Those mistakes aside, Dallas hit national headlines when two scrappy denizens from the troubled Trinity River bottoms decided to pick themselves up by their boot straps. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow helped many banks alleviate their load during the Depression and did their part to redistribute the wealth. However, the crooked forces behind Texas law didn't care much for that kind of talk back in those days. They snuck up behind them on a Louisiana roadside and that was that.Things stayed pretty quiet in Dallas for the next few years. A small football team made the most noise until a few newsmakers hit the scene. Stanley Marcus, a storekeeper. Gen. Edwin Walker, a self-described patriot. HL Hunt, a bowtie aficianado.
But there was one man in Dallas who knew that history was for those who reached out and took it. One man who knew that if you didn't play an instrument or know how to write good or can't manage money properly, there are limited outlets to greatness.
That man was Lee Harvey Oswald.
Since that fateful Friday afternoon, many have speculated on how the world changed. Even more have asked "what if?" And yet, even more in the past few years have asked the most haunting question of all: "Who is John F. Kennedy?" But I assure you, history was changed on that day.
If you believe the author of one of the biggest time-wasting novels of the 21st century, many earthquakes would have destroyed the world if Oswald hadn't been such a good shot. No one wants that. Another argument: we may not have gone into Vietnam. Can you imagine a world without Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, or Country Joe MacDonald's "Feel Like I'm Fixin to Die Rag?" Can you imagine how bad tourism in Dallas would have suffered, with only a shitty TV show in the 80s and a couple of Super Bowl rings to show for all its troubles?
There is a bright side to every situation. A silver lining shining through those dark clouds. For just remember, every rainy day will clear up eventually. And when it does, you can remove the bubble top from your Lincoln and take a drive through sunny downtown.
And when you do, be sure to turn up the music.
TOP FIVE "HITS" INSPIRED BY THE ASSASSINATION OF JFK
Man, history gives some guys all the breaks, and then takes a collective dump on other guys. Jacob Rubenstein gets no love, portrayed for all eternity as some wormy hanger-on with a night club. But The Carousel Club was no ordinary night club. Regular nights at the little joint across from the Adolphus featured an act showcasing comedians, singers, strippers and a ventriloquist. Not just your average Saturday at the bingo parlor, I dare say. Anyhow, after the assassination, he closed the club for the weekend, locked his dog in a car parked outside the courthouse, and went downstairs to give Lee Harvey the old "South Dallas Hello." His first visitor in jail was Joe Campisi, Dallas crime family capo. Died of some mysterious illness he claimed was injected into him. To make matters worse, was played by Danny Aiello in a poorly-researched film in 1992.
Dude says to hell with the United States in the height of McCarthy era paranoia, as the Cold War is just cranking up the AC. He moves to Russia, picks up a family and moves back. Beats the shit out of his wife, passes out pro-Castro pamphlets, hangs out with a Russian emigre (with ties to both GHW Bush and Jackie K) and shoots a crazy fascist politician. The FBI had files on him and "kept missing him" on routine visits to his house.
To me, the scariest thing about the entire JFK assassination is not some vast conspiracy, but how the Little Assassin Who Could shone a light on just how inept the FBI really was back in those days.
One of the coolest aspects of history is how malleable it becomes over the years. Think about it: Memoirs that his image began to wane. Followed up with the overnight success of Birth of a Nation and years of romanticism, William Tecumseh Sherman is the most vilified historical figure below the Mason-Dixon.
Sherman burned the South, but after the war was celebrated as a hero for years. It wasn't until Jefferson Davis took a college tour and Sherman's own
The fascination with JFK's murder has undergone a similar shift throughout time. In the 90s, Oliver Stone's shitfest of a film coincided with heightened conspiracy theories and impassioned pleas for the truth. Fast-forward to the current era -- one rife with YouTube videos and gifs -- and you find a culture far removed from the stolen idealism of the Sixties or the conspiracy obsessions of the Nineties, but instead an audience captivated by head wounds and gut shots.
But the greatest fear is not the Russians anymore. Nor is it the Cubans. The Mafia is no longer pervasive, except for Sopranos reruns on HBO. As mentioned earlier, it would be ridiculous to assume that an organization so bumbling and inept as the federal government could ever have pulled off an assassination of that scale and kept quiet about it for fifty years. LBJ had the means, motive, and know-how, but the graduate of an East Texas teacher's college and idealistic Master of the Senate operated by a different code and would never have ordered that trigger pulled. JR Ewing... nah.
No, those are no longer the great fears we face. While everyone prepared for one of those evils, in came the little guy with a gun and a desperate need to matter. That's who fired those shots on the Friday in 1963 and he fired them again at Reagan in 81 and again in Columbine and again in Newtown, Connecticut.
It's easy to be afraid of vast conspiracies or criminal organizations. It's fun to imagine a terrible nation with an ideals counter to your own. But you are afraid of the wrong thing. THAT'S what the government does not want you to know. THAT'S the big secret.
JFK jerked "back and to the left" because he wore a dibilitating back brace, due to injuries he sustained saving his shipmates on PT 109. The brace prevented his body from lurching forward during the fatal headshot. People heard multiple shots because they experienced shock from what had just happened. (Try counting gunshots sometime. You never get it right.) Also, the "canyon effect" in Dealey Plaza creates an echo. The FBI "lost" Jim Hosty's files on Oswald because they were trying to cover up their own stupidity.
No one is more bummed out by a lack of a vast conspiracy than me. I wish there were puzzle pieces and intrigue and missing witnesses... Instead, what we have is fifty times scarier:
A lone gunman.
Please catch my short fiction piece "November," due out in Pulp Modern #6, the Winter Issue. Also, for more on lone sociopaths, be sure to check out my forthcoming novel DIRTBAGS which will be published in the Spring of 2014. All of my credits are available at www.erykpruitt.com
