Lies, Misconceptions and Mistruths That Make Fools Of Us All

Introduction

To paraphrase Art Linkletter, people believe the damndest things.

Raised on TV movies, "historical novels," and a piss-poor educational system, Americans have the most appalling notions about things. We believe things that are in a lot of cases not only non-sensical, but half-insane.

And I'm not talking about the usual legendary stuff, like whether Paul Revere really rode through town, or Betsy Ross made the first flag, or Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, although there are enough books about the falseness of all that nonsense. I'm talking about 20th century stuff, stuff that we live with every day, stuff every 5-year-old should know.

Half of us believe OJ was innocent. Seventy percent of us (according to one poll) believe that UFOs are alien spacecraft. We believe that federal workers pay no federal income tax, that the Mafia killed Jack Kennedy, that John Glenn was the first man in space. We are so hugely, almost proudly misinformed that we have to worry about whether we are educated enough to handle running a democracy.

The Firesign Theatre comedy troupe once released an album called "Everything You Know Is Wrong."

And they were right.

Truth No. 1 -- The JFK Assassination

It has been both fascinating and appalling to see the amount and scope of drivel written about the assassination of Jack Kennedy in 1963.

I don't know what compells conspiracy theorists (conspiracists, or conspiragroupies, take your pick) to throw themselves, heart and soul, into advocacy of whatever crackpot theory they've latched onto.

There are those who claim that JFK was shot from the front from the grassy knoll, despite the evidence in the autopsy photos. (Obviously doctored, right?) There are those (the author of a fairly brisk-selling book) who claims with a straight face that there were 6 different shooters in Dealy Plaza, peering from under manholes and atop railroad towers, in addition to being perched in the school book depository and the Dallas Records Building. There's the proponents of the Umbrella Man, the Babushka Lady, the fake Secret Service agents. There is even a guy who regularly gives lectures purporting to prove that Bill Greer, the driver of the limo, was the actual assassin, and claims that one can clearly see Greer turn and fire a pistol at JFK in the Zapruder film.

Then there are the Oswald and Ruby theories. Depending on who you talk to, Oswald was either a dull stooge or a mastermind, Ruby either a small-time punk or a major underworld figure. They either knew each other or they didn't. Ruby either shot Oswald to cover up the mob's involvement, or because he was pissed off that the other strip joint owners didn't close up Friday night like his did. Take your pick.

This would all be funny if it wasn't so inutterably sad. These guys are worse than Trekkies, who at least don't believe their little world really exists.

The truth is that the Government did perform something of a coverup of the assassination, and in fact it was due to Government involvement in Kennedy's death. But it was involved in a horrible, tragic way that has frustrated people for 32 years.

Oswald actually was a lone shooter up in the sixth floor of the TSBD. He fired two shots, the first of which went low and left, striking the pavement directly behind the limo. (Many witnesses saw this, including a man named Tague who was nicked by a piece of shrapnel from it.)

The second shot was the so-called "magic bullet" which struck both Kennedy and Connelly. Those who claim that one bullet could not have caused all the wounds it did and emerge as "pristine" as it did simply do not know anything about guns or ammo. It was a full metal jacketed bullet, clad in copper, and it could have kept going with little additional damage.

This raises an interesting question about the third shot, doesn't it? Where did it come from, and why did it shatter into a million pieces when it struck Kennedy's head?

The tragic truth is that the final shot was fired accidently by George Hinkey, a Secret Service agent riding one car behind the Presidential limo.

At the sound of the first two shots, Hickey, who was riding next to an newly-developed AR- 15 assault rifle, loaded and with the safety off, grabbed the gun, stood up in the seat and spun around to see the source of the shots. At that moment, the car lurched forward, throwing Hickey off balance and causing him to discharge one shot.

By an incredible, one-in-a-million quirk of fate, that one accidental shot struck Kennedy in the head, killing him instantly.

