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Chapter 1 A Little Solitaire
Part 1
Colin Bennett
Being a Meditation upon a Theme of Lee Harvey Oswald as Fortean Man
“Would you like to play a little solitaire? (code for activation of hypnopatsy in Richard Condon’s novel, The Manchurian Candidate)
Millions of words have been written about Oswald, both on the web and in scores of published books. Mighty authors have fallen victim to the sheer weight of material, and I do not intend falling into the trap of writing yet another portmanteau volume full of more lists than a telephone directory.
The theme of absurdity is the one thread that unites each and every stage of Oswald’s life and action. My theme here is the consistency of inconsistency. There are no new facts in this essay; there is nothing that poses as “new evidence” for some “new” approach or other, in terms of a trio of gunmen from Marseilles, death bed confessions from a member of the Luton Girl’s Choir, or Martian involvements. Neither will be found the claim that two rifles not one were “found” in the Book Depository in Dallas, this being surely an inordinate number of weapons for a high street book-trade store, and must be something of a record as far as plot complications are concerned.
The information here can be found in a thousand and one places embedded in voluminous texts.
Rather than add a third rifle to try and correct the orbit wobbles of our modelled plots, I intend an experiment in biography in terms of a re-imaging of atmosphere and character. I hope to bring into sharper focus that which is already known, in the hope to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. The same person can be photographed countless times yet one frame will catch something of the soul of a subject, though purely arithmetically speaking it contains no more information than in countless thousands of other frames. Photographers and workers in daguerreotype, silk screening, or etching, know the feeling well. For a magical instant, light, shadow and atmosphere appear to co-operate, as if these things themselves become consciously alert and aware of a need to produce new perspectives. Often the result is that one face stands out from the many faces of the same person staring up from the contact sheets in the developing dish. The other versions of the same face can be discarded. They are strangers, the masks of people we are not interested in.
In that often plain fact and fiction techniques are useless when we consider human character and actions, Shakespeare certainly would have made Oswald into a second Hamlet. He would have sensed the vast interior monologues, the restless soul, and deep conviction that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark. Like most assassins Oswald on the surface at least was of almost no social interest or consequence, a “waif” as William Manchester calls him. Yes, we might say, but many a grocer’s assistant has been found with twenty corpses in his basement. But Oswald won’t fit the psychopath or waif formula, and he was certainly no grocer’s assistant, though he might look like one in a certain light. For a man who did not have much going for him, he moved faster through twentieth century history than almost anyone else. Perhaps if he had looked down from his high tight rope, he would have fallen like Icarus. As a monument to the miracle of nerve, the memory of him will last as long as Stonehenge.
Shakespeare would have avoided the fundamental mistake of trying to resolve and explain away the countless inconsistencies in Oswald’s makeup and action. The whole point about Oswald’s life is that the inconsistencies are numberless. Like Hamlet, he simply could not help living and breathing puzzle after puzzle. Almost every hour of every day of his life has been examined in detail by dedicated experts. Each element of time in his amazing adventures becomes rather like that for Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, for whom June 16th 1904 contains infinities of time present and time past.
The “truth” about Oswald is that he was almost incapable of doing anything mundane or predictable. Or if he chose a particular path, (such as more than possibly accepting to becoming a willing CIA and FBI informant) he would not accept it as a path to be followed consistently and responsibly; rather would he action-paint with all the ramifications of such involvements, for all the world as he were a puppet master. He would weave such roles into further webs and nets, conspiracies and plots, disinformation fields, and Fortean anomalies beyond the sun and moon. He was perhaps the first prototypal info-junky; one imagines that a few minutes of conversations with him would thread through vital involvements within the power sectors of criminal, political, and state intrigue.
Therefore those who expect to find a unified Agatha Christie-type single elegant “solution” to the Oswald affair don’t know much about human beings, especially human beings of this Oswald type. Whether in the Welfare queue or on the expensive couch of a shrink, many of such are anarchists by second nature. Human being and dramatic and literary character meet in them, making structures of contradictions and paradoxes into a living art form. The “secret” may well be that Oswald loved to see the world dance to his tune as he laid and destroyed “false” and “true” trails in turn, spreading disinformation, misinformation and conspiracies.
