The Single Bullet

 

Because humans are herd animals, like dogs, our instinct is to defer to authority, and assume that those in power are smarter and more honest than we are. We see this in the Stockholm syndrome when people are kidnapped. Of course it also applies to authorities and governments in general.

Every now and then, the curtain gets ripped away.

It was torn badly in 1963 when JFK was assassinated. Just about everyone felt it did not smell right. Conspiracy theories abounded. The young at least briefly adopted the slogan “question authority.” And widely bucked the call to fight in Vietnam. Trust was lost.

Over time, this settled down, at least to a large extent. In Sixties terms, we all sold out. For one thing, Oliver Stone’s movie “JFK” came along, and was so unconvincing in its claims that, intentionally or not, the entire enterprise of questioning the Warren Commission findings was discredited. The cool kids weren’t supposed to believe in “conspiracy theories” any more. Blaming the CIA for anything domestic was “tinfoil hat” stuff, compelling evidence of mental illness.

That alone should make us suspicious—whenever a given position is ruled out of public or polite discourse, it is probably because it is inconveniently true.

Now even the JFK assassination is hot again. Now people are again asking questions. Because recent events have caused another collapse in trust in the government and in authorities generally. I think a bigger one than we saw in the Sixties.

In light of the draconian Covid lockdowns, the fixing of the primary process in the US, the Chinese election interference in Canada, the Epstein affair, the lies about the vaccine, the attempts to silence free speech, to shut down truckers and farmers, the lawfare against Trump and the obvious persecution of protesters on January 6 in the US and the Freedom Convoy in Canada, the charge that the “Deep State” actually staged a silent coup in 1963 sounds plausible, even likely. 

We all know nefarious things are going on. How far do they extend?

And how, short of revolution, do we re-establish social trust?

Alternate History

 

Recent intimations that the Kennedy assassination was indeed a conspiracy, by the Deep State make me start to wonder what they destroyed. What would the world look like today had Kennedy completed his term, and been re-elected?

Things went pretty crazy in the USA within a few years of his death. The culture got knocked into a cocked hat later in the Sixties, and has not recovered. Perhaps this was a reaction to the loss of Kennedy and what he represented: the idea of a brave and better postwar world. People stopped having kids at about the same time: a sure sign of pessimism about the future. And weren’t the Sixties the classic “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die” reaction to a loss of hope? “Tune in, turn on, drop out.”

We can be sure the Civil Rights movement would have continued: it was Kennedy’s initiative, and Johnson continued with it on the strength of his imprimatur. Perhaps the folk boom with its sincerity, concern for social causes, and ultimate respect for culture would not have been supplanted by the Beatles and more raucous rock and roll. Which was less about improving the world and more about getting drunk and getting laid.

Imagine all that energy being better channelled.

I think it is a fair assumption that the Republicans would still have nominated Goldwater. Kennedy would have won a second term. His brother RFK insisted that he would have pulled out of Vietnam had he survived. I suspect this is true; he did not have Johnson’s macho insecurities, and showed his ability to admit and learn from mistakes during the Cuban missile crisis. We might have avoided all that. We would have avoided LBJ’s vast expansion of government and his Great Society, which so devastated the black family.

I assume the Republicans would still go with Nixon in ‘68. Johnson would not run, due to health. The most likely Democratic standardbearer would have been RFK. Let’s assume Kennedy would still be popular enough that RFK would beat Nixon on his brother’s coattails. It was a close run thing for Nixon even against Humphrey, with the latter fighting the headwinds of Vietnam, a dubious nomination, a bitterly divided party, no charisma, and a raucous convention. 

Would RFK have been very radical? I think he was at base an opportunist. He would play it by the polls. He would probably, in these altered circumstances, be a relative centrist. And he would not have been assassinated; nor would Martin Luther King have been. These were copycat crimes. We would have been spared those two traumas, and have had King’s input in the years to follow. It could have been a glamourous time, with RFK in Washington, Pierre Trudeau in Ottawa, Expo ’67 still recent, and civil rights passed.