Consider the following points:

• There were three shots fired in six seconds, according to most witnesses. Most stated that the second and third shots were much closer together than the first two, too close to have come from the same rifle Oswald was using. (The 1978 Assassination Committee finding that four shots were fired was so flawed, it doesn't merit discussion.)
• People in Dealy Plaza, and especially on the overpass ahead of the motorcade, reported a strong smell of gunpowder immediately after the shooting. This couldn't have come from the TSBD, blocks away. And it didn't come from the grassy knoll, campers.
• The third shot was generally reported as being louder than the first two. The AR-15 is a high-velocity weapon with a much louder report than the Carcano that Oswald was using.
• Any testimony about the direction of the the shots is suspect, because of the echoing qualities of the plaza. In any event, it makes more sense for a shot from the street to be mistaken for coming from the grassy knoll (a loud sound in front of you can sound like one behind you, but not to the sides) than one from the TSBD.
• The AR-15 round is highly frangible, which is why it broke up on impact. It's also why, out of all the data about the assassination, the Government has been so hincty about the location and status of Kennedy's brain and the bullet fragments from it. The different chemical composition of the AR-15 round compared to the Carcano round would be a dead giveaway that something is amiss.
• Three ejected casings were found by Oswald's rifle, which matches up nicely with the three shots heard. However, one of the casings was so bent and distorted that it could not have held a round. Oswald probably used it for practice in loading and unloading the rifle.
• It's easy to lose track of this in all the convoluted theorizing, but the fact is that the two shots that hit Kennedy came from different angles -- the first shot traveling right to left relative to the car, the other left to right.
• Oswald seemed genuinely convinced, in his talks with police and the press after the shooting, that he didn't kill Kennedy, as opposed to most assassins who are eager to claim their moment in the sun. Imagine the poor bastard up in the window, having made his two shots, suddenly heard another shot from nowhere and the top of Kennedy's head get blown off. What kind of paranoid fantasies would that trigger? That he had been a patsy of the CIA, tool of the mob, controlled by his old friends in Minsk? God knows.

One of the litmus tests for the conspiragroupies is the cover-up issue: If you can show that one existed, then the Government is guilty of the murder. If you believed Oswald acted alone, you had to ignore some inconvient facts that showed the Government was more than interested in some aspects of the case. The truth is that the Government conspiracy existed, but not to hide the Government's premeditated involvement in the crime, but to hide the Secret Service's accidental role in Kennedy's death.

You're Lyndon Johnson, aboard Air Force One on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. You've just been sworn in as President, with the slain president's blood-soaked widow at your side. The plane is being held up waiting for the body to be crowbared from the Dallas County authorities. The Secret Service chief on the scene takes you into the private office and tells you that, in fact, the President was accidently killed by one of his bodyguards. It is a horrible, tragic event. People are looking to the Government to provide leadership in this time of crisis.

Scenario 1: You spill all, admitting that the Secret Service, far from protecting the president in his moment of crisis, are the ones who actually killed him. The Government is defiled and Kennedy's death is cheapened. And people start to look at Lyndon Johnson in a funny way -- God knows he wanted the job of president bad enough in 1960, and he does have some control over the Secret Service . . . . Too horrible to contemplate.

Scenario 2: You cover it up, which is entirely in keeping with Lyndon's past prediliction to invent facts to suit his purposes. Nobody saw the shot. You've got a shooter, right? (And you even get luckier when someone pops him off.) A word to Earl Warren and J. Edgar, and everything is handled.

A much more complete and compelling story of the death of Jack Kennedy is contained in Mortal Error: The Shot That Killed JFK, by Bonar Menninger.

Truth No. 2 -- OJ

Of course he did it. Give me a break.

The sad truth from this fiasco is that it proves the point I made in the introduction -- we are so damn stupid as a people that we can't pick twelve people at random and find at least one with any sense. If people are told all their lives that Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray, Arthur Bremmer, and John Hinkley (yeah, even John Hinkley) were but tools of some larger, darker conspiracy, and that the Government is hiding aliens in New Mexico, they'll believe any damn fool thing you tell them. Was there any evidence at all to support the notion that the LAPD were planting evidence to frame OJ? No. But they could have, and that's enough for us. We need to start teaching the notion of "reasonable doubt" in kindergarten if we are ever to get intelligent juries in this county.

