The Zapruder Film vs. 9/11 Films

The Zapruder film is an interesting historical source because it can be viewed in two different lights. It can make people aware of the awfulness of the assassination and how it must have felt to be watching the Kennedys as JFK got shot, but it is also a platform for conspiracy discussions that disregard the emotions experienced by those in the car and those watching it. If you dissect the film, looking carefully at the all the frames to see what clues you can find that point towards a government conspiracy, you risk becoming used to the sight of someone having their brains blown out. Then you also risk forgetting that this caused everyone a great deal of pain; JFK obviously suffered physically, but Jackie and the people watching suffered emotionally. It strikes me that the Zapruder film is very similar to the films of 9/11 that people have tried to dissect, searching for clues about government involvement.

There is much more footage of 9/11 than of the Kennedy assassination, and this means that there is a lot more material to work from when forming conspiracy theories. There are dozens of videos on Youtube about conspiracy theories, all showing in detail how the planes crashed into the World Trade Center. They examine how the floors collapsed, claiming that there must have been explosives placed inside the building. Other films, however, show a more human side. They show people jumping out of the buildings because they don't know what else to do. They show pictures of people in the street, screaming and running in panic. They include recordings of phone calls made from the buildings from people who were about to die to the people they love. If you watch the first type of video, you don't understand the despair that people felt, just as you lose the human side of the story if you watch the Zapruder film with an analytical mindset.

Of course, these are tragedies on very different scales. In one, one man was killed, and another was killed in the aftermath. In the other, thousands of people lost their lives and thousands of families lost their loved ones. But they are both tragedies, and perhaps that fact should be more important than the government's possible role. I do not mean to say that it is not important to figure out the truth. But since it may not be possible to know the truth, perhaps it is better to focus on the sadness and the ways that people reacted to these events after they happened. Focusing too much on how it happened feels somehow disrespectful to the people who died.

The Fake Identity Toolkit

Nowadays, obtaining a new identity is not as difficult as it once was, with Everett forging all the documents in his basement.Of course, most people who assume a new identity do it to hide from less omnipresent organizations than the federal government and its many intelligence operations. Most people who create a new legitamate identity do it by registering new names and social security numbers with the government, meaning that the government has a record of these changes. However, this new identity can help certain people slip under the radar of other organizations. I found several stories that interested me about creating new idendities.
The first is the simplest, and the only one that would allow you to keep your identity change secret from the federal government. According to Bob Burton, president of Cobra, a bounty hunting organization, assuming a new identity is as simple as obtaining the birth certificate of a dead person:

"You look in the obituaries," Mr. Burton said, "in Topeka, Kan., say. You want a gas station attendant more or less your age. Once you get the date of birth, you call the county. 'Hi, I used to live in Kansas, but I've been living in American Samoa for the last 20 years as a Christian missionary. Any chance I could get a copy of my birth certificate?' 

If the ruse works, you can now become a new person. Since you possess one piece of real identification belonging the this person,  you can obtain others. To the federal government, you exist, and the other person exists, but by becoming both of them, you have hidden yourself from them.
I also read about Frank Cullotta, a former mob hit man who had several run ins with the people he was informing on and was entered into the Witness Protection Program by the federal government to protect him from other organizations.He made the switch to a new identity sound much more difficult that Burton did. Here are some of the general guidelines he gave for keeping your identity hidden:

1. Come into your new town with a story: "They asked me why I came there and I would say I was married and my wife got killed in an automobile accident, and I didn't want to stay where I was at anymore because of the memories..."
2. Don't take pictures of yourself an post them to any social media site because there will inevitably be something in the background that could identify you or the place where you are living.
3. No credit history is a problem. Claim that previously you had chosen to spend only cash for idealistic reasons, but now you think that credit will be a little more secure as you get older. "They want your money. They give you a little static at first but they’ll take your money.”
4. According to Cullotta, it is nearly impossible to change your personality or demeanor though: "You hear my voice? Can you imagine me living in Biloxi, Mississippi?...Of course, people would look at me and they would say, ‘you’re a Yankee, you’re a gangster, you sound like a gangster,’” he said in a strong Chicago accent. “So I tried to dress down. I wore ball caps, jeans, tennis shoes, s— I never wore in my life to try to fit in, but I still had that accent. And the demeanor, how I walk and carry myself which is almost impossible to change. It is impossible for me to change.”