Nixon would presumably not be back for another round in 1972; that would be one too many resurrections even for him. Whomever the Republicans ran that election, we would have missed the trauma of Watergate and the aura of “Tricky Dickie” in charge of the globe. They might well have run Ronald Reagan, who was by then well established as the standard-bearer of the party’s right wing, and was serving as governor of California. Imagine him winning this election—after three terms, the electorate is usually hungry for a change—and being able to govern in his prime.

Would Reagan have made the same deal with China that Nixon did? Perhaps. But without Vietnam, he would have had less need or incentive to do so. And subsequent events suggest we might have been better off had Nixon not made that deal. The Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union would probably have collapsed anyway, for economic reasons, and China would not have been built up to replace them.

Give Reagan a second term, and he would have been in power during the Iranian Revolution. We can imagine him giving the Shah the backing that Carter did not; we can imagine the Ayatollah and the Iranian theocrats not coming to power. That might have saved much strife and anguish in the Middle East.

Although we’ll never know, it seems to me it could have been a happier century. As one left-wing British commentator remarked, before the Kennedy assassination, everyone admired America. After it, everyone fell out of love with America. 

Imagine that had not happened.

The Grandfather of All Conspiracy Theories

 

In recent years, we have been learning that one “conspiracy theory” after another is actually true. Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophilia ring. Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide. The Russia hoax. The vaccines and the lockdowns. The excess deaths. UFOs turn out to be legit. The FBI was manipulating and shadowbanning on Twitter. 

“Conspiracy theory” became a pejorative in the wake of Oliver Stone’s implausible film on the JFK assassination. Whether it was intended to cast derision on the concept of conspiracies, it had that effect. For the term as common parlance dates back to theories on that assassination.

Now that we learn conspiracies are genuinely possible and apparently common in government, have we been wrongly dismissing the big one?

Was the Kennedy assassination actually the moment the CIA and the Deep State seized control of the US government? Was it a secret coup?

Scott Adams has argued for years that any country with a large spy agency can, will and must be taken over by that agency eventually. There is every incentive, and nothing to prevent it. These spies have a license to do whatever they want, essentially unlimited government funding, a license to keep it all secret, a license to kill. Are they going to sit idle and not make use of this power? Are they going to use it only on external enemies? 

Russia has been visibly owned by the KGB since at least Yuri Andropov. Britain has been run by MI5 for generations; the British don’t particularly care, because they are used to deference and historically trust their ruling class. But America has always had these quaint delusions about democracy and the popular will. 

Those of us who remember the Kennedy assassination remember it as a generational trauma, the end of our innocence. Nothing has ever felt right since. 

Perhaps our instincts were right.

Perhaps now it will all come out. 

Perhaps that might start to make it right.

"I now feel that most of my adult life, what I have thought was real, has been erased."--Roger Simon

Surely a Revelation Is at Hand ...

Why was I thinking last night of Lee Harvey Oswald... along with Don Cherry?

It was almost the same time of year, as darkness was asserting dominance in the skies; and it seemed as epochal a disturbance in our shared lives.

To anyone of about my age, the Kennedy assassination was a revelation. We had innocently assumed that the world was good. The obvious empire of evil had been destroyed, a couple of decades ago, and the future could only be brighter than the past. The death of JFK was, to us, the discovery that evil had spontaneously resurrected itself. Nothing was ever the same again.

Although it seemed so improbable that we could not process it, Kennedy seems to have been killed by one lone demoniac. Oswald killed him for one simple reason: because Kennedy was a better man than he was, and so could not be permitted to exist.

The revelation that comes with this sudden career assassination of Don Cherry is that, over the intervening years, we have all become Oswalds. Now Oswald’s voice is coming from not just from the grassy knoll, but from all sides, from the observing crowd.

Or at least, the Oswalds have taken charge.