JFK and the Unspeakable

[Martha Rooster-Singh]

it can not be


On Sat, Jan 11, 2014 at 9:01 AM, Martha Rooster-Singh <
martharoostersingh at gmail.com> wrote:

> blinded by what the forces of the day, say, and by his own voice. He
> should listen to the wind or the river, the unspeakable is another double.
> Evil, the evil that would set the Earth aflame, end all history,  is a
> phantom for journalists to chase through the stacks and archives and
> courtrooms, grace haunts and hunts, it can be found or discovered or
> revealed, or spoken or thought into rational equations.
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 11, 2014 at 8:54 AM, Martha Rooster-Singh <
> martharoostersingh at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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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