Category Archives: Life In General

Difficult to remember but think I came back to my dorm room after classes one November night.  My roommate, Mike, had the TV on and tuned to the local network affiliate.  The Berlin wall was coming down.  Something utterly impossible.  Something that could not be and would never happen in my lifetime had happened and I was totally stunned.  I had no reaction.

I think it was the same way for many people.  As odd as it sounds a whole way of life, a mindset, an attitude was suddenly all erased and the wheels of history had gone down a different road.  That looming specter of nuclear war that I had pretty much accepted as an inevitability had just vanished in the pop of champagne bottles and fireworks being shot off on top of a wall.  What was left?

I think that we all had to come to terms with the “new reality”.  Some looked at it in a hopeful light and decided that we could now move forward without all the baggage of the last fifty years weighing us down.

Others not so much.

Maybe with that sort of mindset in place they almost welcomed George Bush when about a year later he popularized the phrase “The New World Order” in a speech concerning the course of history now that the Soviet empire had effectively collapsed.

New World Order wasn’t a new phrase.  Conspiracy theorists knew it from the beginning of the 20th century when globalists such as HG Wells, Cecil Rhodes, Elihu Root and Woodrow Wilson advocated for the dissolution of national boundaries and the establishment of a planetary governing body.  Globalism became the new nefarious conspiracy to replace international communism.

Previously little known groups such as the Council of Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg group, the Trilateral commission, Bohemian grove, and skull and crossbones suddenly became more and more scrutinized.  The innate secretive nature of these groups just fueled speculation to ridiculous levels.  Now here we are 25 or so years later and we’ve little to no more information on any of these groups or plots.

Then the 90’s brought a series of disturbing incidents and vaguely defined threats to liberty.  Desert Storm, Waco, Ruby Ridge, “clipper chips”.  Certainly pop culture fed the hysteria with shows like The X-files.  Then along came the mismanaged 2000 election with hints of fraud and shortly after that 9/11.

The general level of distrust, the misgivings, the overall respect for governments, and for international bodies such as the UN has plummeted.  The American people are more leery of government and its intentions.  Anything and everything can now be a plot against the general population.  Even the most innocuous of programs such as health care seem to have an ominous edge to them.

Those in power don’t help things.  They seem rather oblivious to the complaints and blindly plunge on.

The general feeling is now that anyone with power or money or both will do what they have to do to maintain or augment that power and money at the expense of others and not just financially but in terms of liberties and individual rights.

What could happen if this type of sentiment is not addressed?  Well in the extreme cases when people get shoved too far it could lead to a violent counter-reaction.  Just look at what happened in countries in the near east when their governments failed to react in a proper and timely manner to the complaints of the great many.  Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Syria are great examples.

At the very least it means that more and more of the population will become disillusioned by the political process and take less of an active role in their governments and leave decisions to a smaller number of people.  A sort of twisted self-fulfilling prophecy.

What’s the answer?  More rather than less involvement with the government, real and not just promised transparency in government, a more thoughtful approach to governing that is more reactive to the fears of those that aren’t on the leading edge of change.

I don’t think that conspiracy theories will ever go away entirely but I do think that if we make things more transparent and we have a more reactive government that we may minimize the effect on the general population that they have enjoyed in the last quarter century.

This is the one that everyone talks about.

Possibly the closest thing that we have in American history to compare to the legend of King Arthur or Barbarossa or perhaps even to the expulsion from the garden of Eden.  The story of a golden age in American history brought to a violent end by the murder of a man of legend.  A pivotal point in American and even world history.  People are left wondering what might have been.

A whole industry has cropped up around the assassination of President Kennedy in the last fifty years.  Books, movies, TV specials, that all claim to know the absolute truth and put forward theories as diverse as they are colorful.

The undisputed facts of the case are:

1. Kennedy was shot twice in Dallas.

2., and that he died.

Beyond that, all else is seemingly up for grabs.

