Here’s a fascinating little film by Errol Morris on the strangeness of historic events viewed from the quantum as well as the ordinary perspective. The human mind, overwhelmed by the notion that such a huge tragedy and so much pain could be inflicted on so many people by one man, tries to cope with the tragedy by expanding the source of the evil into something as immense as the effect of the evil. It can’t have been just a pissed off little man with a grudge against the world and a rifle. It had to be something more than that. And so was born sixty years and counting of conspiracy theories and a tendency to interpret every tiny detail as fraught with one vast, unifying malignant plan and power. Every. Single, Action. by everybody in Dealey Plaza is analyzed down the minutest detail in a search for a Grand Unifying Theory.
But as this film makes clear, people can and do act with complete autonomy from one another for the strangest and most idiosyncratic reasons having nothing to do with a Grand Conspiratorial Design.
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4 Responses
You mean it wasn’t because the sun was hot that day?
Interesting story. Off topic, but I was surprised to learn that the limo JFK was riding in when he was shot was refurbished and returned to service for the White House until 1977 – it is currently in the Henry Ford Museum near Detroit, where I learned this. I thought it would have been considered an historic item and immediately preserved, or not thought to be appropriate to continue using because of what happened, but not so.
Yesterday was the 22nd here in New Zealand, and I am always very moved on 22 November. I was 21 years old and at work.
Three people died that day: JFK, C S Lewis, and Aldous Huxley. Some Catholic author – I forget who – wrote a kind of dialogue amongst the three in the afterlife.
Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley
Peter Kreeft