06-10-2010, 09:16 PM
A Parable of Turning
Seeing James Douglass last night was a memorable event. From his entrance on crutches, in worn clothes, with long hair around a balding head, he lacked perhaps only the donkey and the palms. If that sounds totally inappropriate to say, let me explain. What I think I glimpsed for a too short time was a man whose very life was an attempt to be like He who Douglass obviously reveres, and he is well along the way. As the founder of Mary’s House, a facility dedicated to serving the poor elderly in need of health care, part of the Catholic Worker movement, and as a peace and social justice movement leader, active in anti-nuclear non-violent protest, he has walked the walk.
I came to the event having read not only JFKU but also his “Resistance and Contemplation”: I mistakenly ordered two copies, gave one to a friend and misplaced the other, and then bought a used version and re-read parts of it on the way. So I had somef amiliarity with the man who sat before me, microphone in hand, in some small way.
His remarks for the evening, I discovered after the fact, were based in great part on the Afterword that appears in the new Simon and Schuster version of the book that is regarded by many critical JFK researchers as the best and most recent definitive answer to why JFK died, how that came to pass (and at whose hands), and why it matters to you and I. True to his reverence, he spoke of miracles, and turned the tale of the death of our President, the first Catholic president, on its head by describing it (and, by later direct and indirect inference, the events of 9/11) as a miracle that opens the way in our own understanding and our own action. Twice, Douglass gave thanks that we were able to meet in this room on this day, for if it had not been Kennedy’s success in standing down the generals in the Cuban Missile crisis, “this all be would radioactive rubble”.
John Kennedy, he said, lived with The Raven on his shoulder, having battled a number of illnesses and near-death experiences. Death was always just a step away. Douglass repeated many of the elements of the story from his book, noting especially Lincoln’s quote in JFK’s handwriting “I knew there is a God, and I see a storm coming. If He has a place for me, I believe I am ready.” Since World War II, there has been a gun to the head of the world in the form of nuclear weapons, and it is also a gun to the head of the President of the United States.
Douglass also recounted the tale of Merton’s perception that every President would have his Bay of Pigs moment in which he was challenged by the military-intelligence apparatus with a covert op. Kennedy fired Dulles after that; Douglass says the Warren Commission was misnamed and should have been the Dulles Commission. The confrontation with US Steel was his second; Luce’s Fortune magazine responded with a shot across Kennedy’s bow entitled “Steel: The Ides of April”. Douglass also recounted the dinner with Dorothy Day in which they and others talked deep into the night “of war and peace, of man and state”, and Kennedy’s confrontations with the generals around the issue of sending troops to Vietnam (a parallel he drew with Obama, Petraeus and McChrystal), of Khrushchev the atheist and the Pope and the idea that the Ark needed to retain its buoyancy and successfully complete its cruise with the clean and the unclean gathered together in its hold.
Douglass mentioned the American University commencement address, its parallel to King’s Riverside speech, both marking out each of them for their assassination, and of that poignant dramatic turning point the book’s study guide asks us to revisit in which the five-year old Caroline, having interrupted her father in White House Rose Garden, recites to the National Security Council the poem her parents taught her to memorize: http://www.bartleby.com/104/121.html . He tells us what we know: that, in the end, Kennedy stood his ground and took the bullets.
I went armed with questions which I never got to ask. I am left to infer his answers based on his remarks, the background of “Resistance and Contemplation”, the text of the book and the study questions and the answered questions for the author at the conclusion of the Simon and Schuster edition.
I wanted to ask:
Who gave the order?
What role, if any, did the role of the Israeli efforts to attain nuclear power with the assistance and imprimatur of the President play in his death?
What role was played by the confrontation with the Federal Reserve play? Was this another “Bay of Pigs moment”, like the confrontation with Big Steel and its warning of the Ideas of April?
I wanted to ask what reactions and thoughts he had to Obama’s looking the other way at Israeli’s nuclear posture, the testing recently conducted by the US, and his involvement with the current Federal Reserve issues, the Wall Street bailouts, BP and the Gulf of Mexico.
I wanted to ask if he was aware of the allegations by Pilger and Madsen that Obama had been brought along by the people of the Grand Chessboard, and the CIA, and had been an instrument of theirs?
I wanted to ask of politics today, the left-right paradigm, of Obama as the last hope for change.
I wanted to ask of biowar, cyberwar, weather warfare, assassination squads, and extrajudicial shenanigans, and of the empowerment of corporate and military squads engaged in their own mini-evils.
In the back pages of the Simon and Schuster edition, there are 15 study questions. I have selected four for the reader’s contemplation.
The first asks us “How does the government’s doctrine of plausible deniability rely on personal denial of responsibility for the Unspeakable?” I would add “How does it assist the citizens in simply accepting their own denial by enabling this doctrine to be used to create doubt and uncertainty about real events?”
The second of my inclusions asks ‘If JFK had been assassinated on 11/2/63 in Chicago on November 2nd rather than Dallas on 11/22/63, LHO would be an unknown and Thomas Arthur Vallee would be notorious. What were the similarities between the two?’
