JFK – 45 years ago

It’s the Big Secret everyone knows.

Even gray haired bank managers.

Today I went to the bank to get a document notarized. In the cubicle to the right of me a customer ranted loudly about how rich people ought to pay higher taxes like they did in the 1970s. In the cubicle to the left a banker tried to explain to a Spanish-speaking customer the difference between a savings account and a line of credit. It seems the customer's savings account balance was negative and his line of credit was positive. The man went outside to fetch his wife.

Across the desk the gray-haired bank manager proceeded to remind me that tomorrow is the 45th anniversary of the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. He said, “I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday, but I remember that day crystal clear.”

He told me he was at school just down the street on that fateful day. He pointed out his window down the street. The children of Saint Mary's had been instructed by the principal to begin saying their rosary for the president. Just five minutes later the principal came back on the intercom and played the news on her transistor radio that the president was dead.

He then began saying that John Kennedy was no saint, but it doesn't mean you go and kill the guy. And it wasn't just the Cubans, and it wasn't a mafia hit either.

"Right!," I added. "It was a coup d'état."

He began to get animated. He started ranting about the Bay of Pigs and all the players in the assassination: Lee Harvey Oswald was not a lone assassin but was a player on the periphery of the military industrial complex.

"Yup," I said. "He was FBI, CIA or both."

He looked at me surprised. He began to get slightly agitated. "You're not as old as I am, but I remember the day, two days later, on a Sunday morning, when …."

I interrupted, "when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot right in front of everyone on live television by Jack Ruby?"

He pointed at me: "Oh, very good. You know that."

"Um, hmmm," I said.

His face began to get red. He ranted about the murder of Dorothy Kilgallen of "What's My Line" fame, and how they made it look like she had been a doper and an alcoholic.

"She was actually a journalist. You know what she had done to upset the status quo?" he asked.

"Yea," I said. "She was the only person to interview Jack Ruby in prison."

"Right," he said, perplexed at my familiarity with these obscure names.

I asked him if he'd seen the Oliver Stone film, JFK. He said yes, he had. "Do you think Jim Garrison really had the guy?" he asked me.

"Clay Shaw? Yes, probably so. He was with the CIA in New Orleans." I said.

He brought up FDR's [wooops, Eisenhower's] famous warning about the military industrial complex. He ranted about the line of debunking that passes for information on television. He couldn't think of the guy's name who had written all the books debunking the JFK conspiracy theories.

"You mean, Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed"?

“That’s the guy.”

I said, "yeah, they bring him out every five years to close the case again. The problem is everybody knows what's up."

"Have you ever seen the list of mystery deaths surrounding the JFK assassination?" I asked. He said he had. He said President Kennedy's daughter Caroline was probably aware that her father was murdered by the military industrial complex. I agreed that she probably knows the whole deal but can't say anything. We talked about the Conspiracy Museum in Dallas founded by assassinologist, R.B. Cutler. It was a whirlwind discussion.

His phone beeped and I excused myself.

I walked out of the bank realizing the whole world is now paranoid. We're all twirling on the head of that angelic pin. You can't tell us anything we don't already know. There’s an elephant on the pin with us. They can't dupe us anymore.

Tomorrow I'll bring him a paranoia manual, wooops, I mean, magazine. Maybe he'll buy a prescription, wooops, I mean a subscription.