"Beware the People Weeping"

My initial reaction to last night's reading was that Jack Ruby is totally crazy.

First of all, while I understood that the Kennedy assassination was a huge deal and would therefore bring out irrational responses from the American public, Ruby's constant vomiting and complete and total sorrow just seemed strange and out of place. I knew from earlier chapters that he was extremely patriotic, but back then I had seen his gung-ho nationalism as having a slightly sarcastic undertone. It sounds bad to say, but it just didn't seem normal to me for a hard, abrasive man like Jack Ruby to love his country that much.

His dramatic response to the assassination, though, was decidedly sarcasm-free, which made me see his character in a different light. Quite frankly, I thought it was weird how distraught he was and foolish of him to kill Oswald, seeing as he could've been extremely helpful in implicating other people involved in the assassination plot had he been kept alive and interrogated. I'm not saying I was surprised that Jack was upset or that he wanted Oswald dead--I'm sure many, if not most, Americans felt similarly--but it did shock me that he was so over-the-top about his feelings, and that he acted on them so quickly.

However, I was soon reminded of another time when Americans were so shaken by the death of their president that they responded in rash ways that would have seemed completely out of line in any other context. I wrote a good chunk of my American History Seminar paper on the not-often-talked-about violence that consumed much of the North after Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Jack Ruby's reaction would have fit into that narrative seamlessly.

A lot of Northerners felt betrayed and personally affronted by the Lincoln assassination, and lacking a better way of handling their frustrations, they took to the streets in anger soon after it happened. In Thomas Reed Turner's Beware the People Weeping: Public Opinion and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, he depicts one instance of post-assassination violence:

On the street a man shouted, “I’m glad it happened.” In a moment, he was scuffed underfoot, had most of his clothes torn from his body, and was barely rescued by three policemen with drawn revolvers as he was being hustled to a nearby lamppost. (26)

Later he continues, emphasizing the extreme extent of people's distress:

One anonymous writer, who claimed to have been a copperhead, advised the government that its duty was to hang every rebel caught. He could have felt no worse had his own mother or father been slain and would personally volunteer to shoot every Southern man. (Turner 23)

What's perhaps more shocking, though, is that it wasn't just one or two crazy people who turned to such rash measures after the death of their president. Rather, the public as a whole seemed to accept violence as an appropriate response: "The Chronicle pointed out that the people had performed certain acts of irregular justice ‘which though not sanctioned by the courts will not be severely condemned by the most moderate and law-abiding citizens’” (Turner 28).

This concept is very much in line with what Jack Karlinsky promises will happen to Ruby if he goes through with killing Oswald. "Let me tell you something straight out," he says. "The man who gets Oswald, people will say that's the bravest man in America. [...] This act, they'll build a monument, whoever does it. It's the shortest road to hero I ever saw" (DeLillo 431).

Granted, this doesn't totally come true for Jack, as he does end up going to prison, but there is some evidence that people do indeed think of his act of heroic. He receives a telegram that reads:

HOORAY FOR YOU JACK. YOU ARE A HERO MR. RUBY. WE LOVE YOUR GUTS AND COURAGE. YOU KILLED THE SNAKE. YOU DESERVE A MEDAL NOT A JAIL CELL. I KISS YOUR FEET BORN IN HUNGARY LOVE. (DeLillo 443-4)

Thus, Ruby's overblown response to his president's death begins to seem a lot less crazy, or at the very least a lot less strange. Killing Oswald would've been a rash action no matter what the circumstances, but the fact that other people seem to affirm it as the right thing to do, and the fact that it mirrors what angry Northerners did following the Lincoln assassination, puts his crime into perspective.

It was a crazy thing to do, yes, but people in distress do crazy things, and there's no way to see them coming. It seems Turner was onto something when he titled his book Beware the People Weeping.

Sympathy for Lee

I find it sort of strange that, despite the fact that this entire novel is about the Kennedy assassination, the president himself really doesn't make an appearance in the book until he's shot in "22 November," and even in that chapter he says/does almost nothing. I feel like DeLillo does this so that the novel focuses more on his conspiracy plot and less on the tragedy of the assassination—more fiction, less history, in a way. It's as though the person being shot and the consequences of killing that person are not nearly as important as the shooter himself and the planning that went into his action.

On the one hand, I think this makes sense for DeLillo's novel. There really isn't a need to give Kennedy a role and have readers get to know him as a character before his death because that would change the tone of the novel in a way I think DeLillo does not want. It always toys with a reader's emotions a little to watch a character they're familiar with die, whereas watching the death of a man whose name we know because of its historical significance but to whom we haven't really gotten connected throughout the novel is, in comparison, no big deal.

