Much Ado About Nothing: Asking Who Won the Political Debates
Edward Curtin
It amazes me that alternative journalists would spend even a minute writing about the ongoing Democratic Party debates. They are meaningless and they are not debates. How many times do we have to go through this ridiculous charade before this can be accepted once and for all? The “debates” are farces, total theater, as are the Presidential elections. They don’t matter.
The political quiz show of duopoly is fixed. Discussing who has won is the height of absurdity. It legitimizes the system of oppressive duopoly. It is political “jeopardy,” and only the fixers win when they suck us into watching and opining. One expects the corporate media to do their jobs and drone on endlessly about nothing, but not those who oppose this anti-democratic sham.
Emma Goldman is alleged to have said, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” She was right then and is right now.
With the exception of JFK, who was assassinated by the national security state when in his last year he radically turned against its war agenda, not one American president since has posed the slightest risk to the systemic power of the elites who own and run the country.
If anyone ever did, they would not be on the ballot or in office.
Here and there, a candidate running for the nomination of one of the ruling parties makes it into a debate only to be marginalized for bluntly attacking war policies – e.g. Tulsi Gabbard in 2019. Those who enjoy the support of capitalism’s invisible army (the CIA) and Wall Street’s corporate merchants of death are allowed to present nuanced “anti-war” positions that their backers know are lies but suckers bite on in their desperation to believe that the system works – e.g. Obama in 2008.
Because Emma Goldman opposed the U.S. war and conscription policies during World War I, she was charged and imprisoned under the Espionage Act in 1917, “for conspiring against the draft,” a form of state-imposed slavery.
Like Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, she was punished for telling the truth to the American people and the world. To contemplate their confinement in these prison hellholes sickens the soul.
When I was young and was seeking release from the Marine Corps as a conscientious objector, I spent quite some time pondering prison life, something I was expecting and preparing for but surprisingly avoided when the Commandant of the Marines released me so I could “take final vows in a religious order.”
It was an outright lie, something I never mentioned in my C.O. application, but it allowed them to save face while getting rid of a troublemaker.
Ironically, as a religious young man, I had often thought that the life of a Catholic priest or nun, in their respective celibate rooms in rectories or convents or monasteries, was similar to the life of a prisoner, and it struck me as very depressing. Even a few years in a federal prison felt more liberating, so I steeled myself for that possibility by reading Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, and Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, among others, and disciplining myself physically, mentally, and spiritually for what never came to pass.
Now the world is our prison, as John Berger wrote in 2005 in a stunning article with the understated yet hopeful title, “Meanwhile.”
Because he was not caged by traditional categories of conventional thought but just wrote, trusting that words were winged creatures that rise and fly out of sentences into the unknown, Berger was able to discover truths that many feel but cannot articulate. Often referred to as a Marxist art critic, such a description fails to capture the liberated nature of his writing, even when he is describing how we are imprisoned:
I’m searching for words to describe the period of history we’re living through. To say it is unprecedented means little because all periods were unprecedented since history was first discovered….The landmark that I’ve found Is that of a prison. Nothing less.
Across the planet we are living in a prison….No, it’s not a metaphor, the imprisonment is real, but to describe it one has to think historically….Today the purpose of most prison walls (concrete, electronic patrolled or interrogatory) is not to keep prisoners in and correct them, but to keep prisoners out and exclude them…
In the eighteenth century, long-term imprisonment was approvingly defined as a punishment of ‘civic death.’ Three centuries later, governments are imposing – by law, force, economic threats and their buzz – mass regimes of civic death….The planet is a prison and the obedient governments, whether of the right or left, are the herders [US prison slang for Jailers].
At the heart of this prison system is financial, not industrial, capitalism, and the system of globalization fueled by the Internet that allows speculative financial transactions to be continually performed instantaneously. Speed is the essence of cyberspace, a placeless “place” that allows this worldwide prison system to operate.
