President Kennedy's Assassination & No-thingness

[Charles Drago]

My own particular ambivalences about all this I suppose arise from my humanistic training (I am a product of the 70s); I need to keep balanced to some reasonable extent in my own thinking what may be attributable to unconscious, impersonal, even evolutionary, social structuring and culturally systemic effects, and what is actually the result of purposeful social engineering (through the media, etc.). And then there is even the loop-back potential that presents itself between those two possibilities. Or perhaps even a kind of chicken-or-egg question which can be asked about where the ultimate explanation lies for any given event or its consequences. It is not a simple question. But then what interesting questions are? Even the most simple and elegant "solution" (in the realm of mathematics or physics) does not betray the complexity of the problem it addresses (that's why the result is often called 'deep').

I feel your pain, Albert. And not just because I too am a product of the 70's -- the decade in which my formal higher education took place.

One cannot overstate the importance of maintaining the analytical balance to which you refer. If I'm reading your subtext accurately, you (unlike Noam Chomsky) seem to be endorsing modes of inquiry that, far from being entrapped in the A or B frame, encourage and utilize the search for so-called "third alternatives"

Or as the other Marx might have put it: Sometimes, but not always, a cigar is just a cigar.

What presently astounds me is how a rather compartmentalized "interest" (that's too neutral a term, ethically; I should say "concern") of mine -- the realities of political and economic power, and the significance of the events of the 60s (and forward) -- has led me into a kind of discussion I would have never suspected.

Be more than astounded. Be overjoyed, too.