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:
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.
I always love reading this blog! But that's just a side note.
ReplyDeleteI had the same initial reaction to Ruby. It was kind of gross all the puking (although I do know someone who did the whole puking while driving thing. Seriously, that should be included with the no talking on cell phones laws. It seems super distracting). And I just didn't see the strip club owner being the guy in charge of the fourth of July parade.
I guess I'm still not convinced that killing Oswald was patriotic (wouldn't such a patriot believe in the power of our judicial system?) or that Jack Ruby really was a deep down patriot.
But I'm more convinced than I was before I read this blog. The stuff about Lincoln's assassination and the violence that followed suggests that perhaps reckless and irrational violence is a "natural" response to extreme sadness and distress at a national level.
Like Oswald (in many ways), Ruby embodies contradictions--the superpatriotic Jewish Texas strip-club owner and pill addict who likes to imagine himself a "made man" but also feels genuine pride in his local police force. And even in shooting Oswald, he's embodying contradictory--or at least not quite compatible--impulses: yes, he is on his "hero" trip, and he does seem really angry at and disgusted with "that smirking twerp" Oswald. But Karlinsky also promises that Latta will forgive his debt (and, he implies, help Ruby with the legal fight), and he's acting out of self-interest at the same time. (Again, not unlike Oswald, who is both working for his imagined "Cuban future" and also serving the interests of anti-Castro exiles when he makes a fateful shot).
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