Jack Ruby's Guilt

The last “In Dallas” chapter gives us the story of Jack Ruby’s assassination of Oswald. Intriguingly, Delillo spends a good amount of the chapter trying to minimize the role of Ruby in deciding to kill Oswald. First off, Jack Ruby is portrayed as heavily emotionally distraught. He is described as having vomited and crying continuously since the president's assassination. In fact, he can’t even hear the name “Oswald” or “Lee” without becoming distraught and sick once again. Ruby is clearly absolutely devastated by the loss if his president and is willing to do anything to show his patriotism and loyalty to Kennedy. He even “honors” the president by closing down his clubs: “the carousel and Vegas”. While having a strip club closed for him is not the honor Kennedy was probably imagining, to Ruby this is a massive decision, considering that he is heavily in debt to the mob and needs every dollar that he can make from his clubs.

Clearly, Ruby has been rendered unable to function rationally as a result of Kennedy’s assassination. A good lawyer could probably argue that he was mentally insane at the time he shoots Lee. This sets him up perfectly to be manipulated by Karlinsky. Karlinsky is able to exploit Ruby’s emotional state and financial peril in order to essentially force him to kill Lee. First off Karlinsky spins a tale of how Ruby will he hailed as a hero by the city of Dallas. He says things about how people want to see Lee killed, how Ruby can be the hero of Dallas and save the name of the town. He claims that people will consider the man who kills Oswald “the bravest man in America.” Having manipulating Ruby’s well-known desire for attention, Karlinsky even tries to claim that he will be acquitted in court, as people in Dallas are somehow holding on to the old-west style of justice. He then seals the deal by announcing that Ruby's loans will be forgiven if he does this. His manipulation is so insanely effective, that Ruby doesn’t even fully appreciate what he is doing. This can be seen in how casual he is about it. In fact, he is almost late to his own crime, as he has to wire $25 to one of his club’s employees. He even takes the time to feed his dog, mere minutes before he commits the murder.

In the end, Ruby ironically ends up becoming a patsy of Karlinsky, just as Lee became a patsy for Mackey and the rest of the CIA agents. I think it's interesting that while Delillo sets up it rather ambiguously on whether Lee is guilty of murdering Kennedy, yet seems to unequivocally pardon Jack Ruby. But maybe this is just how I am reading it, what do you think?

Who is Lee?

Who is Lee Harvey Oswald? This is a question that we are just starting to get an answer to as we start this book. Our initial picture of him is not a particularly nice one. Delillo paints him, rightly, as an angsty teenager. He is rebellious against his mother and talks back to her. He skips large amounts of school and takes pride in doing so. He also just seems to be an annoying kid, touting his reading of Socialist Work’s in his friend’s faces (A habit he keeps all the way into the marines)

Still I feel a little bit of sympathy for the boy. While it may seem weird to feel bad for a boy who would grow up to join the ranks of those who have assassinated American presidents, I feel it's justified. He really had a rough childhood growing up. His father died when he was young and he kept moving around with his mom, which doesn’t make for a great environment to make friends, and it doesn’t really sound like he has many, considering that he would rather hang out with animals at the zoo than people. What really killed me though was that he never ends up earning the respect of anyone. In the documentary we watched on Lee, the KGB discussed why they didn’t accept him into the Soviet Union and it is just brutal. They describe him as having no skills, value, or intelligence (both in the military sense and the intrinsic one). They even go so far as to imply that it would be disrespectful to the C.I.A to suspect them of using this man as an agent. Although this is quite ironic, considering that it sounds like Winn Everett is going to use him in his plot.

Libra even supports the idea that he has minimal value to the KGB, as what little intel he has on the U-2 plane and American radio dishes is lost when he gets court-martialed, twice. Dr. Braunfels even tries to convince him to stay, as he will be of greater value if he gains some intelligence. Which is really quite devastating to him, considering his admiration for Russia. So even though it is probably ridiculously un-American to say, I kind of want him to have some success in his defection to the Soviet Union. This is really a remarkable thing that Delillo has done, he has managed to make me sympathetic for an almost insufferable human being, whether Lee deserves this though, is an entirely different question. So what do you think, does Lee Harvey Oswald deserve our sympathy? Or is he just an awful person?

