NEWTON'S LAW: IN THE FUROR REGARDING `JFK,' WHY IS GOVERNMENT SO TIMID?

Elvis Presley was born 57 years ago Wednesday in Tupelo, Miss. I am not one of those who think the king of rock 'n' roll was somewhere this week munching on snack food and celebrating his birthday.

Elvis is cold as the other side of the pillow and planted in the backyard at Graceland. No number of sightings short of a guest appearance on "Arsenio" with a consent to be fingerprinted will convince me otherwise.

The conspiracy thing is not in my nature. I lean toward a philosophy that most of what happens in life is the result of chance. If a pizza is delivered to me and the pepperoni isn't plentiful, I try not to think the chef was out to get me.

All of this is to say I come to the "JFK" controversy without a lot of baggage. Oliver Stone might see confederates at every turn, but I don't. If the history of the last 30 years has been shaped by some wily cabal, it hasn't been proven to me.

Still, histrionics that have accompanied the release of Stone's movie about the Kennedy assassination have gotten the better of me. The way some pundits have reacted, you would think their children had been insulted.

News flash, guys: it's just a movie. It was made in Hollywood, and Hollywood is about making money, not archiving the past. If people go to the cinema for their history lessons, they deserve all the Luke Skywalkers they get.

What the journalists are probably reacting to is the artist himself: Stone has the temperament of sandpaper. Any Stone interview you encounter is a belligerent diatribe about lessons to be taken from the 1960s, a decade most of us would like to discard along with our bell bottoms and Nehru jackets.

If you don't agree with his unique views of the world, Stone immediately brands you as one of the enemy. In his eyes, there are plenty of enemies.

How much fun would this guy be to have over for the weekend? Probably not much. Give the guy his due, though. An artist's job is to propel us to a greater understanding. Stone does that by slapping us in the face.

Pondering this after the fact, however, a slap shouldn't have been necessary. Stone's "JFK" endows us with few revelations. His conclusions are drawn from other works, a grab-bag of conspiracy theories, most of which have been gathering dust for decades.

That doesn't make Stone's offering any less valid as a film. And if you trim the excesses of his vision, and apply some thought to the indisputable facts of President Kennedy's fateful trip to Dallas, you find it hard to accept the conclusion the government has espoused for 28 years.

Why would a lone gunman not shoot President Kennedy as he was being driven slowly toward him on Houston Street in Dealey Plaza, rather than when he was racing away from him on Elm Street.

Why was it not more promptly discovered that the gun purportedly used by Oswald, a man of meager marksmanship skills, had its telescopic sight far out of alignment?

Why were law enforcement authorities so reluctant to accept the insistence of eyewitnesses that a shot was fired from the grassy knoll to the right of the president?

Since seeing "JFK," I have read the book from which much of its material was taken, Jim Garrison's 1988 work "On The Trail of the Assassins."

While Garrison and Stone seem cut of the same cloth (there are no coincidences in their world), some of the author's points are hard to argue with. Lee Harvey Oswald was interviewed by Dallas police for 12 hours after the assassination but no notes were made of his remarks. Bullets found in the body of police officer J.D. Tippet, whom Oswald also supposedly killed, did not match the gun the alleged assassin carried when he was captured.

Finally, these able lawmen allowed the captured suspect in the shooting of the president to be gunned down in their own headquarters.

If such bungling went on in a murder investigation in Cape Girardeau County, the police chief and prosecutor would be run out of town. In Dallas, though, it was only the president being murdered in broad daylight, on film and in front of hundreds of witnesses. Incredible.

A Time-CNN poll released this week indicated that 73 percent of Americans believe there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. This is nearly three decades after the event.

With the 27 percent believing Oswald acted alone is the Warren Commission. Almost in this category is the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which convened in 1978-79. The congressional panel determined, among other things, that there were at least two gunmen in Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963, but it is theoretically possible that they were acting independently.

Get it? Two people with rifles showed up at the same place on the same day with same idea of shooting John Kennedy ... so there wasn't necessarily a conspiracy.

Through this mist of ambiguity, the Justice Department has not reopened its investigation since the House panel disbanded. Much of evidence is sealed tight to the public until 2038, so many of us won't live to learn those secrets.

Stone said he wanted to make "JFK" not as a "whodunit" but as a "whydunit." The real "why" for me is why the government has remained so uncurious about this over the years.