Notes from the Void: Wisdom, Knowledge, Education, Sensationalism—What is Intelligence Anyway?

…Or The Second Gunman Was—What Now? 

        My favorite professor in undergrad was an adjunct professor in the Political Science Department who also taught at Harvard. You know that whole “smart is sexy” thing? I never really believed it. I thought that was just something that was said because you had the brainy people, then you had the beautiful people. Maybe sometimes it’s “pick your side”. Maybe it is more about which one you choose to define you…. Which one other people choose to define you…But this professor WAS that saying. He had I think six ex-wives…so while six women found his intelligence hella attractive, six women were also no longer married to him, so clearly something was wrong—but you know, go up for second helpings in one line, means you probably skipped out on one of the other lines…so deficit somewhere… 

        But he made me interested in international politics in a way I never had been before. I initially became a Political Science Major because of its Pre-Law track, but I wound up focusing on international politics instead. A fairly substantial part of that decision was to take additional courses with this professor. He taught in a way that made the material come to life and I felt smarter just being in his class. I remember the last thing he ever said to me—It was right after the final for my Russian Politics class. I filled up three blue books in about forty minutes with the answers to the test questions and walked to the front of the classroom to hand them in. He looked up from his desk at me and said, “Nicole, you’ve already finished my test I don’t know if I should be insulted or impressed.” I got an A. Maybe it was an A-, but regardless, he would have been impressed. He was a tough grader. 

        Our first test he joked about a student who literally spent the test period drawing a toilet bowl for an answer. So, yeah. Tough grader. I loved everything about that Russian Politics class. As a Gen Xer, I remember the Soviet Union. I remember the Cold War. We didn’t have the drills to “duck and cover” under our desks like our Boomer parents did, but it wasn’t because there was no longer a threat of nuclear war. We were instead ingrained with a fatalism stemming from the knowledge that ducking under a desk wasn’t going to save us from a nuclear detonation or the subsequent nuclear fallout. Nothing would. And those “fallout shelters” hadn’t been renovated or restocked in 50 years. If nuclear war started, we were screwed. Hell, music videos even spoofed the nuke ‘em button—yeah, I’m looking at you, Phil Collins.

        But I remember going for a visit home and being so excited to tell my parents that there never really was a threat of nuclear war, that the two governments created the “Cold War” as a way of keeping their very diverse populations in check, focusing on an external enemy over their internal issues. I had books, studies, communications that all became available after the fall of the Soviet Union—officially at the end of 1991, even though the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989. I was so fascinated. Seeing how each government lied to their people between 1947 and 1989—it was shocking. And I couldn’t wait to talk to my parents about it. I guess that part of it was that Gen X fatalism that made me fear throughout my childhood that the world was going to blow up like that Weird Al Song “Christmas at Ground Zero”. And now, I saw that fear was unwarranted. That the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had essentially had a 42 year penis measuring contest. 

        To say my parents weren’t impressed with my new found knowledge would be putting it mildly. Their reaction? “Huh.” They did give a little more—“it felt real to us” but for the most part their response was “Huh.” I didn’t understand it. I felt like I had gleaned something profound, something that opened up the world and how it worked to me and they were all “Huh.” 

        I couldn’t look much farther than that then. And very recently, it happened again. I have gotten into listening to podcasts. It is really funny how we have “reinvented” previous media in a slightly different format. It reminds me of a Tumblr post ragging on how someone wished that there was texting—only in audio where you could talk to someone—you mean like using the telephone? We have all these streaming apps we can bundle—like cable television…and now we have podcasts which is basically radio “on demand”. Huh. I started listening to short podcasts—like Morning Cup of Murder, and graduated to the longer one hour or more podcasts. They provide just the right level of distraction while I do other things. I would blame my short attention span and need to multitask on law school, but that would be a lie. I’ve always been this way. 

