Please Rate Your Experience

As a student who has recently undergone this rigorous course, your insights are valuable to me. I'm specifically interested in your perspective on the writing assignments (blog, essays, False Documents project) and my responses to and assessments of that writing. Please take a few minutes to answer some questions about your experience. Your commentary will help improve the course for future generations of Uni students.

Fifth Period

Eighth Period

Thank you, and please have a restful and enjoyable winter break!

Assassination Aura

In his 2005 preface to Libra, DeLillo doesn’t focus on the historical consequences of the Kennedy assassination as they are traditionally understood—what it meant for international and domestic politics, for our understanding of covert intelligence and its role in a democracy, how it shaped relations with Cuba, what it did to “the American psyche,” how it inaugurated the period of social unrest that carried into the 1970s, and so on. These have all been discussed at great length, and continue to be debated. DeLillo focuses more on what the assassination has meant to us in less traceable ways—the “aura” that continues to surround the event, and the images and characters it has introduced into American popular discourse. It has become a story that is fascinating in its own right, apart from any argument about its significance. In part because of the deep uncertainty pervading any coherent account of the events leading up to and following the shooting of the president (which opens to door to a seemingly unlimited string of conspiracy theories), and in part because so many of the key moments were captured on film (the serendipitous “Zapruder film,” the shooting of Oswald by Ruby, broadcast live on television), the Kennedy assassination has become a part of American popular culture.

JFK conspiracy theories have become a “world within a world,” to quote DeLillo’s refrain in Libra. Even a timid excursion into the thriving online archives and discussion groups reveals an alternate universe of trivia, speculation, and strong feelings. There’s a kind of “fanboy” dynamic to a lot of this stuff—it is a world unto itself, not unlike that of Star Trek fans or Minecraft enthusiasts. The fascination makes a lot of sense, on one level: it’s a massive mystery story, full of bizarre coincidences and eccentric characters, international intelligence and counterintelligence, organized crime, and forensic analysis. As DeLillo’s “CIA historian” Nicholas Branch discovers, it is a giant, neverending “novel” that keeps rewriting itself as we read: “the Joycean book of America . . . in which nothing is left out” (182).

The assassination—its names, images, and intersecting narratives—has become a part of the American popular imagination in a way that no other assassination has. And this has a lot to do with why it’s such a quintessentially postmodern event. The images and names circulate in a way that has nothing in particular to do with politics, or conspiracies, or assassination. The phrase “grassy knoll” can never again be used to simply identify a feature of the landscape; a “schoolbook depository” is part of the national working vocabulary in a way that has nothing to do with depositing schoolbooks. There have been punk bands called the Dead Kennedys, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the Jack Rubies. DeLillo refers in his preface to the t-shirt image that circulated a few years back, where the iconic image of Oswald being shot in the gut by Jack Ruby was ingeniously refashioned to look like a punk band on stage:

“There at center stage is the mythic figure of Oswald, barking his sad and ragged love into a hand mike” (viii). Oswald totally looks the part of the punk frontman, and it’s easy to forget the fact that we’re looking at a man being fatally shot—a fatal shot that had enormous consequences for securing the mystery and ambiguity that continues to haunt this story. (And note the iconic Dead Kennedys DK logo spraypainted on the wall in the background—an additional and rather morbid meta-joke.) This is a great example of a meme that precedes the internet and Photoshop. In fact, the Oswald-Ruby-rocking-out image was itself made into a kind of “meta-meme” back in the early 2010s:

I can’t think of any other subject of widespread conspiracy theories that enjoys this kind of pop-cultural capital (with the possible exception of the Roswell UFO stuff—there’s a definite air of postmodernist camp surrounding that whole thing). We don’t see t-shirts with the iconic “falling man” photograph from 9/11 refigured as a stagediver or bungee-jumper (even typing such an idea feels deeply wrong); I’m not aware of John Wilkes Booth’s image being deployed for comedic or ironic effect fifty years after he killed Abraham Lincoln. For some reason, a combination of deep seriousness and ironic pop appropriation combine when we talk about the Kennedy assassination. The people who obsessively pore over the details of that day in November 1963 can seem like heroic, monkish seekers of truth, exposers of a deep-seated government coverup of one of the most important events in American history, or they can seem like deeply paranoid, obsessive freaks, denizens of the most rabbit-holey rabbit hole on the internet. There’s an undeniable compulsion to try to unravel this insane tangle of a story, and there’s also a little repulsion—a desire not to get involved.

The title of my previous post, “Conspiracy A-Go-Go,” alludes to one of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite movies, Richard Linklater’s plotless 1991 classic Slacker. The film follows a seemingly random assortment of characters around Austin, Texas, on a random summer day; we stick with each character for a few minutes and then move on. This scene takes place in a used bookstore, as a young woman makes the mistake of browsing through the JFK Assassination shelf.