Truth No. 3 -- The North Pole

Of all the places on earth, the North Pole is perhaps the most abstract: a mathematical point in the middle of an ice-covered ocean. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, explorers became obsessed with the race to stand at the pole, to reach a literal end of the earth.

Robert Peary is usually credited with being the first to reach the pole in April 1909. His expedition was sponsored in part by the National Geographic Society. Remarkably, it was the NGS which published, in 1988, a closely-reasoned analysis by a seasoned Arctic explorer, who concluded that Peary could not have come closer than 60 miles from the pole. It is now clear that Peary falsified the records for the last few days before he arrived at the point he declared to be the pole, after realizing that the drift of the ice and the earth's rotation had caused him to veer eastward from the Columbia Meridian and start a wide circle around the pole. Keeping the info to himself, he took over all navigation duties for the last three days before the arrival, destroyed his navigational notes, and, tormented by his failure, was reluctant at the end of the return trip to offically announce that the Pole had been reached. The article was sterling, and made perfect sense.

Of course, NGS then squandered their brownie points by publishing, the next year, an article attempting to prove that Peary did indeed reach the pole as claimed. This piece of claptrap was based on an analysis of the photos taken by Peary and his men, using the shadows cast in the photos to calculate time and position.

I'm no scientist, but the theory was complete bullshit. First, for this to work, you need to know the exact time the photo was taken, which in most cases is not known. Secondly, and more reprehensible, was the author's arbitrary assignment of a horizon to each photo. The math requires a fixed horizon to determine the position, but the grainy black and white photos all show a seamless merging of earth and sky, the white ice and overcast sky completely indistinguishable from each other, with numerous hillocks and rises which would have obscured the horizon even if the weather was better. For the analysis, the author drew a line where he figured the horizon should be, and voila -- Peary stands at 90 North. It was an egregious, weasley attempt to revive Peary's claim and the NGS's stake in it.

All this takes nothing, I might add, from Peary's remarkable acheivement. Even if he missed the pole by 60 miles, it was still a remarkable, heroic effort which, if nothing else, provided a lot of good sounding information about the Arctic Ocean. No one has ever repeated his achievement. (The most recent pole trip, by Will Steger in 1986, was resupplied often by air and was spared the deprivations of the return trip by being airlifted out from the pole. Peary managed the return trip by feeding his sled dogs to each other, something that PETA would probaby frown upon these days.)

Anyway, how close do you have to get to the pole to say you've arrived? At the South Pole, which has the advantage of being on dry land (albeit under two miles of ice), later precise measurements showed that Amundsen's team was approximately 100 yards off at one point, and his moronic competitor, Robert Falcon Scott, was never closer than two miles. That's close enough for me. In a shifting environment like the North Pole, 60 miles doesn't seem too far off. One god-forsaken spot on the Arctic Ocean looks pretty much like another. It wasn't until 1968, to be precise, that a team of Russians arrived overland (so to speak) and momentarily stood at the exact pole before the two-knot drift started dragging them south again.

Truth No. 4 -- The Lindbergh Kidnapping

I'll admit, I always thought the worst kind of conspiragroupies were the Lindbergh Baby wackos, the ones who were convinced that Bruno Richard Hauptmann was wrongly executed for the kidnapping and murder of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., in 1932. Well, I just read a heavily researched (but rather poorly written) book called Lindbergh -- The Crime by Noel Behn. He makes a very compelling and believable case that the baby was actually killed by Anne Morrow's crazy sister Elisabeth. The Lindberghs concocted the kidnapping story (after a hurried weekend consultation with Lindbergh's lawyer and "Wild Bill" Donovan of later OSS fame) to protect her, than got trapped when a forger extorted $50,000, which later showed up in Hauptmann's possesion. The police and the prosecutor, desperate for a conviction, hid evidence, deep-sixed some inconvenient facts, and got Hauptmann the chair. Lindbergh, in a thoroughly despicable act which foreshadowed his later Goering ass-kissing, picked Hauptmann out of a voice line-up, thereby condemning him to death. The one voice of reason in all this was the Governor of New Jersey, who was informed a month before the execution of the identity of the real murderer, and utterly destroyed his political and professional career by trying to obtain a commutation of Hauptmann's sentence to life in prison. The irony is that Elisabeth died of natural causes in 1934, before Hauptmann was even arrested, so the whole fiasco was wasted. If this theory is true, Lindbergh must have been one of the most cold-hearted bastards who ever lived, an opinion that a lot of his contemporaries shared but couldn't talk about during his lifetime.