The (possible – it was never proved in a court of law) assassination of a president as a finite crime pales in interest and significance compared with a man whose actions could be put into the Guinness Book of Records. Over nearly a half-century, the assassination of JFK itself has become a pale significance compared to the almost mediaeval quibbles concerning where Oswald was at any one time, who he was with, and what exactly was he doing, and how he existed with money, accommodation, and sustenance appearing from nowhere. We have to ask ourselves would the inconsistencies have continued through a long life, or perhaps fail at some point, rather like a formula for prime numbers? What kind of person would he have become be without the very things that define him?
The face still haunts us after fifty years. He is a reference point for all time, like Coca Cola and Hiroshima, or Charlie Chaplin and Auschwitz. Unlike hundreds of thousands of other far more famous and talented folk, the singularly unaccomplished Lee Harvey Oswald has not vanished beyond recall, and probably never will. Rather has he reinforced his presence through four decades like a prototypal cyber golem manufacturing fresh updated scripts for each and every media & research year, the two now being almost synonymous. He has the face of a short-order cook, and he rarely exhibited any kind of thought or intelligence in any written form or in any remembered spoken words. Like no other historical figure, Oswald is still very much a live provider for all the world of fascinating images and associations, atmospheres and interpretations. Just like James Dean, it is as if he were still young and alive, but this time hustling Matrix-type scripts to a live-wire but extremely reluctant and doubtful film agent. Or perhaps we should now say sitting before a screen and hacking into metaphor-systems beyond the sun and moon. That’s what he would be doing now we suppose; he can be seen as a drained Keanu Reeves, living above a cheap dunk’n diner, behind with the rent, waiting for Trinity of The Matrix to arrive through the window. Meantime, he has smoked his last cigarette, and is being drive half mad with the gorgeous smells he cannot afford rising up through the floorboards. With Oswald it is always near existential midnight, and Trinity has still not arrived through the window as he glances nervously at his watch, the only thing left that has not been pawned.
Every minute of his life, this kind of threatening theatricality was never far away. A constant absentee whilst at school, he was described by a school psychiatrist as a “dangerous schizophrenic.” Mentally ill or not, he was certainly one of the greatest performers of history in a play whose final act might well have ended in nuclear annihilation, which is the ultimate hard act to follow.
In this respect, despite the attempts of some of the very best brains of our culture and society, Oswald fits still Winston Churchill’s description of Soviet Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” We cannot say even that he was a notorious murderer and assassin, because it has never proved that was responsible for the death of President John Kennedy. If he did indeed murder an American president, it was under the most unusual circumstances with bullets, trajectories, and with a weapon equally as absurd and impossible as was every stage of his utterly fantastic life. It appears that Oswald was somehow incapable of living and acting within any kind of 24-hour frame of mundane reference. He kept a diary whilst in Moscow, now judged by some to be entirely false. On the sixth day of his arrival in Moscow, he slit his wrists in his room in the Hotel Metropole (Oswald always chose good-class settings). He said he did this after being informed that his Soviet visa would not be renewed. But again, Oswald may have been acting the whole thing out. KGB Officer Igor Ivanovitch Guzmin told Norman Mailer that it had been decided on the highest levels after the suicide attempt to let Oswald stay, even though some thought his suicide attempt may have been staged. Igor Ivanovitch Guzmin assigned Stepan Vasilyevich Gregorieff to Oswald, but hundreds of pages later Norman Mailer tells his readers that these names were pseudonyms. This constant detection of multi-layered stage-fronts of one sort or another is one single uniting factor in the Oswald business from beginning to end. He then loops the loop by getting the Russians to quickly reverse their decision. Getting Russian stiff-necked bureaucracy to do such a thing was yet another near-miracle. The Russians rewarded the embarrassing suicide attempt by this extremely tricky customer by moving him to Minsk, where he lived a life of luxury by the standards of Russia in 1960. Oswald almost certainly achieved this status by playing his one protective ace card: offering full details concerning the whole and entire U-2 operation. “In 1970 Francis Gary Powers wrote in Overflight that he believed Oswald’s defection was related to his being shot down: ‘Oswald’s familiarity with MPS 16 height-finding radar gear and radio codes (the latter were changed following his defection) are mentioned in the testimony of John E. Donovan a former first lieutenant assigned to the same El Toro radar unit as Oswald on page 298 of Volume 8 of the Warren Commission Hearings. According to Donovan: ‘Oswald has access to the location of all bases in the west coast area, all radio frequencies for all squadrons, all tactical call signs, and the relative strength of all squadrons, number and type of aircraft in each squadron, who was the commanding officer, the authentification code of entering and exiting the ADIZ, which stands for Air Defense Identification Zone. He knew the range of our radar. He knew the range of our radio. And he knew the range of the surrounding unit's radio and radar.’ ” (http://www.ajweberman.com/nodules/nodule4.htm)
He then performed a veritable hat-trick unrivalled by all history. Certainly le Compte de Saint-Germain or Fulcanelli the Alchemist would have admired. Oswald, after having a high old time, marries Marina, a Russia girl, who gives him a baby daughter. After this, he decides he has had enough of Soviet life and takes his bags and family back to the United States with as much ease as if he were leaving a holiday camp.