        Side note: I see guys complaining about women who watch a lot of murder podcasts and how it is alarming how women are obsessive about learning to kill. I would say that most of us don’t look at these murders through the eyes of the murderer, but through the eyes of the victims. What did they do wrong to get killed? How can we protect ourselves. It’s about survival. About learning what can be done not to be in those situations. Sure, I should be able to walk down an abandoned alley way free from the possibility of being brutally raped and murdered—but I also know that there are scary people out there, and so maybe walking alone (or with someone I don’t trust) down that alley may put me in danger and why chance it? But back to my regularly scheduled post… 

        I started listening to various podcasts, everything from serial killers to the wild west, and one of the shows I have gotten into is Last Podcast on the Left. See I love horror movies so part of the intrigue for the podcast may have been that the name is a play on a Wes Craven movie. Not only a Wes Craven movie, actually, but the one I found the most profoundly disturbing. That’s the thing about art for me. The things that really seem to slap me across the face when I watch or see or read it are usually the things that stay with me—make me obsess on the why of it. The Last House on the Left is one scary movie. But back to LPOTL—I listened to a great series that was a few episodes each on the Donner Party, Jonestown, and then I found a six part series on the JFK assassination. 

        By the time I was born, there had been several incarnations of official (and unofficial) committees investigating the assassination and the findings of the Warren Commission. SEVERAL. But I didn’t know any of this. I knew JFK was shot, and that it was a very public assassination. And that there are many conspiracy theories out there…many of which involved a grassy knoll. I had no idea what a grassy knoll was. I knew that JFK’s death meant something to people my parents’ age, and even a little younger. I remember Guns ’n Roses’ song Civil War mentioned the assassination was one of Axel’s first memories. Actually meaning that his first memory was when he was less than two years old. My first memory is from when my brother was born when I was just under three and I thought that was considered an early memory, but you know, whatever. Suffice it to say I knew very little about the assassination other than the name Lee Harvey Oswald and that “I’m just a patsy” thing. And the Lone Gunmen was a reference on it in the X-Files. There was a Zoolander reference to it, also made by David Duchovny, actually…anyway very little. So it was really interesting listening to this six episode podcast series on it. I could go on for days about the various conspiracy theories out there, and it is kind of fun. My Aquarius is showing, I know. But my god, it was like EVERYONE had a reason to hate JFK. The CIA hated him because of the Bay of Pigs. He refused to escalate in Cuba and called their bluff. JFK had decided that the CIA needed to be stripped of much of their power. Organized crime hated JFK because he had put RFK in as Attorney General and pushed going after the mob as a priority. JFK felt organized crime was a bigger threat to America than Communism, which really ticked off J. Edgar Hoover, so the FBI was also mad at him. He was going to de-escalate American involvement in Viet Nam which upset the military contractors. Even his Vice President, LBJ hated him. And quite honestly, reading about how LBJ acted after the assassination, including blatantly turning policy in the opposite direction just makes me dislike LBJ even more. I already thought he was a jerk for the whole Eartha Kitt thing, so I suppose I should not have been surprised, but still. I mean there are even people who think the JFK assassination never happened…But the reason why all this is coming up at all, is because of one of the theories presented. It was the one that at least two out of the three of the guys on the show subscribe to—a theory that has apparently been around since about 1968, eventually becoming a book in 1992. But this was the first time I had heard anything about this theory. And yet it it is the only one that in my opinion makes the most sense. The theory? That Oswald fired probably two shots with one missing then one hitting the neck. Then a third shot, the one that took out some of JFK’s head was an accidental discharge from an AR-15 rifle in the Secret Service vehicle behind the President’s limo. That it was a mistake. 

        What I loved about this theory was that this seemed like the only one that the person who came up with it took all the facts they could get a hold of and then used them to create a theory. So often, and dangerously, people do what Sherlock Holmes warned about in “A Scandal in Bohemia”—“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” I highly recommend reading Mortal Error: The Shot That Killed JFK by Bonar Menninger if you’re interested in this stuff. Menninger writes up the theory based on all the information collected by Howard Donahue, a Baltimore ballistics expert. To sum it up briefly, the theory is that a rookie agent heard the shots from the book depository, and picked up the loaded AR-15. When the car jerked, he fell backwards and the gun inadvertently discharged. The book goes into the difference between full metal jacket rounds and frangible bullets. The bullets in the Secret Service’s AR-15 would have been frangible bullets as bodyguards generally use frangible bullets to take out a threatening target. The bullets from the book depository, from Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano, were full metal jacket bullets that wouldn’t have caused the kind of damage done to the President’s head by that final shot. It was the kind of damage that would be done by a frangible bullet. AND WHERE IS THE BRAIN TO CHECK? Wait! I have a picture to better illustrate my pain:

