Chomskys faulty "there was no JFK assassination conspiracy" logic

[Albert Rossi]

Alexander Cockburn pretty much summed up his (and Chomsky's) attitude in this quote:

"The effect of 'JFK' is to make people think that America is a good country that produced a good President killed by bad elites...This is an infantile, inactivist prescription for politics, essentially inviting people to put their faith in another good President, whose inevitable foul-up can then be blamed on the same bad elites."

I wouldn't disagree with Cockburn's statement though.

Sorry, that was a hiccup. I've edited.

Let me start over. I may agree with Cockburn's analysis of the film. But that's Oliver Stone and Hollywood he is talking about. That's not the only thing Cockburn has written on JFK in the Nation. And most of it is garbage. It is easy to take the tack he does, because the US has a cult of the leader. It's true. But if he is going to deny the fact that JFK fought entrenched interests, and do it by distorting history, then he has lost me, much as I may believe in the activist spirit he supposedly is vouching for. I never thought of The Nation as a vehicle of revolution, however. Not when its readers are invited to take a Caribbean cruise with Victor Navasky.

Why focus on a Hollywood movie?

It is true, however, that 'JFK' has come to be associated with this view of Cockburn's. The film's music has been coopted for all kinds of associations with military heroism.

P.S., Just for the record. I follow David Swanson in emphasizing that the first two articles of the Constitution are about Congress, which is the heart of the representational system, not the executive. I believe that. I believe the executive branch of the government should never have arrived where it is today (largely because Congress abrogated its own authority). I don't believe we need another Kennedy to make everything right. Does that mean I should not try to understand what happened in 1963? Does that have nothing to do with the present state of affairs? Should I be accused of political infantilism?

Sorry, Victor, for mispelling your name.