At each intersecting stage of this amazing progress there is maximum ambiguity regarding almost anything and everything. It is almost as if the game had been devised such that the system cannot be entered, or at least not fully. As a system, the Oswald world is a guessing game reminiscent of a short run of translated plain-text filtered from ten-digit Morse blocks snatched from high aerials. But was he programmed? This man could no more be programmed than could a healthy chimp with learning difficulties.
To baffle completely each and every process of investigation applied to him over nearly half a century is Oswald’s main achievement. He had only an elementary education, wrote not a single book, did not go to college, and he was hardly mentally or physically gifted in any sense. But few more clever human beings of greater knowledge and sophistication have ever achieved such conscious personal and psychological visibility and invisibility. Moreover he achieved these at one and the same time in the context of a scale of intercontinental actions and possibly apocalyptic consequences for the whole of the human species.
In addition, and almost without trying, he managed to violate the world picture of a steady-state psychology, finite within the skull, and with determined inputs and outputs. He showed that Mind reaches its targets through self-deception and fantasy, confounding all rational expectancy as it does so. He also left behind him the irresistible and marvellously subversive thought that Mind in its wanderings can network with others of its kind, suggesting therefore that Death itself is a state of Mind, being merely a shut-down part of the Matrix. This puts the idea of motivation into a group context operating mainly on image channels which alone confounds all existing intellectual and philosophical ideas. Undoubtedly, Oswald was getting information from a channel we yet hardly recognise. He thus left behind much more than he ever knew, and long before the words computer and internet were in general use as metaphors.
Therefore one thing is certain: as far as professional killing is concerned, Oswald would be the last person in this world to be considered for a major part in a complicated plot involving possible multiple weaponry, exact timing and complete organization. He was so unstable that he well might ruin such a plan instantly: he simply would not turn up, would fire in the opposite direction required, would betray, inform, confuse, forget things and finally disappear when he was most wanted. Another question: if multiple gunmen fired from beyond the grassy knoll, how could they be sure that their bullets would not be found? They could not be sure. If one of their bullets had been found, then Oswald would be off the hook instead of being on. Getting Oswald off the hook was no part of anybody’s plan. Better to have him not there in the first place, and get him off the hook good and proper!
Oswald left few written personal records except a highly suspicious diary, and he disappeared almost in a magical puff of smoke only feet away from an entire pantomime assembly of legal, police, and media authority. No death was as public as his. It was recorded live in “real” time (whatever that means) by almost every single piece of technology available at the time. His death was as big in this sense as were the vast social political, criminal and military sectors that hinged on his every action. Not even his killer Jack Ruby appeared to quite know who he himself was, or what he had done. Indeed Ruby appears not even to know much about who he had killed, since according to Anthony Summers, Ruby hardly referred to Oswald or even mentioned his name, either as illustration, justification, or in argument or conversation. That he had murdered a man for a particular crime was never the issue with him. All Ruby ever said (and he said it many times and nobody took any notice, not even the Warren Commission) was that the world was run by a terrible conspiracy and he begged to be taken from Dallas to Washington where he would be safe to tell all. Needless to say, this invaluable asset was left in Dallas to rot. On January 3 1967, he died of lung cancer before his second trial could begin. He claimed that he had been injected with cancer-causing drugs.
