JFK and the Unspeakable

[Martha Rooster-Singh]

And so it goes.

On Saturday, January 11, 2014, Mark Kohut wrote:

> Yeah, the CIA did it.
>  Read Bugliosi's book as well.
>
>
>   On Friday, January 10, 2014 10:20 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net<javascript:_e({}, 'cvml', '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/?list=pynchon-l
>
>
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