How to articulate that delicate and elusive dance between fact and memory? That relationship is part of what makes us who we are. Students of history especially are attuned to this balance and to how it applies to collective memories and dominant paradigms. There are things that happen. Then there are things that are remembered. In our most brazen illusions, those two things match up almost seamlessly; In reality, they absolutely never do, and are at many times far more divorced than we might imagine.
How is memory shaped, especially now, when so much "fact" can be preserved via recording of various types? Collective memories, it pains me to say, are by their very definition created by dispensing with "the whole truth" and "nothing but the truth", preserving islands of truth peeking up through the fog.
The collective memories of the assassination of John Kennedy and the 9/11 attacks are the two archetypal collective American memories of the past half century. In studying them, we bear witness to that insidious process of constructing a memory.
The government's versions of these two events both depend on a collective forgetting of what hundreds of people saw, heard, and recorded as the events were actually happening, as the "facts" were actually taking place.
JFK
When John Kennedy was shot, dozens of witnesses had a very similar story to tell. They had either seen a gunman, seen gun smoke, or distinctly heard gunshots from the grassy knoll in front of the president. The local police, intimately familiar with the sounds, sights, and smells of gun fire, raced to the grassy knoll. Many civilians, a good deal of whom were combat veterans, had the same reaction.
These people did not race towards the Texas School Book Depository. That building was not stormed or surrounded; if it had been, Lee Harvey Oswald would not have been able to saunter out the front door several minutes after the shooting.
There was one simple reason for this: the eyewitnesses, including police officers and combat veterans, knew exactly what they had seen and heard and they were not yet privy to the "official story", which hinged on the assumption that every last one of them was simply mistaken.
The doctor who examined the president at Parkland Hospital was likewise not clued into the "official story". This man who, like the local police, had years of experience and no reason to lie, informed the press that the president had several distinct entry wounds in the front of his body, including one in the neck and one in the head.
This was before the "official story" dictated that all the shots had come from behind, from that building that nobody raced to after the shooting. Again, the "facts" hinged on the assumption that this doctor was woefully incompetent.
Apologists for the Warren Commission, purveyors of the "official story", chalk up these discrepancies to "the heat of the moment" or "chaos" or "rumors". But what they really reflect is the brief existence of truth before the insidious onset of memory.
The lie-laden "official story", which could only be foisted on a population desperate to believe it, turned these real-time eyewitnesses to the facts into confused or obstructionist nuisances.
What was castigated later as the frenzied first impressions of the overzealous and the ignorant was actually a fleeting snapshot on what actually happened. The Warren Commission asked us to believe that everyone who had actually witnessed the shooting and seen the president's wounds in Dallas were mistaken. They must have been mistaken, of course, or else their accounts would have jibed with the "official story".
The only other explanation for this discrepancy would be if the "official story" were itself a lie, which would be worse than, well, worse than a president being executed in broad daylight in the streets of an American city.
9/11
The Kennedy assassination was witnessed by several dozens of people, many of whom would have testified that, if there were indeed only one shooter, that shooter was absolutely not in the Texas School Book Depository. Good thing there was no trial.
9/11 was witnessed by tens of thousands of people, and by hundreds of millions of more on live television after the attacks started. There is also an "official story" about 9/11 which is, just like the Warren Commission, deeply vested in rejecting real-time eyewitness accounts in favor of an unlikely narrative of events that only became clear after the fact, and only to people who weren't actually there.
It is amazing to watch television coverage from the day of the attacks and compare the reporters observations, given obviously before they were aware of the government-sanctioned narrative, the 9/11 Commission report, which essentially discounted all real-time witnesses as being discredited by those old bogeymen, "chaos", "rumor", and "the heat of the moment."
There were indeed rumors swirling on 9/11, such as those warning of more hijacked planes than there actually were. Most of the early assertions that were rejected, however, were not rumors; they were interpretations of events being witnessed in real time. These were physical observations made by reporters and witnesses that, only after the emergence of the "official story", were "proven" to have been "mistaken."
The first reporters to reach the Pentagon noted how pristine the lawn was, how localized the damage was, how absolutely minuscule the supposed plane wreckage was, and how few the eyewitness accounts of jumbo jets flying over the nation's capital a couple hundred feet off the ground were.