However, I feel like making Kennedy a more or less faceless man and thereby eliminating a lot of the emotional responses a reader would have to his death sort of messes with the historical context of this novel. Before reading Libra, I would undoubtedly have seen Kennedy as the sympathetic character and Oswald as the villain because that's what my knowledge of American history has taught me to see. When reading "22 November," however, Kennedy seemed more like a lifeless pawn than a man, and while I wasn't exactly sympathetic to Lee (I find him a little weird and intolerably stupid at times, although I don't dislike him), I did feel more connected to him as a person.

It makes me wonder who DeLillo wants us to see as the "hero" of this novel. Obviously he doesn't want us to ally ourselves with Kennedy and read the novel merely as a tragic telling of his death because if he did, he'd give Kennedy more of a voice and allow readers to get to know him before killing him off. However, it seems at odds with my historical knowledge of the assassination for Oswald to be the hero because, even if he is a sympathetic, deep character in many ways, he is still an assassin, isn't he?

Yet, somehow Lee is shaping up to be something of tragic hero. When Ferrie tells him Kennedy's motorcade is going to pass right by his office building in the first "In Dallas" chapter, it honestly does seem like Lee has very little choice in whether or not he kills the president. It's as though, like the Tralfamadorians once said, there really is no such thing as free will in his case, and for that I have not choice but to genuinely sympathize with him.

Maybe, then, DeLillo's point is that there's never a clear-cut hero and clear-cut villain, but rather that there are always more layers that add nuances and complexity to historical events. Generally speaking, this is an idea that I would agree with; it's just that I didn't really expect an author to try to convince me that someone who made an attempt U.S. president's life is actually a sympathetic figure, and I certainly didn't expect him to succeed.

Response to the Zapruder film

Watching the Kennedy assassination video over and over again in class on Friday started to give me a different outlook on what Don DeLillo's doing in Libra. It brought me back to the scene where Nicholas Branch is being sent things like warped bullets and shattered bones, and he thinks:

The bloody goat heads seem to mock him. He begins to think this is the point. They are rubbing his face in the blood and gunk. They are mocking him. They are saying in effect, "Here, look, these are the true images. This is your history. Here is a blown-out skull for you to ponder. Here is a lead penetrating bone."

They are saying, "Look, touch, this is the true nature of the event. Not you beautiful ambiguities, your lives of the major players, your compassions and sadnesses. Not your roomful of theories, your museum of contradictory facts. There are no contradictions here. Your history is simple. See, the man on the slab. The open eye staring. The goat head oozing rudimentary matter."

They are saying, "This is what it looks like to get shot." (DeLillo 299-300)

Originally when I read this passage, I was inclined to side with Branch and think that the contradictions and ambiguities are still extremely important, even if the end result of the plot will always stay the same. Juliana and I led class on the day that we talked about this reading and it seemed like most people felt the same way—that even though the only truly concrete thing we can ever know about the JFK assassination is that it ended with our president getting shot, it's still worth our while to study its history and try to make some more sense of it.

I still feel that way to some degree, but watching the assassination video so many times really drove home the, "This is what it looks like to get shot," idea for me because we literally were just watching a man get shot. By the time we'd seen the clip three or four times, I started to wonder why any of the conspiracy theories mattered; at the end of the day, it was a video of our president being killed, and anything someone might notice and use to jump-start some crazy theory should ultimately be a secondary detail.

Thus, while I'm hesitant to say it doesn't matter at all what the real story was behind the assassination, I feel much more aligned with the people who sent Branch the bloody goat heads and shattered bones. You can study the intricacies of the JFK assassination, but when you boil it all down, it will always be the story of a man's death. That may not be all there is to it, but isn't that all that matters? Regardless of the what kind of plotting you think led up to the assassination, doesn't it all add up to the same thing? Won't the Zapruder film always end in exactly the same way?

I guess, though, this kind of thinking leads to a very cynical view of history because if we never let ourselves dig deeper into tragedies, there'd hardly be anything for historians to study at all. Yet, I still think it's a worthwhile thing to keep in mind. It's certainly made me feel differently about Libra; where I was once intrigued by the complex web of coincidences making up DeLillo's plot, I now sort of wonder why it even matters. Watching the assassination video over and over again is like, "Yes, this is what is looks like to get shot," and it starts to seem ridiculous that we'd ever consider focusing on any other aspect of the event.