Executive Action

There are those who say that America blew up the USS Maine in Havana Harbor to get us into a war. The Lusitania was sunk for a similar reason. Ditto the attack on Pearl Harbor, which FDR knew all about in advance. And of course, the Pueblo incident never happened. I just chanced on a website claiming that very thing yesterday.

I know there have been conspiracy theories as long as there have been people, but I don’t think they really got going as a full-time industry until 11/22/63, the assassination of John F. Kennedy by a small-time total loser named Lee Harvey Oswald. And yes, I do believe that, fool that I am. I have come to believe that any event of that magnitude, as it is studied in greater and greater detail, will yield of plethora of “inexplicable” coincidences and volumes of “evidence” (mostly contradictory) that proves it can’t have happened as the “official” version tells it. Just take a look at the literally thousands of YouTubes showing how 9/11 was a put-up job by our public servants in Washington.

I will admit that for a while I was fairly sure, along with most Americans, that we hadn’t gotten the whole story. The faulty rifle. The grassy knoll. The weird blown-up photo that showed … what? There were a hundred thing. And I found this movie interesting, maybe even persuasive. Seeing it again. I’m amazed at how amateurish it is. I’m talking about technically, but also the screenplay and the whole cockamamie idea of what might have really gone down that horrible day. All of the characters are about as lively and interesting as the cardboard cutouts the conspirators used when they practiced gunning JFK down. As a movie, as a thriller, as a cogent theory of the plot against the president, it is just terrible.

I have to mention that one of the forces behind making this piece of crap was Mark Lane. He gets a story credit, though the script was written by Dalton Trumbo, who was a much better writer than this and should have been ashamed of himself. Are you old enough to remember Mark Lane? I think he was the first huckster to realize there was a good living to be made in conspiracy theories. He wrote a bestseller about the assassination, and was off to the races. He touted several other conspiracies, and oddly enough, was there at Jonestown when Jim Jones incited 900 or so idiots to suicide. He escaped by the skin of his teeth, and naturally came up with a theory that all the survivors had been machine-gunned by American troops. What a turd.