Douglass wrote “Understanding that the CIA coordinated the assassination does not mean that we can limit the responsibility to the CIA. To tell the truth at the heart of darkness in this story, one must see and accept a responsibility that goes deeper and far beyond the CIA.” How much deeper and far beyond? What is the truth at the heart of darkness in this story?
Finally, what are the implications of state murders that target not just visionaries, but the fulfillment of their visions as well?
In the same back pages, Douglass is asked what surprises he discovered in doing his research. Douglass answers, “I was surprised by John Kennedy…. The grace within his struggle was the big surprise….”
In responding to a question about the time pressures in completing the book, he notes “Patience is a revolutionary virtue.”
He is asked if there is anything left uncovered and says he included only that which could be backed up with solid sources (footnoted) that the reader could check out. Yet he says “There is far more than this beneath the surface. Yet we know enough, and have known enough for a long time, to see the truth. I believe that what is written here about the assassination is only a tiny, visible piece of a systemic evil that continues to reach into the depths of our world.”
The work of Vincent Salandria and E. Martin Schotz is noted by Douglass in the dedication, acknowledgments and end notes:
See http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKsalandria.htm and
http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.ph..._Episode_5
Mr. Douglass was introduced by Michael True, the director of the Center for Nonviolent Solutions (see http://www.nonviolentsolutions.org ), a cause in general to which Douglass is committed. He said that “our job is to open our ears and hear”, and that “change will come not from Washington but when we bring change to Washington”. And so I suspect Douglass’ answer would have been couched in terms of massed nonviolent resistance… there was a good deal of discussion about Gandhi and Reverend King, as well … and I thought back to his parable of the turning and the need to bring change to Washington.
I wanted to ask him of the posture of the Unspeakable in its procedures of mass unrest, infiltration and detention of protesters, the militarization of civil authority, the Empire itself. In this unspoken exchange, I could only listen to the words of his talk and reflect back on the book he’d written long ago on resistance and contemplation, and how the doorway to the jail cell was the path to freedom, the way of the Cross.
In the question-and-answer period, for which there was only limited time, the conversation turned. Many there were also interested in the questions of 9/11 and when my question about David Ray Griffin elicited comment and more questions, Douglass has this to say (and I will do my best to paraphrase with integrity):
‘If they can get away with killing JFK in broad daylight, and get away with it for over forty years, what is not possible for them to do? If they can get away with bringing down the Towers on national TV for a decade, what is next? Is there anything that will not do?’
“… one prays every step of the way for patience and the Spirit.”
Seeing James Douglass last night was a memorable event. From his entrance on crutches, in worn clothes, with long hair around a balding head, he lacked perhaps only the donkey and the palms. If that sounds totally inappropriate to say, let me explain. What I think I glimpsed for a too short time was a man whose very life was an attempt to be like He who Douglass obviously reveres, and he is well along the way. As the founder of Mary’s House, a facility dedicated to serving the poor elderly in need of health care, part of the Catholic Worker movement, and as a peace and social justice movement leader, active in anti-nuclear non-violent protest, he has walked the walk.
I came to the event having read not only JFKU but also his “Resistance and Contemplation”: I mistakenly ordered two copies, gave one to a friend and misplaced the other, and then bought a used version and re-read parts of it on the way. So I had somef amiliarity with the man who sat before me, microphone in hand, in some small way.
His remarks for the evening, I discovered after the fact, were based in great part on the Afterword that appears in the new Simon and Schuster version of the book that is regarded by many critical JFK researchers as the best and most recent definitive answer to why JFK died, how that came to pass (and at whose hands), and why it matters to you and I. True to his reverence, he spoke of miracles, and turned the tale of the death of our President, the first Catholic president, on its head by describing it (and, by later direct and indirect inference, the events of 9/11) as a miracle that opens the way in our own understanding and our own action. Twice, Douglass gave thanks that we were able to meet in this room on this day, for if it had not been Kennedy’s success in standing down the generals in the Cuban Missile crisis, “this all be would radioactive rubble”.
John Kennedy, he said, lived with The Raven on his shoulder, having battled a number of illnesses and near-death experiences. Death was always just a step away. Douglass repeated many of the elements of the story from his book, noting especially Lincoln’s quote in JFK’s handwriting “I knew there is a God, and I see a storm coming. If He has a place for me, I believe I am ready.” Since World War II, there has been a gun to the head of the world in the form of nuclear weapons, and it is also a gun to the head of the President of the United States.
Douglass also recounted the tale of Merton’s perception that every President would have his Bay of Pigs moment in which he was challenged by the military-intelligence apparatus with a covert op. Kennedy fired Dulles after that; Douglass says the Warren Commission was misnamed and should have been the Dulles Commission. The confrontation with US Steel was his second; Luce’s Fortune magazine responded with a shot across Kennedy’s bow entitled “Steel: The Ides of April”. Douglass also recounted the dinner with Dorothy Day in which they and others talked deep into the night “of war and peace, of man and state”, and Kennedy’s confrontations with the generals around the issue of sending troops to Vietnam (a parallel he drew with Obama, Petraeus and McChrystal), of Khrushchev the atheist and the Pope and the idea that the Ark needed to retain its buoyancy and successfully complete its cruise with the clean and the unclean gathered together in its hold.