        But here it was, this amazing theory that I couldn’t wait to tell to my parents—who had never heard it before. And then there was that “huh” reaction. Some people when hearing about this theory back ages ago were happy to hear that it cleared the government of being so shady as to murder our own President, the way some theories have at the very least intimated. But the fact that this theory could have been proven and the tools were taken away from us to be able to confirm or deny it? If Kennedy really was de-escalating our involvement in Viet Nam, how many American soldiers could have been saved? Watergate probably would never have happened! Would we still have had punk rock? The guys on LPOTL question that…but I think that punk was just as much about rebelling from the classical style of learning music. A lot of those arena rock artists were classically trained. Punk was different—it was more about rejecting that classic way of learning music. I kind of feel we still would have had punk… 

        I guess I can understand why the CIA would want to cover up everything about the assassination. First off, how did they miss Lee Harvey Oswald in the first place? Well, they really didn’t. Oswald was on their radar, and on the FBI radar. He was very outspoken about his communist ideas and even lived in the USSR for a while. That whole back story is nuts. Although he became disenchanted with the USSR while he was over there—apparently not understanding that the state would decide the role he would play and apparently they didn’t want him as a spy but felt that being a janitor or some such would better serve his comrades…He then decided Cuba was a better implementation of Marxism, but they didn’t want him. This guy wasn’t some random guy who fired at a President. He was an ex-military man who tried to defect to the USSR but they didn’t want him. So the CIA kinda crapped the bed on their work on that one. The parade route was known a few days in advance by EVERYONE IN DALLAS. The parade was broadcasted, where all the information about the placement of the President and details about where on the route they were, including the very open and very easy target area of Dealey Plaza. And Dallas wasn’t exactly a safe place for Kennedy to be campaigning. He took LBJ on as his running mate to get the vote in Texas and he still barely won there. Apparently JFK had a very fatalistic view on things too (wow that word is coming up quite a bit in this post). He suffered from horrible, constant back pain due to an injury from World War II. He often wore, and was that day, a back brace. Apparently he wasn’t the easiest man to guard. He wanted the car open so that people could see him and his wife. In an open car. An open area. Lots of people. What could go wrong? 

        O.K. and maybe the world finding out that the President was shot by his own bodyguards would have made us the laughing stock of—well, everyone, really… 

        And maybe that’s it. Maybe protecting how we were viewed globally was more important. Maybe the CIA and Secret Service acted shady because they screwed up. Yeah, they were involved but not how many think. And maybe the theory isn’t sexy enough for mass popularity. Maybe we want the most powerful man in America to have apparent super powers. Maybe we want to believe that some intricate detailed scheme is needed… 

        But maybe the “huh” is something else. Maybe when we are used to seeing things a certain way, maybe taking them for granted, we can’t just switch it off. There is no reset. No do over. Certain knowledge acts as a foundation—our basis for being. Every day the sun is going to come up. Every few towns there will be a MacDonald’s. You’re going to lose a sock in the dryer—other things build on top of those given foundation pieces…but what happens when the foundation crumbles? Do we become too invested the tower as it was? Do we eventually lack the ability to rebuild when the tower crashes down around that weak foundation? It makes me think back to the Matrix—specifically bringing Neo into the real world for the first time. Morpheus comments “We never free a mind once it’s reached a certain age. It’s dangerous, the mind has trouble letting go…” So is the “huh” that protection? That we see the government a certain way and have a difficult time seeing them as different from that way? That certain scenarios become more easily accepted and easier to bury ourselves in and continue about our lives? Do we then only see the new knowledge as an “interesting possibility” instead of profound discourse?