Submitting to the South

Dana’s perspective on the south has changed rapidly throughout the novel, from one of complete disgust to a remarkable acceptance of it. This change can be seen from when she goes back in time to the south for a second time, to save Rufus from burning down the house. Here, she is rendered completely distraught by Rufus’s racist language and refuses to act as a slave, even for her own safety. However this refusal will not last and the next time she goes back she finds herself working as a slave. Still she does display resistance to this, primarily through her reading. As she reads to Rufus and Nigel, even though slave literacy is illegal at the time. She continues to do this even when Mr. Weylin orders her to stop, indicating her refusal to let the south break her.

Sadly, the south does manage to break this part of her resolve even if it was the result of a beating rather than her acceptance. The next time she comes back she slides right back into the role of slave, this time without the support of Kevin. She even goes beyond just accepting her role, to effectively promoting, when she convinces Alice to accept Rufus. Even though she was doing this for more personal reasons rather than Rufus’s order, it still shows how she has had given up on fighting the south. Intriguingly, in The Storm we see that she starts to fight back and argue with Rufus over how he treats Alice. This makes me question what will happen in the end, will Dana still be fighting or will she submit to the South?

[Edit]

Woops forgot to post this Monday. And I guess she doesn’t submit, considering that she kills Rufus.

Dresden: A Peaceful City

Kurt Vonnegut takes great care in his depiction of Dresden and the people who live there. He manages to portray what could ostensibly be called a crucial part of the Nazi empire into a seemingly innocent town. He is doing this in an attempt to critique the American bombing of Dresden, that will / had / is happening (depending on your perspective / Billy’s).

The people there are described as remarkably content and peaceful just going about their jobs. He also takes great care to depict the city as a beautiful place that does not deserve to be bombed. Especially interesting is when he describes the city as being capable of “winking”: “one of the most cheerful things a city is capable of doing when the sun goes down is to wink its lights on one by one”. Here Vonnegut, is not just describing the elegance of the city but also personifying it, in an attempt to make us feel worse about the bombing. He even points out that the city is unable to do this while Billy is there, as they must keep the lights out to hide from American bombers. Further showing the city as a victim of American attack.  

One of the main arguments for the bombing Dresden was that it was supplying crucial war materials to the Germans. However, Vonnegut specifically addresses this through the peaceful factory that Billy works at. Billy is working at a factory that makes special syrup to help nourish pregnant women. What could be a more moral and noble industry than that of feeding mothers and their babies. By placing this factory in Dresden, it further puts shame on the Americans for their bombing of the town. Overall, I find that Vonnegut does a remarkable job in framing the American bombing of Dresden in the worst light possible.

Modern Jes Grew

In class we discussed what Jes Grew is today and while it is rather hard to pin down the exact thing that it is, there is no doubt in my mind that it is going through a renaissance. To put a definition on it I would define Jes Grew as any form of culture the rebels against the standard. This modern resurgence of Jes Grew began in the 1970’s. In the last couple chapters Papa La Bas talks about his experiences sharing the stories of Jes Grew.

People in the 60s said they couldn’t follow him. (In Santa Cruz the students walked out.) What’s your point? they asked in Seattle whose central point, the Space Needle, is invisible from time to time. What are you driving at? they would say in Detroit in the 1950s. In the 40s he haunted the stacks of a ghost library. In the 30s he sought to recover his losses like everybody else. In the 20s they knew. And the 20s were back again.

Papa LaBas’ personal experiences fit the historical context. The 30’s were dominated by the depression and the 40’s World War II and the subsequent celebration, this prevented the spread of Jes Grew. The 50’s would then seem to set the stage for a Jes Grew revival, as people return both to happiness and physically return to the United States having picked up parts of the cultures from the countries that they fought in. However, this revival was stifled by the cold war. In particular, McCarthyism, which in my opinion is quintessential atonist suppression. Luckily, Jes Grew was able to survive this and finally re-emerge in the 70’s, within groups such as the hippies and the entire counterculture movement.