Oswald volunteered for the Marine Corps on October 27th 1956, and on March 18th 1957, after his basic training, he was sent to Naval Air Technical Training Centre in Jacksonville, Florida In September 1957 he joined Marine Air Control Squadron No 1 at Atsugi Base, Japan. There, after a surprisingly short training period in the United States, Oswald guided in top-secret U-2 spy planes, bombers possibly carrying nuclear weapons, and VIP flights. Also based at Atsugi were the big four-engine Constellation AWACS aircraft with their massive radar housing above and below their fuselage. They flew long surveillance missions in the Far East, often (like the U-2) infringing Russian air space.
U-2 aircraft
If Oswald did give information to the Soviets that brought own Gary Powers U-2 on 1st May 1960, then it might well have been about the (possibly jamming) vulnerabilities within the semi-computerised management system within this type of AWACS surveillance system. The U-2 was a revolutionary concept, but basically it was a simple single-engine subsonic aircraft, being little more than a powered glider. It needed an ultra-powerful radar and sophisticated integrated management system (the first of its type) to enable it to get in and out of its 70,000 feet operational altitude. Its wide wing could keep it aloft like a bird in a thin atmosphere and its single engine could operate nearly in a near shut-down condition for many hours. At this height no fighter in the world could get near it. Once at operational altitude, its cameras and various other sensors could monitor virtually any sector of military-industrial interest: nuclear plants, weapons stores, manoeuvres, bases, and where vulnerable transport and manufacturing and testing links came to together. When we consider that Oswald was a dummy, we must bear in mind that he was an operator at the very centre of a top-secret state-of-the-art Intelligence-gathering system.
Constellation AWACS aircraft
Oswald’s manifest clever practical ability conflicts with many reports describing him as a brainless and confused waif and stray. Anthony Summers in his book Conspiracy describes Oswald doing his radar operating job so well that one of the leading Marines in Oswald’s group commented: “He had the sort of intelligence where you could show him how to do something once and he’d know how to do it, even if it was pretty complicated.” Another officer wrote: “I would desire to have him work for me at any time...He minds his business and he does his job well.”
The Warren Report comments of Oswald at this time:
In other words inside the mind of the competent NCO at the radar screen there was a cauldron of transcendental dissatisfactions looking for a devastating point of application. At this point in many a young life Jesus Christ and/or aliens may appear at any time. Oswald chose the rather disappointing and inferior alternative of Karl Marx. Or at least he said he did.
Trouble began at Atsugi when in November 1957 Oswald somehow managed to shoot himself in his elbow with his privately owned Derringer (a small handbag pistol). For this he was court-martialled, and yet another court-martial followed when he picked a fight with a sergeant and was jailed from July 27th to August 13th 1958.
After his trouble military service in Japan, he was returned to El Toro Marine Base in December 1958. He spent some eight months there carrying out menial tasks prior to an honourable discharge. Here, his comically humourless intense preoccupation with Communism was noted by people such as Kerry Thornley, who had just joined the Marines. Oswald became one of Thornley’s buddies and was known to his fellow grunts as "Oswaldskovitch."
Back at El Toro, metaphysical realms were waiting for him. This was another dimension. His already extended and holistic personality had not dipped its toes into these waters before. Without even trying, Oswald extended himself into the literary dimension, for Thornley began writing a novel based on his early disillusionment with life in the Marine Corps. After hearing that Oswald defected to the Soviet Union after his discharged, he transformed the book, (called The Idle Warriors), into the Oswald story as he saw it. He thus made himself the only person to write a book about Lee Harvey Oswald before the fatal day of 22nd November 1963 in Dallas.
Further, Richard Condon’s novel The Manchurian Candidate was published in America in 1959. Though Richard Condon didn’t know Oswald, his Manchurian Candidate had previously predicted Oswald as a character. Thus by 1959, the man himself was already part of two contemporary narratives; Thornley’s account was drawn from knowledge, Condon’s purely speculative, though it is the Oswald story with the Chinese “brain washing” theme attached.
