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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe New Yorker's George Packer: Leaving Dealey Plaza
Ever since the age of seven, Ive been obsessed with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It took place when I was three, and though I have no memory of hearing the news, the Presidents murder, in Dallas, hung over my childhood with the vivid and riveting terror of a dream. On my parents bookshelf, there was a slender, crimson-jacketed pictorial account of November 22, 1963fifty years ago next monthand the days that followed, by the photographers of the Associated Press, called The Torch Is Passed. I would sit by myself for what felt like hours and stare at the black-and-white stillsthe roses in Jackies arms at Love Field; the open Presidential limousine gleaming in the sunlight; the waving, unknowing crowds; Kennedys smile in the images just before the first shot; Jackies face turning toward him as his fists jerk up to his throat; the black shoe hanging over the back of the seat as the limo speeds away toward the underpass.
This silent nightmare remains active down in the lower muck of my unconscious: a Zapruder film that never stops playing, in a continuous loop, but always carries the force of the first viewing. In Don DeLillos Underworld, a woman named Klara watches that film, the most famous home movie ever shot, in a private art installation in New York, where it is being screened in several rooms at different speeds, and she feels that it somehow exposes the workings of the mind:
The footage seemed to advance some argument about the nature of film itself . She thought to wonder if this home movie was some crude living likeness of the minds own technology, the sort of death plot that runs in the mind, because it seemed so familiar, the footage didit seemed a thing we might see, not see but know, a model of the nights when we are intimate with our own dying.
At seven, I had no strong feelings about Kennedy himself, and I still dont. He was an attractive person and a better-than-average President. His extremely public murder was a shock from which the country never recovered. But my connection with it has nothing to do with the usual story of generational idealism and disillusionment. Nor am I interested in the apparently inextinguishable question of a conspiracy. Ive always assumed that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alonenot because Im steeped in millions of pieces of evidence but because the randomness of a lone gunman fits my primal sense of the assassination as its own self-contained event, mythic, without reference to anything outside itself, entirely confined within Dealey Plaza, taking exactly the 26.6 seconds of Abraham Zapruders color-saturated 8-mm. Bell & Howell Zoomatic footage. It has to happen, its foreordained to happen, you cant believe that it will happen, that it is happening. The public drama of history and the private encounter with death: those were the discoveries that kept me staring at the pages of that book.
<snip>
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/10/leaving-dealey-plaza.html
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The New Yorker's George Packer: Leaving Dealey Plaza (Original Post)
cali
Nov 2013
OP
“It could have happened anywhere, but Dallas, I’m sorry to say, has been conditioned by ...
liberal N proud
Nov 2013
#2
Berlum
(7,044 posts)1. ...and arriving at The Tea Party (R)
liberal N proud
(60,334 posts)2. “It could have happened anywhere, but Dallas, I’m sorry to say, has been conditioned by ...
It could have happened anywhere, but Dallas, Im sorry to say, has been conditioned by many people who have hate in their hearts and who seem to want to destroy.
Sounds eerily familiar.
monmouth3
(3,871 posts)3. I was in my early twenties, had two children, and witnessed everything the television and papers had
to offer. Fifty years later, I have the television off, I do not want to re-witness any of it again..