JFK was assassinated fifty-five years ago today. Our collective obsession with this event has waxed and waned over the years. For those who remember it, or grew up in its slipstream, the fascination may never fade. For those born later, it is a historical event, one with an admittedly strong cultural resonance, but it’s still history – a bit calcified maybe, and certainly tainted with the viral absurdity of undisciplined conspiracy theorizing.
I don’t know exactly what happened on that day. Having read (cough) a lot about it, I do find it hard to believe that Oswald acted alone. But let’s leave it at that. No theory of mine, or one I repeat, has any chance now of ever moving beyond the realm of theory – though it is interesting to remember that among the first JFK conspiracy theorists, according to David Talbot, was actually the president’s brother, Bobby. In any case, conspiracy theories existed long before JFK (see Jesse Walker’s excellent The United States of Paranoia), but since November 22, 1963 – and especially since September 11, 2001 – the ‘form’, let’s call it, has gone baroque, not to say rococo. One of the most serious consequences of this is an erosion of our sense that the objective truth of an event can ever again be established or agreed upon. I first had an inkling of this in the months leading up to the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination in 2013. I decided to read a few new books on the subject and here’s what happened: I ended up being utterly convinced by all of them, even though it was very clear that in terms of what they concluded they were mutually exclusive, that it was a death match, that if any of them was going to be proved true, only one of them could be. But where would that leave the remaining books, with their copious notes and references and endorsements and artfully spun narratives? And were these other authors liars, fantasists, fools? For that matter, what was I? It goes without saying that some critical discernment on the reader’s part is required here – but short of setting up your own research foundation, how are you ever going to find the time and energy to knock these theories down one by one? The alternative, of course, is to dismiss them all.
And here we are, five years later, living out in slow-motion the weaponized extrapolation of that very dichotomy. It has certainly been a downhill slide. There was always an entertainment value in late-stage JFK conspiracy theories (the 9/11 stuff not so much), but at the root of these often misguided impulses to impose clarity on events lay an all-too-explicable anxiety caused by collective trauma. From swiftboating on, however – through birtherism, Sandy Hook, and voter fraud, to name but a few – the twin engines keeping the show on the road have been cynicism and hypocrisy. Clearly, these aren’t new – some of today’s worst offenders were spawned in the ratfucky swamp that was Watergate – but without doubt what is new is the accelerating and amplifying power of technology. So far, Trump has made it possible to claim or to deny anything and not so much be believed as find a receptive audience. Increasingly, technology will provide support for any position taken, and in the age of ‘deepfakes’, even the appearance some day of an actual pee tape will probably turn out to be, as it were, a damp squib.
Anyway, on this day, as Dallas recedes by another year, let us remind ourselves of words spoken in June of 1963 – words that couldn’t be faked, words it would be impossible to imagine today’s U.S. president even understanding: “And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.