For Oswald the classic non-achiever who looked like nothing and indeed was practically nothing, that is some achievement. He was already being prepared for legend before he became legend. As an anti-hero, that takes some beating. Caught between different kinds of texts, it gives us the eerie feeling that he was being manufactured by a process beyond his means, comprehension, and personal resources. The eerie feel of the presence and operation of such a “lost” channel is reinforced in that the same could be said of the murderers of Robert Kennedy (Sirhan Sirhan), Martin Luther King (James Earl Ray), John Lennon (Mark Chapman).
Every single one of these men was a back bedroom hero born in urban desolation. They arose not out of the wiring harnesses and bubbling baths of Dr. Frankenstein, but were sculptured out of countless B-feature film images, junk TV, countless manipulated advertisements, and the worse diet in the world. They seem hardly born of woman as they step out of their cartoon frame, and pull their tin and paper triggers. None attempt to escape. Whilst being handcuffed, they were all strangely passive, as if wondering what had happened to the next cartoon frame. At their feet lay a much more significant cartoon figure, either dead or injured. Arthur Bremer who attempted to kill Governor Wallace in May 15, 1972, was described by his “defence” as being “incapable of understanding anything at all.” Formed by a family life devastated and wiped out by junk TV, we are not surprised.
The media theme is the thread, not real politic. Reagan was shot in 1988 by John Hinckley Jr. The motivation? To impress the young actress Jodie Foster. He is still in a mental home in 2004. Whilst appreciating Jodie’s qualities, this is a hard way to get a date. Hinckley might have settled for joining Jodie’s fan club and getting signed Christmas cards and special offers for club cinema seats had he not seen the cult film Taxi Driver starring Robert de Niro and Jodie Foster. Chapman in turn was careful to get John Lennon’s autograph before he shot him.
In that these people are more like cut-out Simpsons characters than anything else, Agatha Christie and Sherlock Homes would be puzzled. For the most part, modern assassins don’t come from the Bath and Wells horticultural society they are sculpted by media, theatre and performance arts more than economic, political, national, or moral structures As such, it is not much use looking for complex aspects of their world-connectivity. Their hold on the world is so tenuous they are almost virtual, like the junk-media their very bones have absorbed.
The trouble with mechanical researchers in may cases as soon as they hear the word “media” often they get angry and dismissive. They prefer finding lost socks from second cousins. Even forty years after Marshall Mcluhan’s Understanding Media and Andy Warhol’s theories in Series and Singles became known, media is still far from being understood as a social construct on a par with say so-called “real” economics or “real mathematics” or “real scientific facts.” As soon as people “get serious” they abandon arts culture and media almost completely. Such things are reduced to non-functional prettiness, and are playthings to be pushed aside when “real” matters come up.
Ignoring media, such researchers experience a crisis in the field of explanations such as we have in the Oswald research field. It is not yet realised that the image world can change things just as can any “real” hammer blow. How does this channel work?
Before we sleep, perhaps we remember a, b, and c, these things having initially nothing to do with one another. We wake, and a, b, and c have joined up together during the night showing image-relations between them, whole architectures we could hardly have guessed. We have been re-programmed against out will as surely as if we had been hit by a hammer. More important than a hammer blow is that our new abc relationship is alive in the form of what can be called non other than a questing information-animal that will start to breed, reach out beyond itself for info-breeding partners in the manner of any animal looking for a mate.
The next night perhaps our elementary animal, our amoeba-like intelligence BIT will be joined by elements d, e, and f. That is if we recall such things at all. The stuff we don’t recall say g, h, and i, is beyond all calculation. If we multiply our original abc animal by a purely arbitrary factor of a thousand, we begin to get an idea of how complex are our image-associative areas of perception. Moreover, these image clusters are autonomous, intelligent and powerfully organised but only partially by any kind of conscious linear cerebral process. They are also quite beyond our control.
A friend (we will call her Silvia) once told me that upon waking one morning she recalled that she had produced a complete full-scale Broadway musical in her head, starring out-of-era-phase characters, such as Doris Day and Michael Jackson. A few microscopic dots of active bio-paste within her skull had organised such an incredible thing within the brain of a woman who admitted to not being clever at all in any way. Though hardly interested in such things, she had nevertheless produced and directed and cast all its possibilities, to reveal an utterly fantastic level of autonomous unconscious organization.
