JFK and the Unspeakable

[Martha Rooster-Singh]

The assassination theories, like the conspiracy theories, obscure what
Douglas calls the turns and the moments of grace. Unfortunately, Douglas is
not have the fortitude to let go of the conspiracy because he is haunted by
the assassinations, murders of strangers, of men he had no real connection
with but in whose deaths he invested his entire life. Douglas speaks of
grace, the moments of grace, the Noah's Ark moment, the exchange of
letters, the conversations, the speeches and so on, and how the turnings
through grace from the unthinkable and  toward peace and so forth, but he
resists it, though it pounds on his heart and brain. Maybe some day it will
blow down his back door with sunshine and love. Maybe it never will. Grace
works in unthinkable and unspeakable ways. There is no reason to its work.
I admire the man, Douglas for his labor, for his beautiful and loving
commitment to peace, but he is a fool's fool, blinded by what the forces of
the day.


On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 10:26 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Starting into Jim Douglas's book, JFK and the Unspeakable. I didn't know
> he was part of the Catholic worker movement and had written mostly as a
> Christian pacifist. So far the prose and organization of information is
> engaging and substantive. As he tracks Kennedy's confrontation with the
> Military and CIA he also follows the contemporaneous work of Thomas Merton
> to confront the immoral essence of nuclear military power( while being
> obedient to church authorities). The phrase ' the unspeakable' was used by
> Merton to describe  the mentality and unscrupulous behavior of those who
> have accustomed themselves to enormous power and will do anything to retain
> it.
>    Just the clarity with which he tracks the postwar rise of the national
> security state gives the book a rare quality. He is not trying to be
> inductive, but sets out his contention from the start, provides a timeline
> and begins to fill in the JFK timeline with asides to examine the parallel
> peace work of Thomas Merton.
>   Other works on the JFK assassination seem to get whelmed in competing
> theories, players, elaborate timelines, scientific issues, etc.   Douglas
> sets out to detail the motives of the CIA  and to elaborate how the CIA
> planned and covered up the assassination, as though he were a prosecutor
> making a case.
>
> What gives the book an added power is the concept of what is
> unspeakable,and how even when overwhelming evidence points to a reality,
> there are realities that remain unspeakable. The article on holocaust film
> footage also deals with the phenomenon. Pynchon spends much of his energy
> as a writer bringing us into proximity to unspeakable parts of human
> experience. He backs us into it with jokes and wonders, coincidences and
> seedy lost souls, lists, and the inevitable force of history. But it is
> that feeling of scraping up against the raw madness that compels one to
> think and speak about the unthinkable and unspeakable.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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