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Get Breaking News on your cellOn The Kennedy Assassination: Faith-based or Agnostic?
2:01 AM Sun, Nov 18, 2007 | Permalink
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(Editor's note: Tom Dodge's review of "Praise From a Future Generation" appears in today's GuideLive.) After the publication in 1964 of the Warren Report on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy I said I was as sure of the facts therein as I was of my own name. I had an official birth certificate to prove who I was and that my father was Alonzo Berry Dodge. In 1994, I learned that my father was Clarence Alonzo Mann. My mother said so, and that the official birth certificate was a lie. I've heard lots of intelligent people say they know that one person alone couldn't have been firing at JFK that day. I've heard lots of other intelligent people say they know the Warren Report is true and that doubters of the Warren Report are wrong. They say there are official records to back up everything they say. My birth certificate isn't the only unreliable record. And documents can be forged, erased, or destroyed. Eyewitnesses may see what isn't there and they may not see what is there. Ray Marcus, one of the so-called first generation critics of the Warren Report, was certain he saw a man with a rifle in a photograph of the bushes on Dealey Plaza. I can see it, too. I can also the face of Jesus in all those screen doors. Noting people's willingness, even eagerness, to see what's not there, Michaelangelo Antonioni made "Blow-up," an interesting movie about a photographer, Thomas, who thought he photographed a murder. In the photo he blew up I saw the man with the gun in the woods. Or did I? History teems with events in which the circumstances are so shrouded in myth and deception that fact is forever lost to us. Did Jesus turn water into wine or wine into water? Feed the multitudes or the multitudes feed him? Did the Pilgrims land on Plymouth Rock? Or, as Cole Porter asks, did Plymouth Rock land on them? In 1941, did FDR know beforehand that a Japanese naval attack was imminent? Did LBJ exaggerate the event in the Bay of Tonkin to justify widening the Vietnam War? Did JFK's father rig the vote in Illinois in 1960? Did the Bush family do the same in Florida in 2000? Did Valerie Plame Wilson work covertly for the CIA prior to July 14, 2003? She can't prove that she did. The government erased ("redacted") the record. Was there more than one Kennedy assassin? Prove it. On the other hand, for the lone nut theory to be fact, JFK and Gov. Connally had to be shot by the same bullet. Can you prove it? It's like an Abbott and Costello baseball game. Who's on first. What's on second. I Don't Know's on third. And when you focus too much on who's on first, that's when you're more likely to strike out. |
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Comments
Posted by Bill M. @ 1:07 PM Sun, Nov 18, 2007
Tom,
I suspect the tendency to believe or not to believe is a matter of temperament more than rational thought. Those who lean towards conspiracies seem to habitually see the world a certain way, those who tend to accept the "official" version see it another way. The trouble is, the world doesn't come in "ways." Or it comes to us in all ways at once. What is the only possible reasonable response to this? That rarest of virtues, humility.