She felt that the songs were beautiful, lengthy and quite original, and she was sad that they remained so vague. Like Coleridge and his dream-recall of the Ancient Mariner, she could recall only fragments and snatches or the performances and songs of her dream-show. Some years later Silvia visited a show in which she was astonished to hear about eight bars of one of the songs she had heard in her dream. Marcel Proust’s septet of Vinteuil comes to mind, a private drama which seeps out by a mysterious alchemy into the outer world:
“Proust's recurring metaphors prefigure or anticipate actions and emotions before they occur. Vinteuil's music is linked with Swann's love for Odette, the Bois de Boulogne with Odette, hawthorns with Gilberte, and the sea with Albertine. Marcel realizes the linkage when, through the power of association, the first image recalls the second.”
We have thus multiple dramas in our heads with their own agendas. After a particular show is over, like Jack Ruby, each assassin then relapses into passive caricature as if exhausted by the process, indeed not knowing what the process was or if there had been a process at all. They pollinate like bees rather than “act.”
But most researchers are rationalists. They pride themselves on this set of shining data-base tools and set about any and every problem rather like engineers. The whole and entire education system is geared to scientific rationalism. It gives prestige, it makes money, gather praise and honours, destroys the environment, tortures countless animals to death, and it pleases mums and dads. Needless to say, it gives hardly a clue as to how the world “works.”
“Objective” scientific rationalism cannot connect the blasted heath of King Lear with the political landscape, no more than it can connect media images with the kind of motivations previously described. We are dealing here with shape channels of vital inspirations, not “facts.” We have here analogues of performance as causation, and as yet, neither science nor psychology has any kind of language for such things.
This means that as a society, we cannot connect the equally blasted heath of Iraq with storms, earthquakes and spouting volcanoes in one month with the disturbed national condition of America. We have lost the language for this, and such cannot be remodelled like a circuit diagram. As a culture we have forgotten how to read the old track of image, symbol and metaphor. Therefore Mind and Nature have become separate. To understand Oswald we must learn to read again the lost language of the old subtexts and move in between the grey shades between those two troubled approximations of Fact and Fiction synthesising as they do in the manner of an Escher drawing.
The problem is that the Oswald business creates one of mankind’s great fears: that the merest scrapes of information and experience do not reveal simple harmonious structures, but greater and greater complexity. This is a great change from the late Victorian idea that science “advances” into a railway-line future adding to a fixed “store” of knowledge and therefore time reveals some kind of final truth.
Certainly conventional legal, moral, and psychological terms do not fit the assassins any more than they fit the Nazis. The assassins are living cartoons more than being in any way photographic. In this sense we can hardly call any of them common criminals. Expecting consistent realism of a figure such as Oswald is to expect of Picasso or Dali. We have no problem at all in understanding the bizarre juxtapositions of such painters. However, when such juxtapositions step off and out of the canvas, in order to manage, we stick such things back on the gallery wall. There they become passive things, provide amusement and interest rather than beings discursive investigation tools.
Albert Goldman, the author of The Lives of John Lennon (1988), describes David Mark Chapman watching TV without cease for three solid weeks before he shot and killed John Lennon, often “bursting out in rage at people who were successful, like rock stars.” Goldman continues: “During this period he had two hallucinations which he interpreted as divine messages. Walking past a plaque on his wall listing the Ten Commandments, Mark saw the Sixth Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ leap forward. Another day, while watching a cartoon, he suddenly spied the same phrase on the screen.”
Often with such people, as with the UFO visionary George Adamski, the arrival of a man from Venus is the least you can expect. The only trouble is that when we put them down as losers, they often jump through many more hoops than can more sane, intelligent and well-balanced folk.