It is interesting to me to see how much you have to change to disappear, even when you are not trying to hide from the government, and these points were just a few of many. The next story was just kind of interesting. Jacob Allred, whose other hobby is reading and writing science fiction, runs the site fakenamegenerator.com, a comepletely legal site that creates "a name, date of birth, address, email, Social Security number, mother’s maiden name, even a credible-looking credit card number with expiry date and security code" for billions of new identities every month. He uses real street names, zip codes, telephone numbers, and names from databases of common names and mixes up the data to get a fake but realistic new identity. Some people use these idenities online, and others generate them just for fun. Some people use the name database to look at baby names, while researches sometimes use large batches of fake identities to test database systems. Even though most people do not do illegal things with the identities, the federal government is somewhat suspicious. The FBI and the NSA have been looking into the operation, and the government has asked him not to post social security numbers (even fake ones) openly on the internet. 
 To me, it is interesting to see how someone could remake themselves if necessary. I think it would be very difficult, and I would not want to do it myself, but it is amazing how some people have just disappeared and started entirely new lives in new places.

The Assassin's Fan Club

I have to admit that I was surprised when Mr. Mitchell said that there was a lot of sympathy for, and even romanticizing of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev after the Boston Marathon bombings, and that there was that same current of romantic interest in Lee Harvey Oswald after he assassinated JFK. So I decided to look into it a little more.

Tsarnaev has garnered the interest of women young and old, primarily because he is attractive. Despite the evidence that he is a mass-murderer who is interested in violent jihad, women all over the country have seen the prom and graduation pictures that show him as a curly-haired, slightly-smiling kid who looks completely harmless. Young women enamored with Tsarnaev (and the apparent "air of mystery" that he seems to have earned by murdering three people and wounding many more) even set up a site called "Free Jahar" to chat about how he was set up by the government, complain about unflattering mugshots, and "[cluck] maternally over his well-being". Unfortunately, criminals like Tsarnaev often have fan-bases; among the celebrities of the criminal world are Oscar Pistorius (killed girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp) , Ted Bundy (murdered 30 or more young women across the US), and Chris Brown (on trial for assault).Older women have also been on Tsarnaev's side, talking about he didn't know what he was doing, and how he is too young (at 19, he is a legal adult) to be charged with such as serious crime as terrorism.

I couldn't find any information on corresponding fan clubs for Lee Harvey Oswald, but conspiracy theories surround them both. Many of the people on Free Jahar believe that he was framed by the government. This seems very similar to the way that many people believe that the government was really behind the assassination of J.F.K. and that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the sole perpetrator of the crime. It is difficult to think about, since three people were killed and more than 200 were wounded, but perhaps at some point a few decades from now, someone like DeLillo will write a novel about how the government was implicated in the Boston Marathon bombing. At the moment, most of us would be unwilling to absolve Tsarnaev and his brother of any responsibility for the crime, but it is possible that we may end up contemplating the involvement of others in future. I don't know whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it is an interesting phenomenon.

I Don't Get the Hype

I don't find JFK's assassination overly interesting. Unfortunate, I know, since we are beginning a four hundred page book about conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination. But it just doesn't draw me in. I do find conspiracy theories interesting. I like to hear about the NSA and the ways that the government is controlling our lives as much as anybody else. But present conspiracies are more interesting than past conspiracies.

One of the reasons for my apathy is that there is nothing about the government's version of the story (the little that I know about it) that I find difficult to believe. I don't find it hard to believe that a 24-year-old nobody with little education and no real role in any government or military activities could kill the President. I recognize that during Kennedy's presidency, people viewed him as almost a deity. He was loved, revered, even though some of his policies were questionable. JFK and Jackie were role models for the entire country. But he was only human, and the people who were guarding him were human. At its core, it was one man killing another, something that has happened countless times over the course of history. He was a political leader--political leaders are killed all the time, whether by rebels or complete lunatics.

