Grassy Knoll

Why is it famous? Why does the term resonate with unease and darkness, rather than evoke, at most, some casual image of meadows and picnics? Why does the term have any, and only, connotations of assassination? Here it is: somebody thinks he saw a puff of smoke arise from the spot. Hence, the second gunman.

Now I'm no gun aficionado. I own a handgun, which I've never fired. Maybe five years ago I went to a range with a brother and fired some rounds. Prior to that it would have been the mid '70s that I fired a gun. Clear? But when was the last time a puff of smoke rose from a modern firearm? I know muskets generated puffs of smoke. I expect civil war rifles did. Sometimes cowboy movies get smoky -- but they're about old-time guns, right? Maybe a big shootout between gangsas and fuzz gets smoky. But a single shot from a modern rifle? I really can't imagine that would happen. Smell of cordite, whatever that is? Yes. Billowing smoke signals shouting, Hey, here I am, just shooting at the Prez, don't mind me? No. Am I wrong about that? I don't think I am. Neither does
Wikipedia.  So if this very primitive and obvious observation is correct, what does that say about the conspiracy?  Obviously, the Grassy Knoll Gunman was a smoker.  Yet another senseless tobacco-related death.  When will the madness cease.

Same with 9/11 -- the reprobates who say it was an inside job. First, for shame. Second, we'll just ignore the massive collusion and satanic dishonesty involved. Good lord -- who do they suppose flew the jets? Suicide CIA agents? It's just stupid. I'm sure they have a theory. But that's third. What is the real evidence? The fact that the Towers were attacked. The conspiracy theorists didn't stumble upon some ugly fact. They hated the idea that it was what it appeared to be. The great enemy, in the world, to them, is the government of America.

So, this multiply-named conspiracy dude I linked to. Follow the train of his reasoning. He lists a bunch of accusations, what about this, what about that, as if they were evidence. Bills of indictment do not constitute evidence. Leaping from one conspiracy to another is not proof. Poor Danny Bonaduce doesn't know what to make about all this verbiage. He just knows his opinion about 9/11. He doesn't have the logical training to realize the non sequitur fallacy. But he has the brains to know that the point is 9/11, and he knows what he thinks about that.

There are indeed conspiracies. There is a Kennedy conspiracy. It didn't involve Johnson. It involved Jackie. Jackie Kennedy. And it wasn't about killing JFK. It was about redefining him. Camelot. What a powerful metaphor. Phony. She fabricated the idea that the Broadway musical Camelot was important to JFK. That made it the metaphor for his Administration. A conspiracy. But not evil.

Oswald was evil. And the lefties who immediately commenced to utterly exonerate him, and blame America, literally, and the right specifically -- they were, and are, evil. Oswald did it. Alone. If you doubt that established historical fact, I recommend that you dispel your shameful ignorance by reading either Pollack's "Case Closed" or Bugliosi's "Reclaiming History." That way you won't be so foolish and uninformed anymore about logic and facts.

As for the Left's part in the conspiracy, James Piereson's "Camelot and the Cultural Revolution" lays it out as clear as any sane person could wish. It's another nail in another coffin for the America-hating vampire that will not die. Thus, we're told, that era's Henry Reid, Mike Mansfield, imagined Kennedy had been killed by a "moment of horror" coalesced from "bigotry," "hatred," "prejudice" and "arrogance." Not his own, it should be clarified. Oswald was a bigot, but not a racist bigot. He was a hater, but of America. He was arrogant. Why didn't Mansfield mention Oswald? He was aiming at the right.

Chief Abortionist of the Supreme Court Earl Warren imagined it was "bigots" who had injected "hatred and bitterness" into the life of "our" nation -- maybe like a toxic saline solution injected into the uterus of Lady Liberty? -- to terminate the Fetus of, uh, Free Love? -- something like that? In his eulogy delivered at the Capitol two days after the killing Warren said "such acts are commonly stimulated by forces of hatred and violence as today are eating their way into the bloodstream of American life." He lamented "the hatred ... the false accusations that divide us, and the bitterness that begets violence." He did not mention Oswald or Communism. It would have spoiled his theme.

Johnson, in a Thanksgiving Day message to the nation referencing the assassination, prayed for "wisdom in banishing from our land any injustice or intolerance or oppression to any of our fellow Americans, whatever their opinion, whatever the color of their skins, for God made all of us in His image." A sound prayer. He added: "It is this work that I most want to do -- to banish rancor from our words and malice from our hearts, to close down the poison springs of hatred and intolerance and fanaticism." A sound prayer, but profoundly misleading in reference to the assassination. I hope God didn't mind. I do.

The very day after the assassination, James Reston wrote for the NY Times the editorial, "Why America Weeps: Kennedy Victim of a Violent Streak He Sought to Curb in Nation." Um, no? He was blaming the right, you see. America must weep not merely for the work of the assassin, but because "something in the nation itself, some strain of madness and violence, had destroyed the highest symbol of law and order." If he had been right, he wouldn't be an ass. From "the beginning to the end of his administration, [Kennedy] was trying to tamp down the violence of the extremists from the right." You know, the assassins. Reston must have known exactly who Oswald was -- an extensive report on his communist activities appeared right next to his own very influential, indeed seminal editorial.

They were conspiring, don't you see, all these Lefties.

Somehow, out of the fact that Oswald was a strident Marxist -- is there any other kind? -- who had renounced his US citizenship and lived for three years in the USSR, the Left engineered a rightwing conspiracy.

Several days after the assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy gave an interview to Life Magazine, in which she speaks poignantly of her private times with her slain husband. "...there's this one thing I wanted to say ... I'm so ashamed of myself.... When Jack quoted something, it was usually classical [... and] all I keep thinking of is this line from a musical comedy, it's been an obsession with me. ...At night before we'd go to sleep ... we had an old Victrola. [...] the song he loved most came at the very end of this record, the last side of Camelot, sad Camelot: ... 'Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.'

"...There'll never be another Camelot again..."

And a myth is born. A conspiracy too, or maybe just a bunch of little lies. As Piereson reveals, "Aides and associates reported that they had never heard Kennedy speak either about Camelot the musical or about its theme song. Some of Mrs. Kennedy’s friends said they had never even heard her speak about King Arthur or the play prior to the assassination."

Why make it up? In the immediate and bitter aftermath of her husband's murder, Mrs Kennedy noted that he "didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights.... It had to be some silly little communist. It even robs his death of meaning." In an effort to give meaning to the situation, Mrs Kennedy did something very clever indeed. She gave us a bright spot of focus -- it just wasn't the right spot. Same with all of them. They gave us the dark spot of conspiracy. Where there had actually been just a stupid little man at a warehouse window, we got the open grave of the grassy knoll, a hellish black hole of paranoia drawing in every vagrant delusion from a universe of unstable minds.

We need not regret that Camelot was founded on a deceit. Most religions are. We regret that it placed hope entirely in the past. Magic and nobility had died. What remained for the Left, as the poisonous decade of the '60s unspun its character, was degeneration, delusion and a celebration of betrayal. Well, that's always the case -- there will always be scum. But Oswald, by killing and then claiming to be a patsy, made it respectable.

Insanity.


J