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- Newly-released documents revealing what
actually happened to President Kennedy's original casket may give some
conspiracy theorists something new to talk about. The truth is out there,
and quite coincidentally, comedian Richard Belzer wants to help us find
it. His latest book, "UFOs, JFK, and Elvis: Conspiracies You Don,t
Have to be Crazy to Believe", gives us his unique take on assassinations,
extra-terrestrials and other questionable phenomena.
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- Get a clue... JFK was a plot, there are
aliens among us (No, I don,t just mean in New Jersey), and Elvis Lives!
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- "There are some people who still
think Elvis is alive." - President George Bush, when asked if there
might have been a conspiracy in the John F. Kennedy assassination
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- For thirty-five years, talking about
John Kennedy's assassination has been something other than a casual endeavor
for me. One reason is that on March 10, 1985, I was dropped on my head
on national television by Hulk Hogan. The other has to do with quotes like
the one above.
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- You remember George Bush, don't you?
Sure you do, but probably less vividly than you recall John Kennedy, who
has been dead for more than thirty-five years.
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- But George Bush left his mark on history.
He's the only American president to ever puke on another world leader.
Of course, Bush was a Halcion-head at the time. In case you don't know,
Halcion is a sleep medication that is banned in Great Britain but was popular
in America at the time. Apparently, it was decreed to be safe by our medical
guardians in the FDA and AMA and was the pill of choice for an American
president on an international mission. Anyway, Halcion has side effects,
including the tendency to produce odd syntax problems, short-term memory
loss, and erratic judgment in the user, which are all symptoms not only
of the Bush presidency but of George Bush himself.
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- So anyway... somebody asks George Bush
the conspiracy question. And make no mistake: the conspiracy question is
the question of the millennium, because the very fact that it is being
asked means that people have learned they cannot trust what the government
has told them. So in response to this question, which is central to the
way people perceive the world in which they live, Bush says smugly: "Hey
- there are some people who think Elvis is still alive." In other
words, he - a former president and head of the CIA - equates any serious
questioning of a proven fiction, the Warren Commission Report on the JFK
assassination, with Elvis worship. Not that there is anything wrong with
Elvis worship. When Satan is busy, Elvis will do in a pinch. But all Bush
and his conspiracy-suppressing cabal have offered in answer to the conspiracy
question is a web of suppositions and fantastical explanations that have
raised more questions about the assassination than they have answered.
And with their arrogant, pat answers they have succeeded in marginalizing
even the most sober critics and meticulous researchers. And that pisses
me off.
-
-
- I,ve seen it a hundred times: conspiracy
research comes up in conversation and everyone within fifty paces is either
reacting with jaw-dropping incredulity or giving me the elbow and asking,
"You,re kidding, right?"
-
-
- At this point you might be wondering,
"Hey... what do you care, Belz? You,re living in France, sucking down
secondhand Gauloise smoke. You,re in bliss." But I,m not in bliss.
How could I be? Three and a half decades, a twenty-six-volume report, and
two useless committees after the murder of the century and this is the
sum total of what we know for sure about the Kennedy assassination: (1)
that the president of the United States was killed by gunfire in Dallas,
Texas, and (2) two days later, his accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald,
was shot and killed in the basement of Dallas Police Department headquarters.
Everything else is a question mark. And we,re not likely to get the real
deal from any committee, governmental agency, or what we call the "liberal
media," either. Because among the most heinous atrocities that occurred
on November 22, 1963, was the twisted mandate that the government, police,
and press must circle the wagons against any and all who dared doubt the
official version - no matter how absurd and fantastical that version might
be. The brain-damaged offspring of that defensive strategy is the ongoing
quest to make anyone who questions authority look like a babbling imbecile.
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- As the great writer, this country's most
insightful political commentator, Gore Vidal, recently put it, "Americans
have been trained by media to go into Pavlovian giggles at the mention
of 'conspiracy,' because for an American to believe in a conspiracy he
must also believe in flying saucers or, craziest of all, that more than
one person was involved in the JFK murder." I've seen it a hundred
times: conspiracy research comes up in conversation and everyone within
fifty paces is either reacting with jaw-dropping incredulity or giving
me the elbow and asking, "You,re kidding, right?"
-
- The fact is that some of the smartest
people I know, some of the men and women whose intellects and astuteness
I have come to respect most, simply refuse to entertain the possibility
that President Kennedy might have been murdered as the result of some kind
of conspiracy or that life on other planets exists. They find it easier
- and certainly more comforting - to believe that America is the only country
on earth with no conspiracies at all. And maybe you do, too. That,s okay.
You,ll do so until the day you find reason to doubt just one of the establishment's
fairy tales. Then, like me, you'll begin to doubt them all. And it won,t
matter whether your friends are giggling or not.
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- Now, I'm not asking you to believe every
conspiracy theory you'll find in this book. Some - like the idea that NASA
never put a man on the Moon but filmed the historic 'lunar landing' in
the Arizona desert to scare the Soviets - may even be a little over the
top. But you don't have to be crazy to believe that our government would
create such a massive attempt at building up patriotic fervor. Look at
Grenada. And the Gulf War. Wag the dog is what we do best.
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- Anyway, I didn't write this book to give
you all the answers. The Warren Commission did that, and the answers were
all wrong. I wrote this book to inspire you to do what the powers that
be wish you wouldn't: seek out suppressed evidence; interpret independently
everything you hear, read, and even what you see; question authority and
keep an eye out for Elvis. Because if the president of the United States
can die of a frontal wound inflicted by a sniper shooting from behind,
if UFOs can exist in the opinion of American astronauts, the testimony
of the world's pilots, and the writings of virtually every culture since
the beginning of time, but not in any official capacity, Elvis just might
be showing up soon at a location near you.
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- Copyright © 1999 by Richard Belzer
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