"The small towns of Faulkner, the paranoid communities of Pynchon, the tangled but discrete “cases” of Raymond Chandler, all reflect beyond themselves onto the guilt, corruption, and greed that power our national political “progress” and economic “growth.”"
I really hate cynicism. It's considered hip nowadays to think everything is degraded, monstrous, corrupt garbage. It's like people have forgotten that there's more to humans than the murderous. Must we blind ourselves to the good in order to recognize the bad? How about the respect for human dignity, the love of family and country, the sacrifice, the self-restraint, the growth and change, the reform that we've seen through human history, and American history in particular? Was the Civil Rights Act powered by "guilt, corruption, and greed"? Was the establishment of drug safety standards? Was the abolition of slavery?
People are so blithe in proclaiming everything horrible. I just worry it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is a fine point, but it is totally orthogonal to the point of this essay, which is specifically about a tragic and evil event that reverberates through American history (the good and the bad) ever since.
In practice the Civil Rights Act didn’t accomplish all that much, as I’d say the de facto racial segregation in the US is now even larger compared to the 1950s. The progressive white component of the US population decided that the fight had been won by the late ‘60s and they moved on to other endeavors.
The racial riots from the early ‘90s should/could have been a new sign to re-open the fight but nothing of the sorts happened, by now most of the black population is resigned with the horrendous status-quo while most of the white population doesn’t find the current status-quo at all horrendous, at most they protest against some punctual anti-black population actions which they only see as individual abuses (the Ferguson case, the helpless Florida kid case etc).
The mistake is thinking in terms of linear social progress, which is trivially perverted for rhetoric. People are certainly more civil and aware of acute racism and racial discrimination. But in material terms, being black makes you acutely more vulnerable to all of society’s problems: poverty, prison, poor healthcare, poor access to jobs, poor education, low wages. The civil rights movement—and MLK’s life—ended before addressing this. More relevantly to now, only 1 in 5 black Americans are able to work from home.
Segregation still exists, it just largely uses other mechanisms today other than red lining and direct racial discrimination in businesses and government. I recognize claims similar to “we”re doing better now than we were in the 50s” as one technique of many to focus on social, not material or systemic, gains, though I suspect in many cases this does not come from an intent to do so.
I fully agree. I was astonished at how polite and helpful people were in the US for my week long first ever visit beginning of this year. The sentence you quote seems to be typically of most news/social media we are exposed to. Luckily I am aware of the technology side of the US so I typically take the cynicism with a pinch of salt but many people take it at face value and mouth it off as facts.
It has always been that way. Gordon Sinclair famously noted it a generation ago.[1]
The people I have interacted with across my lifetime from around the world have been quite oblivious to the good deeds of the US and largely only aware of anything negative the US has been responsible for. Cynicism sell better. That's what people who have been news-educated online have seen the past 25 years. In the early days of the Web most people I would chat with internationally were heavily ignorant of the US, other than select major details. Today, every flaw and mistake is magnified and broadcast globally, daily. The US kept most of Belgium alive after WW1 with the CRB [2], and fed ten million Russians daily [3] - who were nationally not our friends - during their famine of 1921-1923. Most people are entirely oblivious to that type of history, even in the US (a failure of our education system). Today it's PEPFAR, keeping millions of people alive in Africa. Or Gates & Buffett donating 2/3 of their wealth to helping poor people outside of the US (and the US treats them as heroes for it). When Russia sent that plane of supplies to the US last week, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov noted they hoped the US would reciprocate the favor back the other direction if things become increasingly dire in Russia. And that is exactly what the US will do, if it is able to ramp up the production of medical gear in the coming months.
It is puzzling I must say. On the one end people here are into American things such as MacDonalds, Krispy Creme and Apple is probably the ultimate technology brand. Its a status symbol to own an iPhone. If someone goes to Harvard or MIT the rest of us will be sure to hear about. Probably a few local papers will have the story. Then the same people holding the iPhone aspiring to go to Harvard will be some of the most cynical people.
An example of how "patient" I felt New Yorker's were was on Brooklyn Bridge. Even though I was a tourist myself I was annoyed at how just unaware/selfish some of the tourists were in the search for a selfy, standing in clearly marked bicycle lane. I was amazed at the restraint of the cyclists. The most they did was ring their bells. One guy did sort of say in an exasperated tone, just get out of the way. Where I am from people definitely not as polite. Look no society is perfect but America's problems are put under a microscope by the free press and because you are the biggest economy.
Nothing wrong with recognizing that few things are all black or all white. In fact, I suspect those beautiful things that you mention happened at least in part because people were motivated by the darkness they saw.
Many think too globally, which ironically gives us a narrow view of humanity as we are dealing with such broad strokes. If all you have is a shallow understanding of global politics and news, then you've really got no choice but to be cynical, but you're also missing out on what's really happening around you in your local community. Somewhere you could actually enact change and help, and enjoy the good in the community around you.
Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying
-Bob Dylan
The music Dylan was making in the 60s is just as relevant today as ever before. “Murder Most Foul” hit me in the gut. Truly an epic.