Space, time, nationalities, local traditions, and idiosyncrasies of any sort are washed away by this tyrannical flood of abstract power controlled by the jailers and their henchmen in and out of governments. This planetary prison’s “allotted zones vary and can be termed worksite, refugee camp, shopping mall, periphery, ghetto, office block, favela, suburb. What is essential is that those incarcerated in these zones are fellow prisoners.”
The prisoners that are us are often just dimly aware that they are prisoners, but dimly is better than unaware. For the jailers also use cyberspace to misinform, confabulate, lie, confuse, and convince the prisoners that they are not in cells but are free on their cells and had better be on constant alert to protect themselves and get theirs, theirs always being some commodity, which comes in many forms, including political candidates, sometimes “new and improved” and sometimes just “bright and new.” The prisoners are always free to choose more of the same, if they can be conned. While everyone “knows” these candidates sell themselves and that’s what debates are about – “if you liked that (one), you will like this (one)” – the jailers create what Berger calls “a hallucinating paradox” that keeps the prison population believing that the rigged system somehow works for them since they are exceptions to the rule that renders others moronic suckers.
So the question – who won? – is a good one, if you are a sports fan, but not when applied to the Democratic (or Republican) candidates’ debates. Better to sing Mrs. Robinson along with Simon and Garfunkel:
Going to the candidates’ debate
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you’ve got to choose
Every way you look at it you lose.”
Those writers who wish to help their fellow prisoners should refuse to be herded into doing the work of their jailers and using language in a way that suggests the game is not fixed and they are not being seduced, as Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), the recent Williams College graduate, willingly was by Mrs. Robinson in the 1967 film, “The Graduate.”
Ben may have been put off by the suggestion that his future lay in “One word: plastics,” but if he were graduating from Williams or any other elite college and university this year or in any of the past twenty-five, a top career choice, flashing dollar signs, would be in the financial “services” industry, where he could join the financial tyrants in the use of cyberspace to imprison most of the world.
Our universities have become human “resources” departments (as people have become commodified resources like copper or nickel) for financial capitalism and the whole complex that ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls “the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academe-Think-Tank (MICIMATT) complex, in which the corporate-controlled media play the sine-qua-non today.”
Alternative writers should refuse to rate the candidates or discuss their debates, but, like John Berger, think historically, structurally, and imaginatively, finding “enclaves of the beyond” for their fellow prisoners, little gifts, sunlight and blue sky through the jail cell’s window, not prizes for the winners. That is not dissidence.
And while I am a harsh critic of the digital revolution, I realize Berger is right when he says:
Prisoners have always found ways of communicating with one another. In today’s global prison, cyberspace can be used against the interests of those who first installed it. Like this, prisoners inform themselves about what the world does each day, and they follow suppressed stories from the past, and so stand shoulder to shoulder with the dead.
In doing so, they rediscover little gifts, examples of courage, a single rose in a kitchen where there’s not enough to eat. Indelible pain, the indefatigability of mothers, laughter, mutual aid, silence, ever-widening resistance, willing sacrifice, more laughter….The messages are brief, but they extend in the solitude of their (our) nights. The final guideline is not tactical but strategic.
“Meanwhile” is a hopeful word. It implies that we are between times and the future is coming. It can only be different if we do not play our jailors’ game, buy their lingo, and discuss the fixed quiz show that is American presidential politics.
“Liberty,” concludes Berger “is slowly being found not outside but in the depth of the prison.”
