I must confess, I enter the blogging phase for the month of November, 2013, with reluctance and trepidation, for as most know, this month, and the 22nd of this month, is the 50th anniversary of the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I did not suspect, that as a boy of six, home sick from school that Friday, that I would literally watch a president be murdered, and later that weekend, his alleged assassin's murder. I did not suspect that, fifty years later, I would be writing this blog, and series of blogs, on the implications of that event, for the continued deterioration of American society, culture, and what remains of civil political discourse.

There remain those in America that, in all honesty and sincerity, still believe the official story. I have no quarrel with them, nor even with the more sinister shills in public life who still promote the official version in spite of the mountain of evidence that it was, and was intended to be, a tapestry of lies and coverups. To make my own position clear, I am on of the growing majority of Americans who believe there was a conspiracy to murder the president that day, one going very deep, and embracing a multitude of factional interests. I am also one, within that group, of a smaller subset of people who believe essentially that a coup d'etat was staged that day, and that on that day, an oligarchy took open control of the instrumentalities of power, and has not relinquished them since. Or rather, it reasserted its privileged position in the face of an administration that threatened to unseat it.

The implications of the coup hypothesis are, however, deep and profound, for ultimately, one of them is that the unresponsiveness of government institutions to the genuine wishes of the people can be rationalized: that non-responsiveness is the result of an oligarchical system, of a deep state that saw its privileged position threatened by the Kennedy Administration. There were, of course, scandals and deeply divisive issues in prior American history. One need only think of the populist movement, the election of 1896, and its ultimate denouement with the establishment of the Federal Reserve and the IRS in 1913. There was the infamous Teapot Dome scandal.

But the Kennedy assassination is different, for the reasons of what followed, the infamous and egregious examples of the fallout and blowback from that event. It qualitatively changed this country and its political culture profoundly for the worse. The prelude was Eisenhower's warning about the military industrial complex. The climax was Dallas, Texas, Nov. 22, 1963. The aftermath has been Watergate, Iran-Contra, BCCI, Nugan-Hand, the Savings and Loan Scandal, Waco, Oklahoma City, Ruby Ridge, and, of course, 9/11. All are manifestations of a covert culture of power and covert operations, of government by gunshot and and false flag ops. And the first shot, literally, in that transformation of the republic into an oligarchical state run by technocrats, military men, intelligence agency gurus, and financial paper shufflers and secret bookkeeping. When the ugly threat to promoted memes and oligarchical agendas occasionally occurs, that threat is removed. By scandal if possible, by "wet measures" if necessary. One can think of the more-than-suspicious deaths of US Senator Paul Wellstone(D-Minnesota), of Congressmen Begich(D-Alaska), Long(D-Louisiana), not to mention, of course, the murder of Robert Kennedy, and Dr. King. And on and on one could go.

Having been a boy when it happened, the event has stuck with me all my life. I remember Lyndon Johnson being sworn in, I remember Lee Harvey Oswald being murdered on TV while Ike Pappas, the CBS news journalist reported, stunned, on the event. I remember when the Warren Commission Report was excerpted in our local newspaper, with its cute diagram of the "Magic Bullet." I remember thinking we are being lied to, that something was deeply wrong.

Above all, I remember the comments of my family and its friends: no one... absolutely no one in my family or its circle of friends believed the official story. A kind of sullen gloom descended for days. There were discussions around the kitchen table with friends over games of cards. The concensus? All agreed the truth would never come out completely, and the reason why was that a fundamental change had occurred in the nature of government.

Happily, fifty years has proven at least a part of that prognosis untrue. The truth has come out due to the tireless and dogged research of literally hundreds of people who knew they were being lied to. Most people now believe the assassination was the work of a conspiracy. What most do not yet realize, are the deep connections of that event, via the same factions and interests of the deep state, to the other scandals that have been a feature of American governance and its "scandal per decade" since then. The only thing that has not changed is that the same corruption persist and has only deepened its divisive grip on the country. That grip tightened on Nov 22, 1963, to be sure. It has tightened even more in the decades since. But it is not yet total, nor complete.

That's why the Kennedy assassination still matters. And that's why it matters to drill home, over and over again, to all those who will listen, that it was the work of a massive conspiracy. Because once that is understood, people will start to understand why the system is so broken.

See you on the flip side.