This visionary channel is indeed a source of power worth investigation The higher disturbance it represents belongs to a higher class of inspirations than mere criminality. This is sordid, brutal, and usually miserably plebeian; offenders in this area are usually simple-minded morons who want money, sex, power, or simple revenge or momentary fame. The major American assassins of the twentieth century wanted nothing of these things. Even their political identities, if the exist at all, are pale transient things, swinging from Left to Right at the drop of a hat. They do not want anything at all in the gross physical respect of fleshy objectives. Certainly they are not driven by profit or gain, or even fame or notoriety; like the modern suicide bomber, they are motivated alone by a need to annihilate a set of complex symbols in the full knowledge that such destruction will effectively end their life. None try to escape from the scene; none have the criminal mind to prepare escape routes, accomplices, or hiding places full of weapons, tools, vehicles and communications equipment. In this sense, their objective is never military, political, or technological. They are not saboteurs in pursuit of concrete objectives. Like the suicide bomber again, they are possessed by a much higher class of inspirations than the plebeian criminal need for girls, money, and alcohol.
They are brought to the target not by their own cerebral plot or plan, but by a process that uses their inevitable fumbles and blindness as a channel. This technique as a technique has a rational basis – we just don’t expect them to come that way. The management process is image-association as a language between images and information forms of conscious intelligent life, and all that means as such. Whether bounded by skulls, or on screens and tapes, the images talk to one another rather analogue computers.
The strike is sufficient in itself. After that has been achieved, assassins appear psychologically and physically exhausted, as if the deadly poison they have delivered has in itself led to their own annihilation in the form of an inexplicable loss. They have been betrayed. They have been used for a single highly specialised mission just as a bee inadvertently carries pollen. But the transfer of destructive energy has wiped them out; their lives have no meaning at all beyond the single kill. As soon as the message is delivered, the messenger self-destructs almost on cue. This hardly appears to matter to them since their mission has been accomplished. There is no point in them living beyond this point. Indeed their young lives appear not to have been designed for life in the fullest sense. After the strike, the assassins become limp and disposable as the throw-away packets of the junk culture they have absorbed. With the exception of Oswald (who is an exception to almost everything that can be thought of), most assassins are blown away by history, fading rapidly like an old commercial break.
Though the assassins are men often regarded as daft as the proverbial brush, in avoiding body guards and massive security they just happen to jump through ten more hoops than anyone else, and they are never shot down themselves. This gives us the idea that they belong to a plot structure that gross mechanical materialism has ignored. Their power comes from reading a hidden subtext written in a language of cartoon and symbols and shapes and patterns a kind of Disneyland hieroglyphic of pop and media, advertisements and glamour. This language is far more powerful than objective rationalism. Against it, lists of facts are passive and powerless. As tragedians, both Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy knew an older version of this channel, but lacking all metaphysics, the West lost it and only hears it now like noises from old workings long thought closed down. The entire Oswald story leaves us with the creepy feeling that mundane explanations about shut down systems are decoys.
The 1962 film of Condon’s novel, The Manchurian Candidate followed Oswald as if it were his shadow. Now he had not only a novel but a full-feature film faithfully mimicking his fell shadow as it moved towards President Kennedy. The novel and the film of course inspired many other metatexts, and it inspired Thornley himself. He was living in New Orleans when John F. Kennedy was killed, hanging out, according to his own recollections (which some friends suspect Thornley invented) with a curious cast of characters. Among them were some unfortunates caught in New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigation into the JFK assassination. Garrison thought Thornley might have been part of the conspiracy as a “second Oswald.” The two men looked quite similar, and there was a weird series of coincidences linking them. Finally, with Thornley testifying before the Warren Commission, the world becomes one vast transcendental story machine.
These metatexts of films and revivals of films and novels continue today in terms of yet more fabric of association and synchronicity, techno-mythology and intrigue. As far as the Oswald business is concerned we really don’t know now whether we are on or off the page, in or out of the web, or on or off tape, film strip or compact disc, what is invented or whether indeed all and everything is a certain kind of invention in the Postmodern sense. Perhaps the synchronous image-association field is the psi channel we have been looking for so long. We use this channel to move through one another’s inventions like visiting ghosts.
Even in death Oswald played games with past and future. Like George Adamski again, though dead, he could not resist writing and directing his own drama. Here in a previously unknown photograph of his corpse in the Dallas morgue, he chose obviously Tommy Lee Jones to play him, even though Tommy Lee Jones was in short pants at the time.
Oswald’s motto might well have been: “Someone somewhere is living my life for me” (Luigi Pirandello Six Characters in Search of an Author)
End of Part 1 |
