The problem of useful political information and opinion isn’t restricted to the Kennedy assassination, but the relevance continues as well as the problem involved. For example, the inability or unwillingness to read anything on the part of Our Commonwealth’s voting public is an adversarial form of ammunition, but once you do crack the books you are faced with loaded arguments by which you are expected to define your position, so to avoid this dilemma and the legerdemain involved it can seem reasonable not to read as a defense against being intimidated by things that are beneath contempt in the zone of preemptive framing. The avenue taken by the characters behind the attack is very challenging and hydra-headed, imaginative, even while plodding on as though knuckleheaded horsesense, occasionally resorting to police powers or the vigilante style of National Security arguments. At that stage it doesn’t really have to make any sense.
Liberals have been under dark attack in America since the 80’s. There is a demand on the streets to justify academic learning by a cynical hothouse in the urban political condition, a trickle down from conservative rage, so to speak. The threat Kennedy and King represented, by popularizing social cause work, was the threat of common sense. The very idea of common sense is regarded as inherently not holding water and it is hard to make any headway against that propensity to dismiss liberalism.
The alternative to liberalism isn’t properly identified for cynicism. Underwriting this cynicism is a new cool, that of nihilism. It is hard to make any headway. A teacher I know thinks you can try to identify the socio-economic status of the person talking to give a picture of what they are selling as beneficiary of their burdensome views. She teaches child development and permit me to offer an ingredient she did not, that of object impermanence, the delusion infants have that someone out of sight ceases to exist. Object impermanence is slyly being inculcated and induced into nihilistic people with the childishness of Trump. It isn’t necessary to dehumanize Muslims, you simply stop admitting they exist as human agencies, they become invisibilized for your enfant terrible mentality, which comes out as cynicism, hiding its stupidity and sadism, sometimes hauntingly called negation. Even if you say that cynicism is a way of managing defeat and that Trump scorns intelligence because he fears an informed public would see through him, you are back at the surrender point of being deemed liberal.
Part of this may be that Kennedy’s people were too ready to capitulate to gunfire. Both Lyndon Johnson and George Bush hailed under the bumper sticker Don’t Mess With Texas. There was nobody from Massachusetts to retort, you messed with Massachusetts, so shut your Texas face and open the books.
One of the things I learned as a purposefully menialized by deafness laborer who worked as a library clerk between jobs as a dishwasher, is how to read shelves and familiarity with the stacks taught me something, some of the books were part of the conjob sure, but more important they lay in wait as part of the assassination team, Huie, Bugliosi, Wecht, these are men who said to the gunmen committee, you do the number, we’ll write the books, and spoke the publisher’s raven, “Klondike.” There is in evidence a troubling stagecraft of gang-think processing in the proceedings, a series of intellectual hot-wirings, a challenging smorgasboard of piracy.
That’s not the only place it comes out. My own dilemma, notoriously with Warhol’s crowd and Penis Gabriel is a very belligerent example with attending viciousness and ultimatums. Knowing I hate them can be very misleading. It speaks to a problem in the University climate in 2019 all across the United States. Under cover of some dark retort to neoliberalism a form of guerilla war emerged on the left with Axis stage management, a bizarre adoption of the theme behind the assassinations for Democratic Party congress. The crank arguments managed to get ordained and medium that emerged is Warhol Foundation, University of Washington, Pittsburgh and N.Y. publishing houses, with all that implies about Rockefeller, present as a cohort in fact at Swarthmore College where Penis Gabriel’s metanarrative soap opera first emerged.
Jesse Jackson, often dismissed as an old hack, preaches common ground but sometimes common ground works against common sense in black culture. The white did historic evil, they reason, therefore no gains by the white for the black have merit. Nat Turner’s new crusade is to champion the misunderstood victims of Hiroshima and the 47 Ronin of Tojo. The old robber baron formula of pitting minorities on one another takes a new spin, while charmingly torturing a child and laughing, let’s hear it for the intellectual stripper. Cornel West comes over in his dogma of sex equity, mandatory eugenics and biological linkage as an advocate for disease contagion and Unit 731, beholden to the various Cosmotosis Debras who divine micro-aggression for the pot-boiling of peer rampage. The names are just ways of filling in the blanks of a machine intelligence print out of computer graphic mandatory evils.
The effect of shelf-reading as a library clerk for years is eerie. Off-open mic epiphanies shock the monkey to life. One of the most perennial is this realization that many writers were on cue because in the arrangements, but beware taking a chance on that 16th minute of fame. The living dead won’t have it.
