Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 4:55am

Blame Dallas!

 

 

Lee Harvy Oswald

 

The 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination will be coming up on Friday, and I have a post in the pipeline for that day, but I had to comment on this piece by James McAuley in The New York Times:

 

 

For the last 50 years, a collective culpability has quietly propelled the city to outshine its troubled past without ever actually engaging with it. To be fair, pretending to forget has helped Dallas achieve some remarkable accomplishments in those years, like the completion of the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, the development of the astonishingly successful Cowboys franchise and the creation of what remains one of the country’s most electric local economies.       

But those are transient triumphs in the face of what has always been left unsaid, what the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald once called the “dark night of the soul,” on which the bright Texas sun has yet to rise. The far right of 1963 and the radicalism of my grandparents’ generation may have faded in recent years, they remain very much alive in Dallas. Look no further than the troop of gun-rights activists who appeared just days ago, armed and silent, outside a meeting of local mothers concerned about gun violence. If this is what counts as responsible civic dialogue, then Dallas has a long way still to go.       

This year Dallas has a chance to grapple with the painful legacy of 1963 in public and out loud. Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to happen, although the city did quietly host a symposium on whether it really deserved to be labeled “the city of hate” earlier this month.       

But when the national cameras start rolling on Nov. 22, Dealey Plaza, the abandoned, almost spectral site of the assassination and now of the commemoration, will have been retouched in a fresh coat of literal and figurative white paint. Cosmetics seem to be all we can expect.       

“This is not a group psychology lesson,” Mike Rawlings, the mayor, told me over lunch recently. “We can do what we can do. I guess I could bring up all the relatives of the people that said bad things. But why would you do that?”       

To which, of course, there is nothing to say.

Go here to read the rest.  McAuley  apparently has “issues” with his heritage since his paternal grandparents  were involved in conservative causes in Dallas.  Poor dear!  I am sure that caused him some social ostracism as a student at Harvard and Oxford!  He can work that out with a shrink.  My amusement with his piece is the continuing inability of the left to accept that their hero JFK, a centrist Democrat, was gunned down by a deranged Marxist, Lee Harvey Oswald, and not by some sinister right wing cabal.  According to McAuley I guess conservatives in Dallas were responsible for setting a tone that led Oswald to slay Kennedy.  By that logic I guess abolitionists were responsible for setting a tone that caused John Wilkes Booth to assassinate Lincoln.  I expected a fair amount of absurdity from the main stream media over the Kennedy assassination anniversary and this idiotic piece by McAuley is no doubt merely an opening salvo.

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Alphatron Shinyskullus
Alphatron Shinyskullus
Sunday, November 17, AD 2013 1:57pm

The left sees truth as malleable. I was studying philosophy at the University of Oregon when they shifted away from analytic philosophy to “deconstructionism”. They really do posit that things like logic are a means to oppress women and minorities, and if it doesn’t serve the politically correct purpose, it is not true. Something is true, no matter the variance with the facts, if it serves the correct purpose. It is an extension of Nietzsche’s ideas.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Sunday, November 17, AD 2013 2:47pm

What is the function of intellectuals, but to tell us that things are not as ordinary people perceive them. You think the President was shot by an unsettled and intermittently employed man of 24 sporting a dishonorable discharge from the military, a wife and children who had been taken in by a local Quaker family because he could not provide for them, and a bad case of delusions of grandeur? Well that’s much too simple a view…

The scandal here is that this mess was approved for publication by a presumably middle-aged editor. The New York Times – where the callow never ends.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Sunday, November 17, AD 2013 2:57pm

men like my grandfather, oil men and corporate executives, self-made but self-segregated in a white-collar enclave in a decidedly blue-collar state —

Evidently, he described himself two years ago as an ‘aspiring journalist’. I seem to recall Tom Wolfe offered that the press corps is made up of people who got knocked around on the playground and want revenge. In this case, men of accomplishment from the Dallas business community are regarded as if they were specimens in an ant farm by a young man self-segregated at Harvard and Oxford.

PRMPMOODY
PRMPMOODY
Sunday, November 17, AD 2013 7:15pm

Today’s Parade magazine (the Sunday supplement) recommends, as one of their “three favorite JFK reads,” something called Dallas 1963, by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis, “a riveting portrait of a city roiled by paranoia and hate.” There must be some point where clueless stupidity spills over into,stupid malice.

trackback
Monday, November 18, AD 2013 1:02am

[…] This – Msgr. Charles Pope Too Many Photos, Too Few Memories – Bernard Toutounji, Ignitum Today Blame Dallas! – Donald R. McClarey, The American Catholic Dawkins Gets It Wrong Again: Similar Is Not The […]

Jay Anderson
Monday, November 18, AD 2013 8:32am

I hate this “blame Dallas” crap so much. As someone who grew up in the Dallas area, I’ve lived my whole life listening to Northeastern and Midwestern liberals blame my city and alleged “right-wing radicalism” for the death of a president at the hands of an avowed Communist.

I still remember when the Dallas Cowboys met the Buffalo Bills for the first time in the Super Bowl – a whole 30 years after the assassination, and George Plimpton said in an interview that he was picking the Bills to win because he still hadn’t “forgiven” Dallas for the Kennedy Assassination.

Either poor William McKinley just happened to be in the wrong party, or Plimpton had somehow found it within him to be able to “forgive” Buffalo for McKinley’s assassination.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Monday, November 18, AD 2013 9:03am

I will never forgive Chicago for vote fraud/electing JFK.

They have suffered enough. I would not wrap in the NYT a dead, reeking codfish.

Thomas Collins
Thomas Collins
Monday, November 18, AD 2013 11:46am

Much has been made of the “Wanted for Treason” fliers distributed in Dallas before JFK’s arrival. They were the work of retired Army Gen. Edwin Walker and there is evidence that Oswald tried to kill him months before the Kennedy assassination. See: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/11/15/jfk_assassination_flyer_distributed_in_dallas_by_edwin_walker_s_group_before.html

In other words, Oswald was a nut determined to kill somebody.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Monday, November 18, AD 2013 12:27pm

Because Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist who hated America and idolized Castro . . .sorta sounds like Obama, NY Mayor-elect DiBlasio and millions of their blood-sucking worshipers.

Instapundit: “And the cognitive dissonance that created has made the left crazy for the past fifty years.”

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