Mug shooter.
I had to choose from a list of of about four people to profile for todays star. My finalists were Willie Horton, former baseball player for The Detroit Tigers and a hero of mine as a kid, Joe Morton, “The Brother From Another Planet,” and Laura Nyro, song writer extraordinaire. But how can we not look back on the life of one Lee Harvey Oswald, born this day in 1939.
Oswald is a complex character and will be forever associated with controversy and conspiracy the alleged shooter of the, ahem, “Kennedy Intervention” as John McCain curiously referred to it during the last debate with Obama.
I recently wrote about the differences between Bill Maher and Bill Hicks and cited Hicks’ bit on the Kennedy assassination, which is dark and painfully hilarious. Hicks acts out the “magic bullet theory” basically shooting down the prospect that Oswald was a lone gunman. An interesting back story thread to the Kennedy shooting was the arrest and eventual release of the three tramps, just outside of Dallas. Two of the tramps were Gordon Liddy, E Howard Hunt and the the third was Woody Harrelson’s father. Charles, who died on “The Ides of March” last year (2007) in a super max prison where he shared the same jail air as Ted Kacynzski and Tim McVeigh. There are those in the conspiracy community that claim that the elder Harrison was the real shooter of JFK, perhaps leading Oliver Stone (JFK) to cast Woody Harrelson as the sociopathic spree killer, Mickey Knox, in his bloody, cinematic death ritual, Natural Born Killers.
But we’re here to take a quick look back at Oswald, a troubled youth with learning disorders who struggled mightily early on with holding a firm grip on reality as he was diagnosed with schizophrenic tendencies. Oswald showed all of the key signs and qualifications early on, to have a fine career ahead of him as a mind-controlled double agent that worked for both sides during the cold war. From his strange time in The US military, where he was court-martialled twice, to his extended stay in Russia, where they were pioneering the sciences of mind control, Oswald no doubt received the best psychological re-orientation available at the time.
Leading up to that infamous day in late November, Oswalds global jaunts which led him to Russia, The Philippines and Mexico were hardly the travels of restless tourist and certainly uncommon during his era. Not many Americans lived in Russia, let alone had permission to visit.
Oswald’s life (and death) holds the skeleton key to the crypt of the mystery surrounding the death of JFK, the fall of Camelot and the systematic fracture of life and culture in America.