Gregorian Rants #1

Since I’m new here, perhaps a brief introduction and background are in order. I was a professional touring and recording musician for 30 years who now makes his bread doing IT for the nation’s largest healthcare/hospital corporation. I was only 2 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, but whenever confronted with that seminal event in our history, there was a ‘disconnect’, a ‘rub’, within. The story didn’t add up for me, even as a young boy who did not yet possess the intellectual and analytical werewithal to process the details of the case. My investigation into the case began in earnest in the ‘80s with my purchase of Jim Garrison’s “On the Trail of The Assassins” and Jim Marrs’ “Crossfire”, both of which would form the bedrock of Oliver Stone’s film “JFK”. The advent of the internet has shot the availability of material and collaboration among researchers into high gear and now here we are in 2015, having just observed the 51st anniversary of the shot heard ‘round the world. I’m honored to be a part of the 22 November Network and to be but a small cog in the churning machinery of researchers all over the world who are advancing this body of knowledge toward the goal of resolution.

Now, on to business… Cognitive dissonance: Although I’m certainly not the first to apply the concept and term to the JFK assassination, it is where all my considerations of the official government/media story line on the case begin. A good operational definition of this phenomenon, as it suits our use, is: “Mental conflict that occurs when beliefs or assumptions are contradicted by new information. When confronted with challenging new information, most people seek to preserve their current understanding of the world by rejecting, explaining away, or avoiding the new information or by convincing themselves that no conflict really exists.” It is precisely this concept which is at the heart of all Lone Nuttery.

Those who have been trotted out to tout the tired old story of Oswald as the lone nut assassin year after year (Posner, Bugliosi, Mack, McAdams, et al) have played, with the help of a complicit and cooperative press, on the cognitive dissonance of a nation. The President could have been eliminated in any number of more secretive and hidden ways, but he was murdered on a public street in broad daylight at high noon. This was by design, in order to send a loud and clear message to all who would follow in that office: “play ball or you’re out”. To those who weren’t alive yet in the ‘60s, the collective naïveté and implicit trust of the populace in our national institutions may be hard to grasp in the atmosphere of our current internet age with cynicism at full throttle, but that is the climate in which this crime took place. It was so utterly shocking, so horrifying, that no good American in 1963 would ever entertain, even for a second, the thought that sinister elements of their own government could have had anything to do with it. This societal milieu made the official story an easy sell because it was what most people wanted – a nice neat case with a quick resolution, a bow on the box and back to life as usual… There wasn’t even the need for the bothersome legal process of a trial.

Not so today. Annual polls show a steady and progressive erosion of belief by the public in the tired old tale. The release of documents pursuant to the JFK Records Act and the Assassination Records Review Board, along with the discoveries unearthed by dogged and intrepid researchers, are producing, much like an old Polaroid photograph, the steady emergence of a cohesive picture coming into focus. I picture it like a scale with the weight of public opinion on one side and the gradual addition of the cumulative knowledge and understanding of the case on the other. The scales are tipping and ultimately there will be nothing left as a counterbalance on the other side. Soon we will all recognize November 22, 1963 for what it actually was – a coup de’etat: the extra-constitutional termination of the President of The United States of America. But that may just be my opinion. What about the facts? Let’s take a look at just a few of the many which make my case. These are only dealing with one aspect of the case: the physical evidence from the crime scene. We’ll look at the other aspects of the evidence in subsequent editions. They range from simply untenable to those which strain credulity to the breaking point.

1) Oswald failed a paraffin test on the day of his arrest, proving he did not fire a rifle that day
2) Governor Connolly was buried with more total lead volume in his body than was missing from CE399, the so-called “magic bullet” that was claimed to have traversed the bodies of both Kennedy and Connolly.
3) In his second recorded rifle fire attempt in 1959, Oswald shot just 191 – one point over the minimum needed to qualify as a “Marksman” – the lowest level in the Marine Corps.
4) The best opportunity for a shot from the alleged “sniper’s lair” on the 6th floor of the Texas school Book Depository would have been a head-on shot as the limousine was approaching the corner of Houston and Elm streets, not when the vehicle was heading away from the building with the shot being obscured by a tree.
5) The alleged murder weapon was first identified and testified to by Dallas Deputy Sheriff, Roger Craig, as a 7.65 Mauser, which didn’t match the 6.5 caliber of the shell casings found on the 6th floor.
6) Dallas Police Officer Marrion Baker saw Lee Harvey Oswald on the second floor of the Texas School Book Depository building less than 90 seconds after President Kennedy was shot.

I could go on, but these are more than sufficient to establish the indefensibility of the lone nut case. We are asked to suspend the established principles of empirical evidence, a priori/a posteriori knowledge and tautology uniquely for this case while they are still assumed to be true in all others. Such selective applications of physics work in Looney Tunes cartoons, but nowhere else that I’ve ever seen. You? Didn’t think so…

As Sherlock Holmes said, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth”.