John Fitzgerald Kennedy, (1917-1963), 35th President of the United States

JFK DIES FOR THESE SINS

The absence of justice, the absence of freedom, the absence of security are all concentrations of power. Power opposed to us. To survive we must adjust. We adjust by partial surrender. Total surrender is death. Power tends to concentrate, to grow more intense. Have you noticed     this over the days, weeks and years? To give us security, the state takes from us privacy, peace of mind and our money. We are squeezed like cheap lemons. It’s a physical principle called momentum. The concentration of power and the resulting surrender of individual freedom…inevitable. Are we feeling more secure with wiretapping, tear gassing and police beatings?

Think of the Kennedy atrocity in this way. The presidential car, roof open, as if the bulletproof bubble top was only used when the sun fails to shine. The treacherous right turn from Main Street onto Houston. The car slows further as it makes the fatal, difficult  left onto Elm. Slow, so slow it goes, slow, like a joke poorly told. From the sixth floor of the Book Depository one could right now throw an egg and hit the president’s eyebrow—a carnival game. But the shooter has no eggs today. He gently sways the muzzle right tracking that famous head of hair. It’s an easy shot. If he uses the four-power scope, the cross-hairs are right in the president’s right ear. The car moves on slowly, the shooter’s aim dead-on. The rifle will shoot a little high so gravity will naturally do its work perfectly. The shooter doesn't know this. He just keeps the cross-hairs steady on the back of that ever slowly receding head.  

The kill zone is near, the perfect concentration of power, the perfect killing ground. The perfect surrender, the perfect, deadly adjustment. John Kennedy, constrained in the rear seat, constrained by the glaring sun, constrained by his back brace, Kennedy has lost his freedom. He is president but cannot move. He is watched and marked and cannot move. The perfect point looms. There will be an “X” in the pavement for decades marking the spot it all ended. It is the intersection point where the bullets will meet in a terrible pink spray of bone and blood and brain. Eighty meters for the shooter upstairs, twenty for the one with the muzzle in the notch of the picket fence ahead. Easy, very easy. A perfect plan and his head’s a balloon in the brilliant sunshine. The destruction will change the world. The shooters don't know this either.

Gunfighter Nation. America, Utopia of Violence. Destroyer of Indians. Kissinger. Chile. Allende. Augusto Pinochet, the CIA and “the filth that was going to ruin the country.” Argentina. Brazil. Indonesia. The Academy of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. Bolivia. Vietnam. 911. Bush. Iraq. Arab Spring. Syria. Turkey. Ergenekon. Balyoz. Bulent Arinç cleaning Turkey’s intestines. Obama. Erdoğan. The CIA. Jack, his head a balloon in the stunning Dallas sun, John Fitzgerald Kennedy dies for these sins.  


James (Cem) Ryan
Istanbul
27 December 2013