That Quickly, That Casually

I stopped in the alcove of the Whitefish Bay Public Library and gawked.

Every so often, the library puts out books that it wants nothing to do with anymore, and simply says, "If you like it, take it with you. No charge."

So when I looked at The Warren Report on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, saw it sitting there, saw it for free, I thought: I'm taking it with, thank you very much.

But the fact that it was there for free, discarded, jolted me. This is an important historical document, criticized and vilified though it was. It's still the definitive document of an event that shook this nation, and I would say my generation, to its very core. I'm not sure that we've ever gotten over it.

Libraries do this to clear their stacks for books more, uh, relevant; read more often, as it were.

So the Whitefish Bay Public Library's saying, in effect: This is being discarded because nobody's reading it anymore. And, if it's not being read, we have no use for it.

I wonder if that was done for Uncle Tom's Cabin. For The Origin of the Species. Or are they considered too classic, too fundamental? Perhaps not controversial enough? Are people flocking to read them, and not the Warren Report?

And I wonder if other libraries have done the same--discarded this important document?

Does it mean that I need to get over that? That other, more important books, are being published as we speak? That the public has grown tired of it? That the next generation has said, in effect: Hey, that's so totally '60s. It's nearly 50 years later, dude. Let's move on.

Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. People are still writing about that. Was there a Congressional investigation about that? Probably not; John Wilkes Booth fairly (though with a broken leg) bragged about what he'd done immediately afterward, and paid for it with his life. There were conspirators, and they were executed--though at least one of them died for a very flimsy definition of "conspiring."

Charles Guiteau went to jail, without much question, for shooting James Garfield in the back. Leon Czolgosz did the same, to an asylum, for killing William McKinley.

But nearly from the moment that the Warren Commission came up with its findings, they were dissected and written about and analyzed and re-analyzed, because the direct connection never was finally established--except by the Commission itself. It was as if the answer was so obvious that we just couldn't believe it.

Computer technology later established that the much-trashed "miracle bullet" that hit Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connolly could, indeed, have passed through them both. That the final, fatal bullet caused the kind of jerking-back reaction of Kennedy's skull--as demonstrated by the Zapruder film--has also been reasonably established as a result of the incredible impact.

Maybe the casual discarding of this means that we've looked at this so much that there's nothing more that can be said (even though Vincent Bugliosi wrote yet another exhaustive study not long ago at all and concluded, again, that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin).

It might mean that, as hard as we've looked for deeper conspiracies (CIA, Mafia, Cuba, ad infinitum, ad nauseum), if for no other reason than that the event was so devastating that it had to be something deeper than just another nut with a gun and the right moment, it simply wasn't anything more than that. It's almost as if it's too disappointing for such a beloved President to be disposed of that quickly and almost casually.

But that's what guns do. They do them to Presidents, and police officers in Pittsburgh and Tacoma, and guards in the Holocaust Museum. And we still don't get that.

And the book that documents that casualness has been disposed of--that quickly, that casually.

Mister Mark