Had another conversation with a foreign journalist this week assigned to cover the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination ceremony here next week, who said the same thing others have been saying to me for a month, which, I must point out, is the same thing I said a year ago they would be saying about now.
See also: Assassination? What Assassination? First, the event itself bores them. And I'm sorry, but that's just how we reporters are. Think about how many parades, memorial services and swearings-in you would attend in your life if you were a reporter. You can't even think of it. It's too many. So after about a thousand of them, all ceremonies look like the same ceremony, so you go looking for what's not boring.
This most recent visiting foreign journalist said to me that pretty much the only thing he could think of about the 50th that would not be boring was the group of assassination theorists who have been banished from the plaza. So now you see why he was talking to me. That's kind of my wheelhouse. For the last year I have been writing here about the assassination authors and researchers who sponsored and held all the prior Kennedy assassination anniversary ceremonies up until this one, now banished from this one because the city doesn't want the visiting press focusing on them.
Yeah, that's going to work.
Here's what I propose. I want to offer my services as a kind of unofficial press secretary and advance man who will help the visiting press find their way away from the boring ceremony the minute it's over and to the banished conspiracy guys. Now some of his will be easy.
The most banished of them all, the one the city has illegally ticketed and even jailed over 50 times even though every judge has ruled he was breaking no law, is Robert Groden, best-selling author, consultant to the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations and consultant to the Oliver Stone movie, "JFK. Groden will be banished to the Subway restaurant one block east of Dealey Plaza on Elm Street across from the Dallas County Records Building, where he will be autographing books, giving interviews and dancing the occasional jig.
Hordes of banished assassination theorists may be found that day a few blocks south at the Hotel Lawrence at Houston and Jackson streets attending the annual convention of the Coalition on Political Assassinations. They have all been banished, and they are all very good talkers, most of whom can do their entire theories in a 15-second bite.
Another whole rival tribe of assassination theorists (isn't that cool?) has been banished to the Adolphus Hotel across downtown where they will be attending the annual convention of JFK Lancer, another assassination outfit, that very day.
If you are a visiting press person and you need better contact information for Groden or others, please call me here at the Observer at 214-757-8460 or email me at [email protected]. I live to serve.