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If you grew up in Dallas - really in Dallas, not a suburb of Dallas; a few blocks from the Texas Theater, where Oswald was arrested - if every day to get to and from high school, you drove down the motorcade route, through Dealey Plaza, past the grassy knoll, under the triple underpass which your great grandfather designed - and if you were someone with a mind for puzzles and espionage, it goes without saying that you spent some time pondering the assassination of President Kennedy.
I do not subscribe to a particular conspiracy theory, nor do I entirely discount the idea of a second shooter. In a sense, I find it more interesting to not solve the mystery; solutions of mysteries are my least favorite part of mysteries, and are why I tend to avoid the genre. This is a strange way to think of a non-fictional criminal investigation, where I should hope for justice, but the assassination has been so mythologized that I have trouble understanding it as an event that happened to real people. The days leading up to the assassination, real people. The days after the assassination - the funerals, the mourning - real people. The assassination?
I do believe wholeheartedly that there was a coverup. More accurately, that there were several coverups. I believe this because I understand bureaucracy. Especially law enforcement bureaucracy. If I were to describe policing organizations, I would start with the word obfuscatory. I would immediately add "self-protecting." This is even when national security isn't involved. Classification of documents is only one way of covering your ass; bureaucracies have dozens. And a lot of people want their asses covered when a routine parade goes as south as straight to hell.
I note the investigational similarities to the similarly unsolved Jack the Ripper case. Similarly overlapping jurisdictions of law enforcement agencies, similarly involved in turf wars, similarly not doing a great job of sharing evidence or waiting patiently. Similar high level of press coverage. Similar political pressures to get this embarrassing thing put to rest.
In other words, I am open to hearing about JFK conspiracy theories, in a way I am not open to theories by 9/11 truthers. I don't necessarily believe the theories, but I could be thought of as a hobbyist or collector of them.
However, something I've noticed lately in a lot of the second gunman theories - specifically second gunman on the grassy knoll - is that their clincher tends to be "the brain and blood matter flew backward and landed on the rear of the car." And therefore the shot had to come from the front.
The problem with this as a clincher is that the car is not a stationary object.
It seems stationary if you watch the Zapruder film, because Zapruder is panning to keep the car in the center of frame. And some digitally modified versions of the film remove the jitter to keep it extra centered, so that you can really see the head whipping back and the particulates landing on the rear of the car.
Which is driving forward.
Which means that in fact what's happening is that the blood is staying in roughly the same place, and the car is - are you following me here? There's an observer effect that's fucking up frame of reference.
There is also a beating heart and a circulatory system which was under tight pressure but now has a leak. When I pop a blister and the fluid shoots up, that doesn't imply a second needle inside my foot.
A physicist could work all this out and maybe tell me about the relative velocity of the car, added to the velocity of pumping blood. A physicist might even use eigenvectors. (Probably the physicist would use other matrix manipulations, but one doesn't often get the chance to say "eigenvectors".) The physicist might say that according to math, additional velocity is needed to explain the distance the blood traveled relative to the car, velocity perhaps imparted by a bullet fired from a grassy knoll.
But at present, I don't find "look at the video" sufficient or convincing.
I do not subscribe to a particular conspiracy theory, nor do I entirely discount the idea of a second shooter. In a sense, I find it more interesting to not solve the mystery; solutions of mysteries are my least favorite part of mysteries, and are why I tend to avoid the genre. This is a strange way to think of a non-fictional criminal investigation, where I should hope for justice, but the assassination has been so mythologized that I have trouble understanding it as an event that happened to real people. The days leading up to the assassination, real people. The days after the assassination - the funerals, the mourning - real people. The assassination?
I do believe wholeheartedly that there was a coverup. More accurately, that there were several coverups. I believe this because I understand bureaucracy. Especially law enforcement bureaucracy. If I were to describe policing organizations, I would start with the word obfuscatory. I would immediately add "self-protecting." This is even when national security isn't involved. Classification of documents is only one way of covering your ass; bureaucracies have dozens. And a lot of people want their asses covered when a routine parade goes as south as straight to hell.
I note the investigational similarities to the similarly unsolved Jack the Ripper case. Similarly overlapping jurisdictions of law enforcement agencies, similarly involved in turf wars, similarly not doing a great job of sharing evidence or waiting patiently. Similar high level of press coverage. Similar political pressures to get this embarrassing thing put to rest.
In other words, I am open to hearing about JFK conspiracy theories, in a way I am not open to theories by 9/11 truthers. I don't necessarily believe the theories, but I could be thought of as a hobbyist or collector of them.
However, something I've noticed lately in a lot of the second gunman theories - specifically second gunman on the grassy knoll - is that their clincher tends to be "the brain and blood matter flew backward and landed on the rear of the car." And therefore the shot had to come from the front.
The problem with this as a clincher is that the car is not a stationary object.
It seems stationary if you watch the Zapruder film, because Zapruder is panning to keep the car in the center of frame. And some digitally modified versions of the film remove the jitter to keep it extra centered, so that you can really see the head whipping back and the particulates landing on the rear of the car.
Which is driving forward.
Which means that in fact what's happening is that the blood is staying in roughly the same place, and the car is - are you following me here? There's an observer effect that's fucking up frame of reference.
There is also a beating heart and a circulatory system which was under tight pressure but now has a leak. When I pop a blister and the fluid shoots up, that doesn't imply a second needle inside my foot.
A physicist could work all this out and maybe tell me about the relative velocity of the car, added to the velocity of pumping blood. A physicist might even use eigenvectors. (Probably the physicist would use other matrix manipulations, but one doesn't often get the chance to say "eigenvectors".) The physicist might say that according to math, additional velocity is needed to explain the distance the blood traveled relative to the car, velocity perhaps imparted by a bullet fired from a grassy knoll.
But at present, I don't find "look at the video" sufficient or convincing.