The putative author of “Profiles in Cowardice” here is a classic parody of the conspiracy theorist—when asked about himself, he launches into a kind of private language full of references and allusions, and it never occurs to him that she’s maybe not part of the cult. And under it all is a kind of nervous self-promotion. Most viewers probably identify with the woman, who just wants to look at some books in peace. She doesn’t even remember this dude from that class they supposedly took together. But he’s so myopically fixated on his private narrative, he can’t pick up on any of these social cues: conspiracy theorist as social misfit. When people start talking about the Kennedy assassination, there’s a tendency to roll the eyes and say, “Not all this crap about the grassy knoll again!” But at the same time, when I read Libra, it’s easy to get sucked into the story beyond the novel, of which the novel is a part. You can see how this guy might’ve gotten hooked.

Google “Lee Harvey Oswald” at your own risk.

Conspiracy A-Go-Go

The assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, is a defining event of the twentieth century. People who were alive at the time like to recount where they were when they heard. It shook the nation to its core: a young, charismatic, and popular president who was on the brink of some major policy advances in civil rights to be killed so suddenly, so violently, and so publicly. Even if it were as straightforward a case as the official record still insists—Lee Harvey Oswald acting completely on his own initiative, to make a dramatic statement in support of Fidel Castro—the event would have loomed large, even in the assassination-heavy 1960s (which included the subsequent public killings of Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, all of which followed JFK). It is obviously an event of enormous historical importance—a rupture in American democracy at a very sensitive time, globally and domestically.

But skepticism about the official account of the case arose almost immediately, and it has grown exponentially since. At this point, something like 10 percent of Americans believe the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone, and a thriving cottage industry of conspiracy theorists—professional and amateur—has scrutinized and re-scrutinized every aspect of every marginal character connected to this case, and a startling number of narratives have emerged, implicating everyone from Lyndon Johnson to Fidel Castro to the CIA to the Soviets to the American mafia in various combinations and collusions. The JFK assassination marks the beginning of conspiracy thinking as a major subtheme of American cultural life. We explored this idea a bit in Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (written less than a decade after JFK, his “theory” that Harding was assassinated clearly reflects this same kind of paranoia toward official records). It has become increasingly thinkable for Americans to assume that pretty much nothing is as it seems in government statements or mainstream media coverage (a tendency that has reached an absurd apotheosis with the current president denouncing all news media except his preferred source of propaganda to be inherently “fake”—what does it mean for the government to view itself as the target of a conspiracy by journalists?). Plots are unearthed around the assassinations of King and Malcolm X and John Lennon; more recently, the same kind of thinking has raised serious questions about the murders of Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace (The Notorious BIG). The July 2024 assassination attempt against Donald Trump immediately spawned a number of conspiracy theories, and you can find extensive documentation of all the ways the campaign allegedly "staged" this event online. The assassination of Charlie Kirk (a postmodern General Walker) by a disaffected online groyper (a postmodern Oswald) was being viewed skeptically within a few minutes of the news. The official narrative of September 11, 2001, is so full of gaps that an organized movement of survivors, victims’ families, and professional skeptics has coalesced under the “9/11 Truth” banner—not all of them supporting any particular conspiracy narrative, but at least raising questions about what the Bush administration knew and failed to act upon in the months leading up to the attacks. Within hours of the announcement, in May 2011, of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden by Navy SEALs, vocal skepticism had the Pentagon seriously considering releasing photographs of his corpse, simply to quiet suspicion surrounding the alleged “burial at sea.” (Whenever a body or a suspect is dispensed with so quickly, the familiar set of questions will arise.) And the penchant for conspiracy thinking has recently shifted from the Left to the Right: on January 6, 2021, as supporters of Trump stormed the Capitol, the narrative of the insurrection as a "false flag event," with the rioters as somehow both "Antifa" and FBI, started to emerge--and members of Congress continue to treat this conspiracy narrative seriously to this day. 

It has become reflexive for us to assume that there’s always at least one other level of reality that we are not privy to. We’re almost comfortable in the view that we don’t really have any idea what’s actually going on at the highest levels of power and influence, and the popularization of this mindset is traceable back to JFK.

This general state of paranoia and skepticism has obvious implications for how we understand history—in terms of its specific content, but also in terms of its truth claims. As DeLillo makes clear through the fictional Nicholas Branch, “official CIA historian,” trying to bring some kind of narrative order to the deluge of facts and data that have been compiled by the Warren Commission and the CIA itself, the more we know about the sequence of events and overlapping coincidences and cross-references leading up to the shooting of Kennedy (and the killing of Oswald soon after by Jack Ruby, and the not-statistically-anomalous deaths of so many people even tangentially related to the story in the years after), the less confident we become that we will ever have any idea what happened. But it’s clear that something happened, and for many people it's clear that it was something more than the official story lets on. We know there’s a history to be reconstructed, but an authoritative and fully satisfying reconstruction will never emerge. The same set of facts are interpreted and reinterpreted to suggest a dizzying range of possibilities. Plots are either drawn out of these facts, or imposed on them—and we can’t tell the difference. And any imposition of plot on a collection of disparate facts means engaging in an act of fictional imagination, as Hayden White would say. Any discussion of the topic necessarily merges fact and fiction; DeLillo simply makes this explicit in his “Author’s Note” at the conclusion of Libra: “This is a work of imagination. While drawing from the historical record, I’ve made no attempt to furnish factual answers to any questions raised by the assassination.” The fascination and continued uncertainty, even after sixty years, surrounding the JFK assassination perfectly frames the theoretical concerns that are at the heart of this course.