Douglass mentioned the American University commencement address, its parallel to King’s Riverside speech, both marking out each of them for their assassination, and of that poignant dramatic turning point the book’s study guide asks us to revisit in which the five-year old Caroline, having interrupted her father in White House Rose Garden, recites to the National Security Council the poem her parents taught her to memorize: http://www.bartleby.com/104/121.html . He tells us what we know: that, in the end, Kennedy stood his ground and took the bullets.
I went armed with questions which I never got to ask. I am left to infer his answers based on his remarks, the background of “Resistance and Contemplation”, the text of the book and the study questions and the answered questions for the author at the conclusion of the Simon and Schuster edition.
I wanted to ask:
Who gave the order?
What role, if any, did the role of the Israeli efforts to attain nuclear power with the assistance and imprimatur of the President play in his death?
What role was played by the confrontation with the Federal Reserve play? Was this another “Bay of Pigs moment”, like the confrontation with Big Steel and its warning of the Ideas of April?
I wanted to ask what reactions and thoughts he had to Obama’s looking the other way at Israeli’s nuclear posture, the testing recently conducted by the US, and his involvement with the current Federal Reserve issues, the Wall Street bailouts, BP and the Gulf of Mexico.
I wanted to ask if he was aware of the allegations by Pilger and Madsen that Obama had been brought along by the people of the Grand Chessboard, and the CIA, and had been an instrument of theirs?
I wanted to ask of politics today, the left-right paradigm, of Obama as the last hope for change.
I wanted to ask of biowar, cyberwar, weather warfare, assassination squads, and extrajudicial shenanigans, and of the empowerment of corporate and military squads engaged in their own mini-evils.
In the back pages of the Simon and Schuster edition, there are 15 study questions. I have selected four for the reader’s contemplation.
The first asks us “How does the government’s doctrine of plausible deniability rely on personal denial of responsibility for the Unspeakable?” I would add “How does it assist the citizens in simply accepting their own denial by enabling this doctrine to be used to create doubt and uncertainty about real events?”
The second of my inclusions asks ‘If JFK had been assassinated on 11/2/63 in Chicago on November 2nd rather than Dallas on 11/22/63, LHO would be an unknown and Thomas Arthur Vallee would be notorious. What were the similarities between the two?’
Douglass wrote “Understanding that the CIA coordinated the assassination does not mean that we can limit the responsibility to the CIA. To tell the truth at the heart of darkness in this story, one must see and accept a responsibility that goes deeper and far beyond the CIA.” How much deeper and far beyond? What is the truth at the heart of darkness in this story?
Finally, what are the implications of state murders that target not just visionaries, but the fulfillment of their visions as well?
In the same back pages, Douglass is asked what surprises he discovered in doing his research. Douglass answers, “I was surprised by John Kennedy…. The grace within his struggle was the big surprise….”
In responding to a question about the time pressures in completing the book, he notes “Patience is a revolutionary virtue.”
He is asked if there is anything left uncovered and says he included only that which could be backed up with solid sources (footnoted) that the reader could check out. Yet he says “There is far more than this beneath the surface. Yet we know enough, and have known enough for a long time, to see the truth. I believe that what is written here about the assassination is only a tiny, visible piece of a systemic evil that continues to reach into the depths of our world.”
The work of Vincent Salandria and E. Martin Schotz is noted by Douglass in the dedication, acknowledgments and end notes:
See http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKsalandria.htm and
http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.ph..._Episode_5
Mr. Douglass was introduced by Michael True, the director of the Center for Nonviolent Solutions (see http://www.nonviolentsolutions.org ), a cause in general to which Douglass is committed. He said that “our job is to open our ears and hear”, and that “change will come not from Washington but when we bring change to Washington”. And so I suspect Douglass’ answer would have been couched in terms of massed nonviolent resistance… there was a good deal of discussion about Gandhi and Reverend King, as well … and I thought back to his parable of the turning and the need to bring change to Washington.
I wanted to ask him of the posture of the Unspeakable in its procedures of mass unrest, infiltration and detention of protesters, the militarization of civil authority, the Empire itself. In this unspoken exchange, I could only listen to the words of his talk and reflect back on the book he’d written long ago on resistance and contemplation, and how the doorway to the jail cell was the path to freedom, the way of the Cross.
In the question-and-answer period, for which there was only limited time, the conversation turned. Many there were also interested in the questions of 9/11 and when my question about David Ray Griffin elicited comment and more questions, Douglass has this to say (and I will do my best to paraphrase with integrity):
‘If they can get away with killing JFK in broad daylight, and get away with it for over forty years, what is not possible for them to do? If they can get away with bringing down the Towers on national TV for a decade, what is next? Is there anything that will not do?’
“… one prays every step of the way for patience and the Spirit.”
"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"