A new Warren Report, everyday!

mickey

May 2, 2025 11:46 AM

This book cements the Warren Commission Report as one of the great pieces of American literature. From out of the thousands and thousands of pages of scientifically rigorous yet internally conflicting facts forms the shape of a young man’s face. A man whose name changed many times throughout his life but would only become Lee Harvey Oswald once he stepped out of the individual struggle for life into the collective river of history on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, TX.

A duality plagues Lee Oswald/Alek Hidell. He is a man of intense internal conflict generated by floods of information, just like the report that would scaffold his position in American history. Sometimes this set of seemingly opposed information about a man born under the sign of the scales makes him seem inconsistent or fleeting in his convictions, but throughout the heart of Libra we are shown that these compositions make up not only him but nearly every historical detail in our world.

And what better way to make sense of the swirling vortex of cacophonous facts, each trying to assert themselves into the cultural psyche of a country than conspiracy? How else have we ever made sense of information that mocks us with its very overwhelming volume and objectivity? We architect conflict throughout the world to force the dollar to make just a few minute’s worth of sense on the stock exchange. We build historical fiction that serves as a refuge from the painful harsh light of a nebula of hazy half-formed facts. And we build mythology from the raw overwhelming data of a night sky spattered with light wave information that only becomes truly beautiful in our pieced-together stories. But let’s not discredit the beauty formed from the things in themselves. These oceans of facts and scientific detritus must have some inherent inner art to them to allow metaphor to generate and take life between the atoms that make them up.

Throughout this book to help us build mythology out of the facts and also to marvel at their innate awesome beauty there are accounts from Nicholas Branch, a fictionalized retired CIA consultant tasked with forming a secret internal history of the JFK assassination. How like DeLillo he is in his impossible pursuit. How like us he his as we read the book that contains his life. And after a half-century of information pollution to the point of annihilation how can we deny that he is our fictitious avatar for navigating the modern digital landscape of our minds? What will The Curator hand us next? We’re too deep to stop now. We might as well create a refuge of beautiful prose out of the comedy of Gödelian notes that we’ve accrued.

“Six point nine seconds of heat and light. Let’s call a meeting to analyze the blur. Let’s devote our lives to understanding this moment, separating the elements of each crowded second. We will build theories that gleam like jade idols, intriguing systems of assumption, four-faced, graceful. We will follow the bullet trajectories backwards to the lives that occupy the shadows, actual men who moan in their dreams. Elm Street. A woman wonders why she is sitting on the grass, bloodspray all around. Tenth Street. A witness leaves her shoes on the hood of a bleeding policeman’s car. A strangeness, Branch feels, that is almost holy. There is much here that is holy, an aberration in the heartland of the real. Let’s regain our grip on things.”