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Of course, it does not matter. Indeed, at the end, we won't know because we can't know.

Conspiracies exist in the minds of the populace for one simple reason: WE FEAR OUR OWN DEATHS. It is the comfort myth, the promise that chaos can be held at bay. And there is no greater manifestation of chaos than the simple fact the each of us, no matter how great, how gifted, how important, can be obliterated in a single instance, by heart attack, aneurysm, the truck we don't look out for or - as with Kennedy - the lone whacko with Marine level sniper training crouching behind boxes in a school book warehouse.

In simpler times, we had heaven and hell. Our deaths explicable as part of a coherent journey of the soul from this realm to the next (imagined) kingdom. That still looms large in the American psyche, of course, with Jesus playing the role the Middle Ages assigned to God the Father in their cosmology. Modern Americo-Christians gathering in mega-churches by the thousands, calling out His holy name and speaking in ululating tongues against the secular devil.

But in 1963,we lived in rational times, or thought we did. We knew that science and technology and rational American know-how were about to perfect the world. The World War II generation, having done so much 20 years before, defeating Fascism in two great and simultaneous wars, was now, in their forties, about to come to power - to do great things again. And now, with the reins of power held, first tremulously, and then more securely in their hands, there were so many greater things to do, to dream.

Kennedy, the handsome young avatar of his generation - even then half understood to be our fertility god - embodied everything. "The Torch has been passed," Ted Sorenson wrote for the Inaugural Address, "to a new generation of Americans: hardened by war, tempered by a long and bitter peace." And handed, not insignificantly, by the great father figure of the last gen: Eisenhower himself.

And then, in a single burst of muzzle flash, it's over: the President's brains, for god sake, splattered on his wife's pink dress. The country in a paroxysm of mourning unseen since the death of Lincoln (also a god in the American Pantheon).

So what, in god's name, can you do with that? Heaven and hell don't work anymore, not for enough of us at least. And Kennedy's death makes a joke of the vision of a wise and knowing god leading the world to light through America. It is the triumph of chaos. The apotheosis of one lone human turd with a

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