Dylan's notorious for leaving brilliant songs on the shelf, sometimes for decades. Some of them leak and circulate among collectors/rabid fans, but some of them don't.
From a good Twitter reaction thread by a longtime JFK assassination commentator: "there's a continuous thread of reference to mostly-black pre-rock music as knowledge of just what happened to JFK and mostly white pop/rock as a kind of rebellious sublimation or, if you like, extrovert denial, acting out the rage but not admitting what happened"
One theory is that the lyric "howl Wolfman, howl" may be a reference to George H. W. Bush, whose CIA codename was Timberwolf and who claimed for years not to remember where he was the day JFK was assassinated.
If the theory is right it wouldn't be the only name in the song Dylan uses as a play on words or with double meaning. The first reference is sandwiched right up against a bunch of rumination on the nature of Kennedy's murder and the people who carried it out.
Daily reminder that congress looked into the JFK assassination and found:
"Scientific acoustical evidence establishes a high probability that at least two gunmen fired at the President."
and
"The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee was unable to identify the other gunmen or the extent of the conspiracy."
I don't know much about the report but the wikipedia article you linked to says that the acoustical evidence that causes the report to think there might be a second shooter has been found to be suspect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_assassination_...
and it also says that they didn't think the conspiracy involved the Soviet Union, Cuba, anti-Castro forces, organized crime, or government agencies. That rules out a lot of the popular theories on who may have had JFK killed.
I've wondered whether people may be blinded by the big sexy conspiracy theories and not looking at simpler more likely options.
The simplest of course is that Oswald did it, but there is at least some evidence for a second shooter from witnesses as well as perhaps acoustics.
The next simplest then is to propose two. What if Oswald had one accomplice who is still unknown because Ruby shot Oswald before he could rat them out.
Why did Ruby shoot Oswald anyway? To stop him from ratting someone else out? Dunno, but these are questions I'd immediately have asked.
What you do in the face of Ockham's razor is gradually dial up the complexity until you encompass all the evidence. You don't leap from simple lone nut to vast conspiracy, but that is what most do.
If there was more than one person involved, the fact that this has remained so mysterious with so many competing theories for so long argues strongly for a very small number of people. The more people are involved the more likely someone would get caught or confess. Death bed confessions are pretty common.
Not electing the guy who probably helped plot the assassination to the office of POTUS would have been a start. There's a whole lot of daylight between "he wasn't killed by a lone gunman" and actually taking some minimal steps to identify and oppose the people responsible.
While the majority doubt the lone gunman narrative, I don't think there is any majority consensus beyond that. People have loads of different theories, different ideas for who the perpetrators were or what their motivations might have been. It's easy to say that something should be done, but actually getting that something done is another matter.
> The real skill was not in the cover-up (which left a ton of breadcrumbs) but in browbeating the American public into accepting and ignoring it.
The people most likely to have done this have probably left FAR larger trails of other malfeasance and we choose not go after them anyway.
Look at the gigantic trail of stuff surrounding Trump.
Why have we not purged the ENTIRE New York FBI field office as being compromised?
At this point, the JFK assassination is a nice distraction to make sure the people who might dig up inconvenient modern, relevant malfeasance are left digging somewhere else.
Right, but who? LBJ and southern conservatives? The Mafia? Castro? And why use a shooter with such obvious Soviet connections?
My best guess is southern conservatives who, among other things, hated him for backing down over Bay of Pigs. So they manipulated Oswald into doing it, as a false flag.
And yeah, maybe that's too obvious. Maybe that's the false flag for something far more subtle.
In Caro's monumental, unfinished biography of LBJ, he basically says that he found no evidence to link him to the assassination, having done decades of incredibly thorough research. But he also describes Johnson as:
- insanely ambitious, and obsessed with becoming President
- devastated at ending up VP, which basically ruled him out from the top job (barring JFK's death)
- insanely secretive (for example, he tracked down and destroyed almost all copies of his college yearbook, which merely showed him as being somewhat disliked/seen as dishonest)
Bearing all of which in mind, I'm partial to this particular conspiracy theory. Though I fully expect that if it's true we'll never know. Johnson was probably unmatched when it comes to pulling off something this audacious and eliminating all evidence.
"JFK and the Unspeakable" suggests that JFK had signaled his intentions to scale down the Cold War, withdraw from Vietnam, and reign in or disband the CIA after the Bay of Pigs disaster, and was killed by rogue elements in the CIA, probably in concert with military-industrial business interests and organized crime organizations who didn't like the Kennedys shining a light on their own misdeeds either.
There's a reference to this in Scorcese's recent movie "The Irishman": "if they can get a president, they can get a president of a union."
I really hate cynicism. It's considered hip nowadays to think everything is degraded, monstrous, corrupt garbage. It's like people have forgotten that there's more to humans than the murderous. Must we blind ourselves to the good in order to recognize the bad? How about the respect for human dignity, the love of family and country, the sacrifice, the self-restraint, the growth and change, the reform that we've seen through human history, and American history in particular? Was the Civil Rights Act powered by "guilt, corruption, and greed"? Was the establishment of drug safety standards? Was the abolition of slavery?
People are so blithe in proclaiming everything horrible. I just worry it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.