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.