JFK, blown away …

As I continue indexing and proofing (yep. A reeeeally long cakewalk), I’ve been struck by how much the JFK assassination turns up in Screen Enemies of the American Way.
I was fully aware of the two assassination films, Executive Action and JFK, which present us with the supposed truth behind the supposed cover-up. But there’s much more …
•The Silencer. In this movie, a conspiracy operating out of the FBI gets the blame for JFK’s shooting (Martin Luther King, too).
•Tribulation 99, a mockumentary in which the alien Quetzals who put their nonhuman agent Castro into power in Cuba respond to the Bay of Pigs by taking Kennedy out. Oswald obviously couldn’t be human and shoot that fast.
•Salt reveals that Lee Harvey Oswald was one of the first Americans replaced by the “Day X” conspiracy; Kennedy’s death was one of their first triumphs.
•In The X-Files, the Lone Gunmen conspiracy theorists are, of course, named for the “Oswald acted alone” theory. In one episode, one of them makes an off-hand reference to having breakfast with the man who really shot Kennedy.
•Richard Shaver, in his stories of The Hidden World, asserted that the subterranean monstrosities called the Derro drove Oswald to shoot Kennedy.
•The Parallax View starts out with an political assassination. Two years later, everyone who claims to have seen a second gunman has died (the supposedly high death toll of the witnesses to JFK’s shooting has been a stock part of conspiracy lore for years).
•The film Winter Kills reveals that Joe Kennedy (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) had his son whacked for deciding he should serve the American people rather than the interests of the powerful.
That’s only the tip of the iceberg. Outside of the movies we’ve seen hundreds of books and articles exposing the “cover up” and others refuting them (plus of course just straight. As the book Voodoo History states, it’s probably the most mythologized event in 20th century American history.
Why? Partly, I guess, because it’s such a landmark memory for so many Americans (“Where were you when Kennedy got shot?”). And for so many people, the idea of one lone gunman destroying the leader of the free world isn’t satisfying. Like Pearl Harbor (widely blamed on saboteurs and fifth columnists at the time) and China turning Communist (one of Joe McCarthy’s arguments in the fifties was that it couldn’t possibly have happened if Reds in our own government hadn’t pulled strings) it’s easy to believe such a terrible event could only happen as the result of a conspiracy.
And if there’s a conspiracy, if Jack Ruby didn’t destroy the men responsible, then we can find them! We can punish them! We can gain justice! Or we can reaffirm how corrupt the world is by realizing these powerful people will never be brought to justice (the view of Executive Action, IMHO, and to some extent X-Files).
As the generation that remembers the Kennedy administration passes on, will the mythology fade? Time, I guess will tell.