[lbo-talk] Fisk avoiding facts? really?

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Fri Nov 21 12:38:34 PST 2003


What are the Kennedy assassination,
> 9/11, etc.,
> conspiracy theorists saying? I'm not sure, but it
> may be that the
> shiny, rational, Marxist-tinged image of things that
> most of us are
> comfortable with masks a real world that teems with
> creepy-crawly
> creatures that we are not at all comfortable with
> acknowledging the
> existence of.
>

This is almost certainly true. I think it is part of the message of James Ellroy's twisted and brilliant American Tabloid. Part of the story turns on the assemby of an assassination team to get Kennedy that links up the Mafia, Hoover, the CIA, and right-wing Bay of Pigs Cubans -- but they turn out not to do the job; they are elsewhere when K is assassinated in Dallas. There is a strong suggestion that it is done by the "A" team, and that these are the "B" team, but in fact this is assumed by the characters and not explored. Ellroy's depiction of the morbidly complex lives if these creepy-crawlies is scarily empathetic. There is a brute killer (over 300 men!) and blackmailer, Pete Bondurant, whose perspective one comes to share and even understand; Ward, a Catholic ex-FBI agent who goes from sympathizing with the Communist he spies on to working for the mobsters he used to hate, and there is Kemper, a cynical social climbing ex-FBI guy whom Hoover taps to spy on the Kennedys, and whose life is ruined when he realizes they think he's a joke; he ends up enforcing civil rights in the South while organizing the hit team . . . . But in the end, Ellroy tells us, for all the damage they do, they are sidelined.

jks

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