The first reporters to reach Shanksville, Pennsylvania noted how small the gouge in the earth was, how utterly absent any discernible plane wreckage was, and how peculiar it was that government officials in hazmat suits were scouring the sight, rather than the NTSB men who would normally respond to civilian air crashes.
The first reporters, as well as dozens of eyewitnesses including police officers and firemen, consistently noted multiple explosions inside the World Trade Center towers. Some firemen actually ascended to the fires themselves, the same fires we were later told were so hot that they melted the entire steel core of the building until it collapsed at free-fall speed.
Once the "official story" took hold, however, these observations were all held to have been wrong. The Pentagon could have proven that the initial observations of reporters there were mistaken by releasing video of a jumbo jet flying 450 miles per hour 50 feet of the ground into the side of the building. They have not.
And why haven't they? National security, they say. As if a video that the government insists simply shows what everybody knows already happened could possibly be a threat to anyone. How is evidence of the government's honesty a threat to the country? Forgive me for harboring the sneaking suspicion that a release of that video would render the "official story" a bit quaint.
When the "official story" took hold, we had to forget about the Pentagon video and forget about why we weren't being shown that video; once we could read the official story, that is, we were held to have no reason to actually watch the facts as they unfolded on video. We are to blindly believe that the image would fit the story, that the image would simply prove the government right, that there is a legitimate reason for the government to conceal evidence of its veracity.
We had to forget that no steel building had collapsed due to fire in the history of the world prior to 9/11, when it supposedly happened three times. We had to forget that Building 7 collapsed later that afternoon, at free fall speed, after most conspicuously not being struck by an airplane.
Our forgetting of that fact, perhaps the single yarn that could unravel the whole ball, was facilitated by the fact that Building 7 is not mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report. It is as if it never existed. If a steel-frame skyscraper like Building 7 had collapsed due to isolated fires on any other day in history, it would have warranted its very own exhaustive investigation.
But since it happened on 9/11, and since its very existence mocked the "official story", it was wished out of existence. It was as if that building had never existed. You know, like the witnesses in Dallas who heard shots from the knoll. They, like Building 7, do not appear in the "official story".
We had to forget that dozens of people reported explosions inside the building before their utterly unexpected collapses. We had to forget that the building hit second was the building that collapsed first, and that both buildings, these thousand-foot pillars of fire-proofed steel, collapsed at free-fall speed, as if nothing were holding them up.
We had to forget these things, and a great many others. Perceptions, images, sounds, mathematic truths, scientific constants, and common sense. All these were layed on the alter, the sacrifice necessary for the Phyrric reward of allowing ourselves to believe that these massacres were carried out by a small and hermetically sealed group of outsiders who got so lucky in their execution that they temporarily suspended the laws of physics. On 9/11, we were torn asunder by 19 swarthy Oswalds.
Remember
When we remember, we must take care to remember what we heard and saw, as opposed to what we remember being told. We must not let common sense and recorded real-time events be discarded in the interest of maintaining a palpably ridiculous revision.
We must not let policemen and veterans and doctors and pathologists in Dallas be ignored for the sake of maintaining the Warren Commission's view of history. We must not let a 50-story building be erased from history for the sake of maintaining the 9/11 Commission's view of history.
Most importantly, we must accept an ugly truth. We must accept that somehow, someway, we are all implicated in these crimes. They were not simply bolts of lightning delivered by young and alien men who did not live to tell their stories. They were, more than anything, failures of America's institutions.
We may or may not have blood on our hands. We will not know that until we know the truth. The only thing we know right now is that we don't know the truth. But we are all culpable. Not because we told the lies ourselves, but because we as a society chose to believe them.
9/11 was witnessed by tens of thousands of people, and by hundreds of millions of more on live television after the attacks started. There is also an "official story" about 9/11 which is, just like the Warren Commission, deeply vested in rejecting real-time eyewitness accounts in favor of an unlikely narrative of events that only became clear after the fact, and only to people who weren't actually there.
It is amazing to watch television coverage from the day of the attacks and compare the reporters observations, given obviously before they were aware of the government-sanctioned narrative, the 9/11 Commission report, which essentially discounted all real-time witnesses as being discredited by those old bogeymen, "chaos", "rumor", and "the heat of the moment."