Today, Jes Grew is experiencing a renaissance. The most obvious part of this are things like modern hip-hop and rap. But there are more things that contribute to this. I would say that both the maker and hipster movements are Jes Grew. As both involve a significant move away from large corporations which are most likely the modern bastion of the atonists. All of these things are fueled by modern technology, primarily the internet. Intriguingly this means that those who attempt to control the internet are atonists, which leads to the fascinating question of whether or not the NSA or Verizon or the Republican Party are the modern atonists out to stop Jes Grew.  

A Solution to Postmodern History

Postmodernism seems to destroy the whole concept of history. It does this through one crucial tenet: it is impossible to know if any story is true. The example of this that we have been focusing on is that it is neither possible to prove or disprove the events of Ragtime, as ridiculous as that first sounds. I mean JP Morgan probably didn’t start a secret cult with Ford, but how would we know, it’s a secret cult.

To solve this, I would like to propose for a system that allows for the analysis and study of human history, even if not possible to prove any story. It relies on two key principles the first is that there exists a set of facts in the world that can just be accepted as true e.g. JFK was shot. The next is that people are allowed to create analysis’s based on facts e.g. Oswald was the shooter because he was in the book repository. This is how history works now, what makes my system special is that every analysis has a score, which I will refer to as “K”. This score ranges from 0-1 and serves to assess the validity of the analysis. Therefore, the “K” score is a function of the number and quality of facts that the particular historical analysis contains. Take for example the JFK case and the debate of how many shooters there were. The Warren Commission concluded that there was one shooter and given their immense resources were able to obtain a large number of facts and as a result, their theory has a K > 0.9. On the other hand, take the conclusion of conspiracy theorist who says there were 17 shooters because he heard the friend of a friend of a friend claim that he overheard a rumour that there was a guy who saw that many, this would earn a K < 0.0001.

Now this is an extreme example. But it expresses the power of the K Score to make decisions about what historical theorems are accepted. It would then be possible for later historians to cite theorems of high K scores as almost facts while still leaving in the possibility for them to be wrong. This then leads to the question of what would Ragtime earn on this scale. I would probably give it a K of around 0.2-0.3. As while so many of the characters are deeply rooted in historical fact, Doctorow has managed to “find” stories that are completely uncited, which unfortunately drags down the K score, e.g. while Houdini does exist I’m not sure how Doctorow knows that he went through an existential crisis about mortality. Overall, this is just a quantitative solution to the very philosophical question about how to decide what is history and what is fiction.

Morgan's Fortune

I have really enjoyed this book for its portrayal of the early 20th century American aristocracy. Nowhere is this better seen than in the description of J.P Morgan and his adventures (or lack thereof) with Ford.

Early on in this section, there is my absolute favorite quote: “Pierpont Morgan was that classic American hero, a man born to extreme wealth who by dint of hard work and ruthlessness multiplies the family fortune till it is out of sight.” This sums up the two things required to make it in America, hard work and a bit of a break. These two things are personified and amplified in the aristocrats seen in this section. On one side there are those who got breaks: Carnegie & Rockefeller. They are shown as simpletons and alcoholics and in doing so implies that they chanced upon their fortunes.

Across from this, there is J.P Morgan and Ford, who are portrayed by Doctorow as believing that they are the hardest working and cleverest people to ever exist. Ford clearly has mastered the art of managing the time of other people and has risen the ranks in society. While Morgan has had so much success that there is no way that it is just good luck. This is especially true if we chose to believe everything he says from bailing out American to rediscovering ancient Egyptian reincarnation. However, Morgan is presented as being, at least, a little bit prideful, a point made excessively clear by his “secret society’. This leads to the question of whether he is honest in his accomplishments and consequentially, whether his fortune is more the result of hard work or good fortune.