Oswald and the CIA
The CIA knew exactly who Lee Harvey Oswald was
Because they were watching him, that’s why
Agency hoards secrets in service of lies
Six decades after the attack in Dallas that claimed President John F. Kennedy’s life — and killed his evolving policy of winding down the nuclear arms race and Cold War conflicts in Cuba and Vietnam — J.F.K.’s assassination still matters. Some lament the continuing influence of “conspiracy theorists.” Others point to abundant evidence of high-level malfeasance in J.F.K.’s assassination. The very night of the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald told reporters that he was “just a patsy” while being walked down the hallway of the Dallas Police headquarters. Oswald was then murdered in police custody two days later, before he could explain himself further.
If you believe the sworn statements of the CIA, the US intelligence service knew very little about the man who supposedly killed President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. As director John McCone told the Warren Commission in closed-door testimony in May …
Hello, Dolly!
Dollywood is the Disneyland of Appalachia
‘We’re not meant to be slouching from grief to grief’
Save those Precious Memories on your iPhone
On a crisp Friday morning in early October, before the first frost, mom and I set out from our home in deep Southwest Virginia to visit the Dollywood theme park in East Tennessee. We’d been there once before, years ago, when I was five or six years old. Dolly’s Eagle When She Flies album had just been released, and my parents bought me the cassette tape as a Christmas gift. I loved Dolly on the cover, in her white blouse and tight denim. I loved the tune “Silver and Gold” even better. Mom sang it to me as a lullaby: “Time can’t be brought back with silver and gold.” When I think of it now, I hear it in mom’s voice.
“Do you remember anything about that trip?” Mom looks over at me expectantly. Through the windshield, I watch the car swallow the pavement beneath us. “I don’t know,” I reply, hesitating. “I sort of remember women dressed in pink and purple spandex with butterfly wings.” Mom …
Black Country
It's more than Shaboozie
Country Pride means Charley Pride
Beyoncé is an establishment hegemon who sells jeans
Readers concerned that America is spiraling into a permanently balkanized hellscape might find comfort in the Top 10 of the Billboard country chart. The cold robotic strum of the repeating acoustic guitar phrase in Morgan Wallen’s “Lies Lies Lies” competes with the icy hook in Dasha’s “Austin” for sheer lifelessness, while Kane Brown and the EDM producer Marshmello’s “Miles On It” is one of the year’s most perfunctory attempts at a big frat-party number. Jessie Murph at least finds a comfortable-enough pocket within the snares of the beat on Koe Wetzel’s “High Road,” while the year’s big chart-topper, Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song,” has been so ubiquitous for so long — as I write it has been #1 on the Hot 100 for 13 weeks — that it hasn’t mattered for a while whether it’s even all that good. The key thing is that hip-hop and country, superficially opposite racial and geographic poles of American folk …