Suspects

It seems everyone had a reason to kill Kennedy.  From Fidel Castro, to Cuban right-wing rebels, to the mob, to the CIA, to vice president Johnson, to a group of army generals and wealthy businessmen, to a witch’s curse put on the Kennedy family back in Ireland, and finally to a disgruntled young man who was a failure.

Various sets of “proof” have been put forward by authors, enthusiasts, movie directors all of which seem to solve the case.  However all rely on sketchy evidence, wrong assumptions, and sometimes outright lies.

Gerald Posner tackled some of the more popular theories in his book in his tome “Case Closed” in 1995 as a direct answer to the 1991 Oliver Stone movie “JFK”

“JFK” itself concerns the theory set forth by a New Orleans district attorney, Jim Garrison, that a cabal set out to murder the president and that Lee Harvey Oswald was put up as a patsy for the murder.

Garrison himself was known to launch cases against public officials and against corruption in New Orleans always trying to land on the front page of the local papers for the sake of his political career.  He ended up prosecuting a local businessman as part of a plot to murder the President.  Garrison was only able to produce unreliable witnesses and speculation.  The case was decided against Garrison in less than fifteen minutes

In the end the case did have a lasting effect as it brought phrases into pop culture such as “magic bullet” and “lone gunman”.  The case would also begin the trend of the general public of doubting and mistrusting the government’s explanations for anything.

Motives

The possible motivations to assassinate the president vary widely and in some cases seem contradictory.

Kennedy had partially left Cuba to Castro.  Operations set in motion in the Eisenhower era such as the invasion of Cuba had been abandoned and hundreds of men were left stranded on a tropical beach to face capture and torture. A large expat Cuban community in South Florida became displeased with the president.  Something that they definitely expressed in the ballot boxes for the next fifty years.  But did they do more?

Castro was no big fan either.  Kennedy had initiated “Operation Mongoose” to subvert Castro’s regime.  Using CIA backed sabotage teams they blew up bridges, burned sugar cane crops and mined harbors.  What made it personal was that Kennedy had his brother Bobby Kennedy run the operation for him.  The Cuban intelligence agency (the Dirección General de Inteligencia) is a world-class agency and certainly had the resources to pull off an assassination.

Vice president Johnson himself was not a happy man.  A career politician, he had become Kennedy’s running mate out of necessity.  A skilled politician, he could get congressional support for any of Kennedy’s policies when necessary but he was looked down upon by most of the Kennedy family and seen as little more than an ill-mannered oaf.  It seems that the only one that personally liked Johnson was president Kennedy himself.

The Kennedy clans’ plans were to have John Kennedy get his two terms and then have Bobby continue the dynasty leaving Johnson out in the cold.  It would be understandable that the vice president might feel ill-used. But was he capable of organizing such a thing?

The mob wasn’t too happy either.  The Kennedy administration had vigorously gone after the mob in the early 60’s and had begun to damage their operations.  Another theory speculates that the Kennedy campaign had reneged on campaign promises made to the mob to help him win the white house in 1960.  Some have speculated that Kennedy had some particular links to the mob in Chicago and that their support in the 1960 election had put Illinois in Kennedy’s camp for the presidential election.

Other mob motives might tie back into the Cuban angle as the mob was very interested in restoring links to a lucrative per-revolution gambling arrangement in Cuba.  Kennedy’s seemingly lax policy on Cuba might have seemed detrimental to their interests.

Lastly it is speculated that a simmering feud between the president’s father Joseph Kennedy and the mob existed from decades past and that this was payback.

The one group most credited is a mix of the CIA, the pentagon, and big business.  It is widely speculated that Kennedy intended to withdraw from Vietnam and to restart nuclear arms talks with the soviets.  The threat of seeming to be weak against communism and the curtailing of “blank check” military spending would be a threat to these parties.

The most far-fetched theory is that a curse was placed on the Kennedy clan due to an ancestor of Kennedy offending a witch in Ireland.  This would take the form of various members of the clan dying violently or ruining their careers.

Lastly we are left with a young man.  A man who had been a failure in most things he had done, a man who was almost totally disregarded by life but who craved attention.  A man who could do only do one thing well.  He could shoot a rifle.