I also do not find it that hard to believe that the government might have been behind that. I grew up post-9/11. I have grown up in a society that does not entirely trust its government. Recent scandals with the NSA have made the government even more suspect. No one I know has complete faith in the government. There are many countries that have corrupt governments; as cynical as this may sound, I do not find it that difficult to see that ours might be one of them.

Finally, I believe that no one will really know what happened, and that what happened in the country after JFK's assassination is more interesting that the conspiracy theories that surround the actual murder. JFK was killed--that is terrible. But the political implications of his death, rather than the governments' possible role in it, are more important to understand because they have led us to where we are today. Contemplating the details of JFK's assassination has gotten us nowhere.

How Kevin and Dana's Relationship Applies to Affirmative Action

During panel presentations this week, there was a paper entitled "Do I look like someone you can come home to from wherever you may be going: Remapping Interracial Anxiety in Octavia Butler's Kindred", and one of the author's arguments was that it is impossible to be colorblind--people must recognize the history of racial differences and conflicts that have occurred in this country. It struck me that this argument is relevant to the questions about affirmative action that have been coming up in college admissions discussions lately. Recently, about eight states have virtually banned the use of race as a factor in college admissions, and the Supreme Court has made it clear that if colleges intend to consider race, they must prove that "considering race is absolutely necessary to maintaining diversity". A court case last year, Fisher v. University if Texas, ruled that the use of race in determining college admissions was legal, but it might be brought up again in court with the different ruling. Some people argue that affirmative action is not a good thing because our goal should be a color-blind society rather than one that is aware of race and working to make different races more equal in education, and later income and job opportunities.

However, in the light of this book, it seems like bad logic. Butler seems to be saying that examining the past is a good thing for both the majority and minorities through Kevin and Dana's relationship. At first, there seem to be some unspoken tensions between Kevin and Dana; although they try to ignore them, they both realize that they do come from different backgrounds. When they spoke to their families, they essentially rejected them; it would be difficult not to feel some regret and tension about that. After they come back from the 1800s they seem to understand each other more, because they both realize that their backgrounds and their histories are very different. This applies to affirmative action because the history between whites and other races in America has always been filled with tension, and must be understood. While people do not like talking in terms of race, that is often the only way to address the issue. In principle, affirmative action at least recognizes this history, rather than trying to put it behind us. It is a gesture that says we want people to be more equal because we were not always and that is not right.

Rufus: Man or Monster?

Like Dana, I find it hard to not forgive Rufus, even when he has done something horrible and manipulative, so it surprises me that everyone in the class seems to have hardly any sympathy for him. He is actually in quite a bad situation; he grew up with a crazy woman for a mother, and a cold father, and his only "friends" as a child--Nigel and Alice--are unavailable to him (for friendship and love respectively) as he grows older. (Some people will probably complain at this point that I am trying the lessen the cruelty of the slave owners; I recognize that they did many terrible things, but the slaveholders were still complex people). Today we would probably look at his erratic behavior and, provided he wasn't enslaving anyone in the present time, diagnose him with a variety of psychiatric disorders related to neglect and identity confusion. I don't think he is bad to the core, and that is why I still sometimes find him sympathetic.

Strangely, I found it harder to like Kevin when he comes back after five years in the nineteenth century than to like Rufus throughout the novel. It must have been the contrast between Kevin's earlier kindness and his harshness when he returns to the present. The situation with Kevin is also more confused because although he usually seems very progressive and egalitarian, he exhibits flashes on strange behavior that makes you question his relationship with Dana. His insistence about her typing his manuscripts makes him seem less egalitarian and modern than he may have seemed at first. Of course, Rufus is no more predictable, but his unpredictability is expected because he lived in a time where it was okay to be kind sometimes and cruel other times. This makes him almost easier to understand. 

