[An article in
today’s edition of The Independent by
columnist Nicholas Lezard contains the following:]
I
think we long ago passed the My-Eyes-Glaze-Over moment when it comes to JFK's
assassination. (...)
Unless,
of course, you are a diehard conspiracy theorist, one of those for whom the
assassination of the warmongering, hypocritical and mendacious US President has
something approaching the status of a creation myth. The compound adjective most
often used to describe the people obsessed with grassy knolls and so on is
"swivel-eyed", but these men (and they are, invariably, men) actually
betray a terrible fixity of vision in which they see only what they would like
to see.
This
kind of thing would be harmless, sort of, if these people hadn't, somewhere
along the way, mutated into the kind of nut-jobs who think Obama isn't an
American citizen, or is a Muslim, or that 9/11 was a put-up job (although they
can't agree on whether the job was put up by the Pentagon, the President, the
Jews, or Mickey Mouse). They also poison the well for those who have legitimate
grounds for doubting official versions of events – the most interesting at the
moment being, for my money, the ongoing doubts about the conviction for the
Lockerbie bombing.
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