There were indeed rumors swirling on 9/11, such as those warning of more hijacked planes than there actually were. Most of the early assertions that were rejected, however, were not rumors; they were interpretations of events being witnessed in real time. These were physical observations made by reporters and witnesses that, only after the emergence of the "official story", were "proven" to have been "mistaken."
The first reporters to reach the Pentagon noted how pristine the lawn was, how localized the damage was, how absolutely minuscule the supposed plane wreckage was, and how few the eyewitness accounts of jumbo jets flying over the nation's capital a couple hundred feet off the ground were.
The first reporters to reach Shanksville, Pennsylvania noted how small the gouge in the earth was, how utterly absent any discernible plane wreckage was, and how peculiar it was that government officials in hazmat suits were scouring the sight, rather than the NTSB men who would normally respond to civilian air crashes.
The first reporters, as well as dozens of eyewitnesses including police officers and firemen, consistently noted multiple explosions inside the World Trade Center towers. Some firemen actually ascended to the fires themselves, the same fires we were later told were so hot that they melted the entire steel core of the building until it collapsed at free-fall speed.
Once the "official story" took hold, however, these observations were all held to have been wrong. The Pentagon could have proven that the initial observations of reporters there were mistaken by releasing video of a jumbo jet flying 450 miles per hour 50 feet of the ground into the side of the building. They have not.
And why haven't they? National security, they say. As if a video that the government insists simply shows what everybody knows already happened could possibly be a threat to anyone. How is evidence of the government's honesty a threat to the country? Forgive me for harboring the sneaking suspicion that a release of that video would render the "official story" a bit quaint.
When the "official story" took hold, we had to forget about the Pentagon video and forget about why we weren't being shown that video; once we could read the official story, that is, we were held to have no reason to actually watch the facts as they unfolded on video. We are to blindly believe that the image would fit the story, that the image would simply prove the government right, that there is a legitimate reason for the government to conceal evidence of its veracity.
We had to forget that no steel building had collapsed due to fire in the history of the world prior to 9/11, when it supposedly happened three times. We had to forget that Building 7 collapsed later that afternoon, at free fall speed, after most conspicuously not being struck by an airplane.
Our forgetting of that fact, perhaps the single yarn that could unravel the whole ball, was facilitated by the fact that Building 7 is not mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report. It is as if it never existed. If a steel-frame skyscraper like Building 7 had collapsed due to isolated fires on any other day in history, it would have warranted its very own exhaustive investigation.
But since it happened on 9/11, and since its very existence mocked the "official story", it was wished out of existence. It was as if that building had never existed. You know, like the witnesses in Dallas who heard shots from the knoll. They, like Building 7, do not appear in the "official story".
We had to forget that dozens of people reported explosions inside the building before their utterly unexpected collapses. We had to forget that the building hit second was the building that collapsed first, and that both buildings, these thousand-foot pillars of fire-proofed steel, collapsed at free-fall speed, as if nothing were holding them up.
We had to forget these things, and a great many others. Perceptions, images, sounds, mathematic truths, scientific constants, and common sense. All these were layed on the alter, the sacrifice necessary for the Phyrric reward of allowing ourselves to believe that these massacres were carried out by a small and hermetically sealed group of outsiders who got so lucky in their execution that they temporarily suspended the laws of physics. On 9/11, we were torn asunder by 19 swarthy Oswalds.
Remember
When we remember, we must take care to remember what we heard and saw, as opposed to what we remember being told. We must not let common sense and recorded real-time events be discarded in the interest of maintaining a palpably ridiculous revision.
We must not let policemen and veterans and doctors and pathologists in Dallas be ignored for the sake of maintaining the Warren Commission's view of history. We must not let a 50-story building be erased from history for the sake of maintaining the 9/11 Commission's view of history.
Most importantly, we must accept an ugly truth. We must accept that somehow, someway, we are all implicated in these crimes. They were not simply bolts of lightning delivered by young and alien men who did not live to tell their stories. They were, more than anything, failures of America's institutions.
We may or may not have blood on our hands. We will not know that until we know the truth. The only thing we know right now is that we don't know the truth. But we are all culpable. Not because we told the lies ourselves, but because we as a society chose to believe them.
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