Finally, I'd like to comment on a remark that was made in class last week. Someone said something about whether or not Rufus was a "monster". I would like to argue that he cannot be a monster because Kindred is not a book about Dana's relationship with a monster. This is not a story about a monster, because a monster can exist in many time, and what makes this book so complicated and interesting in the effect of an era on a person's personality. I don't like the phrase "a man of his time" --it seems like a cop-out, a way to avoid passing judgement or blame--but I think there is a lot of validity to the phrase. Rufus was formed by his time, and although he has unique characteristics (we don't know if he was kinder or crueler than most of the men around him, though he was certainly different), I cannot imagine that he would act the same way in 1976 as he did in 1815.

Billy Pilgrim Reaches Nirvana

"The guide invited the crowd to imagine that they were looking across a desert at a mountain range on a day that was twinkling bright and clear. They could look at a peak or a bird or a cloud, at a stone right in front of them, or even down into a canyon behind them. But among them was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a steel sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eye hole through which he could look, and welded to that eye hole were six feet of pipe."

The Tralfamadorians believe that Billy is sadly limited by his inability to see that all of time is always occurring and that time itself is not at all linear. But Billy has a much better understanding of the Tralfamadorian idea of time. He cannot see all of time at the same time, but he has become unstuck in time, allowing him to understand that the order of events does not matter. This limited understanding seems to us almost like enlightenment (as in Buddhist enlightenment), even though it is not nearly as sophisticated as the Tralfamadorian viewpoint.

Englightment is a contested term; no one really seems to understand what it means. Western culture has adopted the idea of Buddhist enlightenment to use it in self-help books, but there is a very deep religious tradition based on it in both Buddhism and Christianity. The Buddhist idea of enlightenment seems more in line with Billy's attitudes.So what is Buddhist enlightenment? There are multiple terms for enlightenment that come from the various branches of Buddhism in different regions.

Kensho--"seeing one's true essence".
Bodhi--"to have woken up and understood".
Samyaksambodhi--"highest perfect awakening".
Satori--"comprehension, understanding".

Buddha's enlightenment involved three knowledges. He understood his past lives, how karma and reincarnation worked, and the four noble truths (the truth of suffereing, the orgin of suffereing, how to stop suffering, and the truth behind following that path). In this way, he "attained supreme security from bondage". It has been described as an awakening to some larger reality that most of us never understand.

Billy Pilgrim seems to have reached enlightenment in many ways. He has not escaped suffering so much as accepted and thus escaped it. Billy was a prisoner of war. He was in Dresden. Later, he was in a plane crash and his wife died in the same week. He has had his share of suffering, and he has lived through it. He does not let the sadness take him over on a daily basis; when it does surface, he cannot understand what it is about.For example, it takes him a long time to understand why the barbershop quartet affects him so strongly. "Unexpectedly, Billy Pilgrim found himself upset by the song and the occasion. he had never had an old gang, old sweethearts and pals, but he missed one anyway, as the quartet made slow agonized experiments with chords...Billy had powerfully psychosomatic responses to the changing chords. His mouth filled wit the taste of lemonade, and his face became grotesque, as though he really were being stretched on the torture engine called the rack" (173). The effects of his suffering have made their mark on him, but he worked through it, and as a result of becoming unstuck in time he seems to have reached a strange serenity.

Billy accepts everything. For example, when his father throws him into the pool, he does not attempt to paw his way to the surface: "...he was at the bottom of the pool, and there was beautiful music everywhere. He lost conciousness, but the music went on. He dimly sensed that somebody was rescuing him. Billy resented that" (44).When he was being shot at, he stood there and gave the sniper another chance. He lets his daughter make him feel like a child by patronizing him without getting upset. Everything just seems to drift by him, and he looks at it, understands that it has to happen that way because the moment is structured that way, and lets it go. In fact, this attitude is similar to the attitude that you are supposed to try to adopt when meditating, a practice that is intimately connected to enlightenment. When thoughts come into your head, you are supposed to let them pass you by without judging them, in an attempt to eventually become almost thoughtless. It seems that maybe Billy is living in a constant state of meditation., reaching a state of uninvolved presence that allows him to view the world more calmly.