Truth No. 5 -- Landfills

This is my favorite pet peeve, because it really pisses people off when I question anything concerning the environment. Specifically, our national obsession with biodegradable products. If you listen to the tree huggers, landfills are instruments of the Devil, and America is close to being buried under mountains of garbage. Fear of landfills has led to such idiocies as special legislation in some states governing the proper disposal of juice boxes and LA Lights with the bulbs in the heel, lest the foil and mercury lead to three-eyed babies and bald dogs.

These clowns have it exactly backwards. The last thing you want in a landfill is biodegradeable items. First, there is no air in a landfill -- no doubt you've seen pictures of landfill garbologists displaying perfectly preserved forty-year-old hot dogs and eighty-year-old newspapers. Becasue of this, McDonald's switch from foam to paper for their burgers, to use an example, was a waste of time and effort because the paper won't decompose anyway. (And besides, I liked the little foam boxes.) Secondly, if these things did decompose, what happens to their constituent ingredients? They migrate to the water table, the last place you want such crud to show up. Back around the turn of the century, when landfills were almost exclusively filled with degradeable items, a major source of disease was contaminated ground water, water that was contaminated by the largest single ingredient in landfills at the time -- dead horses.

The more stable the stuff in the landfill, the safer and more stable the landfill will be. I'll agree that building houses on recovered landfills may be a bit much, but they certainly can support golf courses and parks and such. And as for the argument that we have no more room for landfills -- do these people ever fly to the coast? Everything west of the Rockies, from Idaho to Arizona, is one big landfill waiting to happen. Plus, once we bulldoze down the inner cities . . . but that's another issue.

Truth No. 6 -- Asbestos

A while back, my kids' church-based preschool got remodeled. It was built in the mid-50s and needed upgrades for better electrical curcuits and air conditioning, in addition to a new and bigger chapel. So over the summer of '95 workmen attacked the place and pulled all the ceilings down. And what did they find?

Asbestos!

You can imagine the panic that ensued. I remember attending parent orientation night before classes started. Parent after parent arose in true ACLU indignation over the threat to "our children," how their little lungs would now be seared for life by the mere knowledge that the dreaded poison existed in close proximity. "We must do something!," they wailed. "Spend vast amounts of money and banish this blight!"

Well, I wasn't a libertarian then, and therefore wasn't thinking too clearly. (That's my wife snickering in the background.) But if I was attending the same meeting now, I'd stand up and ask the following questions:

"How much asbestos dust is in the air right now?"

. . . and of course the answer would have been none.

"And how much dust will be in the air after your expensive team of asbestos removers finishes ripping, grinding and tearing it out of the rafters?"

Well, we don't want to get into that.

The office building I work in was built in the 1930s as one of the huge WPA job program efforts that dot downtown Washington. If I walk up one floor from my office into the attic, I can see acre upon acre of sheet asbestos, grey as a battleship, bolted to the inside of the roof with big lag bolts. Sitting there for 60 years, they haven't harmed anyone. If we took them out, we'd all be moved to some other building for two years to allow the dust to settle out and the asbestos rate to drop to . . . what it is already.

The reason asbestos is a panic word is our bizarre legal system which both encourages everyone to think like a victim, and then pays them large sums for their perceived victimization. Asbestos dust is bad shit. It follows that if I can prove to a court that I work in proximity to it, I can be persumed to be harmed, whether or not any harm exists or can be measured. This isn't science or justice -- it's witchcraft. We have to get smarter and stop believing everything we hear on NPR.

Back to the Home Page | E-Mail Me | Sign the Guestbook
©1995 - 2003 Scott P. Cook
This page last updated February 27, 2008