Showdown in Storytown
Tis JFK season in Dallas. Today marks 61 years since the dastardly event. As has been the case since at least 1995, writers, researchers, and folks fascinated by the assassination are convening in town to commemorate, present, debate, and outright argue about every conceivable angle of the killing, its lead-up, and its follow-on. I attended the first day of one such conference and found it fascinating. Though far from obsessed, I do have an interest the assassination. As a murder mystery, I consider it unsolvable. As an historical event, I consider it a still-evolving hologram of modern political power and its far-reaching tentacles.
In the sizable JFK research community, there are deep and long-standing schisms along every conceivable line of exploration - Oswald, LBJ, CIA, oil barons, rednecks, Cubans…. A question, a challenge, becomes an affront, which often becomes a grudge. But no examination of the JFK case reveals a single, simple truth. There is a telling line from Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK:
It’s a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma!
Even as “evidence” has continued to leak out for 61 years the mystery remains. Maybe it’s serious business, but it’s essentially a game. And like any game, the more invested we become in an outcome, the less enchanting the game’s mystery.
But this is not about JFK or about assassination conferences. It’s about how our stories isolate us. Sometimes our ideas seem so clear to us that anyone who questions them becomes our enemy. We draw lines in the sand for our “truth” and our ideas. We protect them as though they are what we are. In the rare event that we can shape our ideas into some thing, we call that thing “intellectual property” and add it to the list of things we need to protect. What else would we do, once we tie our thoughts to our identity?
Identity is simply another chapter in our story and, like the story itself, it is concocted out of thin air. Just because we defend it doesn’t mean it’s real. We call it a story because it is made up. Sadly, the more adamant our defense of our story and the more narrow our focus, the less interesting the exploration of this thing called life becomes.