CONSPIRATORIALISM, AT LEAST, SOLD WELL OVER THE HOLIDAYS

The Christmas sales reports that are trickling in are not great but we already know that. One item conspiracy did sell well. It always does. Americans love it. They buy it. They are always ready to believe it.

In published form, there were lots of old conspiracies to buy most of them rehashes. On the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor well in time for Santa you could buy the thesis that Franklin Roosevelt and George Marshall sat around the White House almost jumping with joy as they knowingly awaited the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This was their diabolical way to ensure U.S. participation in the war.

Not so, says another conspiratorialist author. FDR didn't know about the upcoming attack, but that old cigar-puffing conspiratorialist Winston Churchill did know. He purposely didn't warn Roosevelt because he wanted the U.S. in the war.

The hottest Christmas conspiracy item was, as usual, the assassination of President Kennedy. Mark Lane, the indefatigable writing granddad of conspiratorialists, writes this time that the assassination was, pure and simple, a CIA plot. This theory paints Kennedy as a dangerous liberal who was going to instantly pull us out of Vietnam, kiss and make up with Castro, and abolish the CIA after the 1964 election.

Another author says no, that's all wrong. It was J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson who "indirectly promoted" Kennedy's murder by the Mafia. Once the Mafia pulled it off, Hoover and Lyndon Johnson would protect the murderers. Motive: Hoover wanted to keep his old job and Johnson wanted to get a new one.

The hottest assassination stocking stuffer was Oliver Stone's "JFK," an absorbing piece of "conspiraganda." Stone's film is a mystery, a diatribe and a paranoid thriller. He argues that other conspiratorialists have been too narrow in their scope. According to Stone, a huge and amorphous conspiracy included the joint chiefs of staff, the CIA, the FBI, the Dallas police, the Mob, the military-industrial complex, Lyndon Johnson and possibly Peter Pan. The principal on-the-scene implementers were a bunch of gay fascists.

After the deed was done, Chief Justice Earl Warren, then-Congressman Gerald Ford and others were appointed to a commission to provide a complete coverup. In Stone's scenario three separate, precisely synchronized hit squads shot at Kennedy from different places. Hundreds of people would have been in on the dreadful deed. Amazingly, all have kept their lips sealed for nearly 30 years.

Stone has built his career on conspiracies of various kinds. He's good at it none better. His directorial techniques are astonishing. As pure fiction portrayed in cinematic art, "JFK" is worthy of applause. As fiction masquerading as history, it is a disconcerting and dreadful teacher.

To millions of Americans John Kennedy is just a vague, handsome figure from the distant past. For many of these people, Stone's movie solves everything. JFK was the victim of a gigantic conspiracy involving every element of governmental and private power in the nation. When cinematic fiction, posing as fact, willfully rapes history, then it ceases to be art and becomes unadulterated and damnable propaganda.