. It is such a strong impulse to and seek order out of chaos that we are left with a fundamental paradox of agent-seeking behavior: we spend so much time trying to find the agency behind random events that we sometimes see static when there is clear, and then we try to read the static that isn't there.

As my brain was processing Umbrella Men (speaking of Doctor Who, this moniker was given to the Seventh Doctor, a further tie-in) and weaponized umbrellas and sleep-darts and extra gunmen and too-long shadows and whether the driver (or even Mrs. Kennedy) had a clear shot and a way to dispose of a gun and whether the man who fell down was another shooter who was trying to get out of the way and so on and so on, it seems weird to think how little of it matters.

JFK's assassination did not lead to any sort of massive governmental shift of power (assuming you do not consider LBJ, and his actions during the Vietnam War, to be such a thing). It did not lead to any far-reaching laws. It did not strip a class of people of rights, or establish some sort of deep ties to industrial-security companies. It did not stop the Space Race, or propel it forward. It did not lead to a massive redistribution of government funds to particular projects. It was a man dying. The trickiest part is a debate about why he did, but nearly all of the conspiracy theories imply it was something entirely behind-the-scenes, and often imply it was something effectively personal.

Why believe in a second gunman? Just in case Oswald misses? Why not put that gunman right at the same place as Oswald, then, so the shots would come from the same place or maybe a window up and over or really close? Why a conspiracy? It seems reasonable that others could have been in on it, but a conspiracy requires more energy than a lone man, and therefore requires more justification for that energy. Many crimes have collaborators involved, but if you are going to start assuming that justice is assuming we go after ever more suspects, you reach a quick slippery slope. Why think it was an inside job? There are a dozen ways that someone close to the president could have killed him in a much more private manner, without witnesses. So maybe it was meant to be a public execution, then why not have an undeniable public execution in a classic "mob" style? Why a poison-tipped dart? What good would that be?

A good quote about this is in Smithsonian.com article "What Does the Zapruder Film Really Tell Us?", and I'll end with it...

"Conspiracy theories often provide solace," [Errol Morris] says. "They provide a level of comfort that makes sense of a world that seems otherwise beyond our ken, our control."
"In my book about Hitler," I [being the author of the article] recall, "I wrote that the inexplicability of horror is equaled by the horror of inexplicability."
"Conspiracies tell you that there's a kind of easy way to grasp the idea of evil. It's those bad guys rubbing their hands together..."
"Twirling their mustaches."

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: May 2014


Written by Doug Bolden

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