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Chelsea Manning is part of the controlled opposition against Wikileaks and Julian Assange and the Collateral Murder video is fake. See analysis here:
https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/wikileaks-controlled-opposition.html
Arthur Koestler said that it would be necessary to destroy what made man a separate, sentient being in order for absolute global control. In the posters, so far, except for Kathy, their being unable or deliberately unwilling to address what you are saying, it is possible that this has been successful and you are too late with your warning. Orwell, as usual, says it better:
“Meanwhile, life was hard. The winter was as cold as the last one had been, and food was even shorter. Once again all rations were reduced except those of the pigs and dogs. A too-rigid equality in rations, Squealer explained, would have been contrary to the principles of Animism. In any case he had no difficulty in proving to the other animals that they were not in reality short of food, whatever the appearances might be. For the time being, certainly, it had been found necessary to make readjustments of rations (Squealer always spoke of it as a ‘readjustment’, never as a ‘reduction’), but in comparison with the days of Jones the improvement was enormous. Reading out the figures in a shrill voice, he proved to them in detail that they had more oats, more hay, more turnips than they had in Jones’s day, that they worked shorter hours, that their drinking water was of better quality, that the lived longer, that a larger portion of their young ones survived infancy, and that they had more straw in their stalls and suffered less from fleas. The animals believed every word of it. Truth to tell,Jones and all he stood for had almost faded out of their memories. They knew that life nowadays was harsh and bare, that they were often hungry and often cold, and that they were usually working when they were not asleep. But doubtless it had been worse in the old days. They were glad to believe so. Besides, in those days they had been slaves and now they were free, and that made all the difference, as Squealer did not fail to point out.” (Animal Farm, Penguin, pge 81)
“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”
Well that is pretty much what is happening in the UK.
Obviously the quickest way to get rid of the dreaded Corbyn and his henchman is to have a general election in which he and Labour are so obviously going to get trounced. Again.
Then the real Labour darlings can get back in to provide the real corrective to the tory policies of the last decade or 4. Like they did last time.
So why haven’t the elections being called already? Maybe they were waiting to find a jolly populist who would appeal as a Tory leader – the affable Al ‘dya’wanna be a yummy mummy’ Johnson.
But if Jezza and co are so shite and losers, why do they still wait?
Also, Cooper and co don’t do themselves any favours, by never defending their time in government, every time May or the tories or the media bring up the failure of nu-labour and it’s destruction of the public services and funds. Why?
They were in charge – some are still on important committees in the House. Why?
I’m absolutely certain the old guard lefties who put Blair into power are right about JC – they keep telling me so.
As for the racists in the party I am shocked that there are many many more than used to be under Blair and Cooper and it is ALL because of Corbyn. I haven’t seen any with my own eyes, not being a member – but if it’s on the beeb, the Mail and the implacable Guardian – it MUST be true.
Yeah, yeah.
I can understand the bamboozlement of the old folks and the working classes by the daily miasma of propaganda, but it is an amazement that otherwise clear thinking persons and experts and professionals slurping up the daily tripe. It is almost as if they have become soft minded and believe in wizards and dragons – i blame it on their willing dumbing down, years of Harry Potter consumption.
What do you mean, no elections have been called?
Our next PM is currently being chosen in an election by 100,000 Tory OAPs.
Sounds perfectly democratic to me.
What more do you want?
Some people are never satisfied.
“Vote for Creepy Joe!” – “No, he’s an old white guy!”
“Vote for Crazy Bernie!” – “No, so’s he!”
“Vote for Kabbala Haaretz!” – “Yes, she’s black! Well, sort of.”
“Vote for Pocahontas!” – “Yes, she’s a Red Indian!”
“Vote for Buttplug!” – “Yes, he’s gay!”
Nice to see ZOG providing us with so much diversity in their 30 shekel whore front guys and gals. But when are they going to give us some trannies? We need some new gimmicks.
The prison is a mind capture. To seek to escape it is to reinforce it as a reality.
The first ‘false flag’ is the assignment of opposition and attack, to ‘OTHER’ as a means of hiding one’s own conflicted thought and purpose under a diversionary displacement that dissociates a split off SENSE of self through the leverage of grievance and vengeance or self-vindication – as a sense of becoming worthy or regaining worth or power at the expense or denial of the OTHER.
I appreciate the article for willingness to look beneath the personality cultism of a ‘tv reality’.
Considering ‘Giving unto Caesar what is due unto Caesar – and giving unto God what is due unto God (worldly power in frame of conflict or Living Creative) opens a profound meditation or self-honesty – for what you give ‘with-ness and worth-ship’ to is your acceptance and thus yours to share in.
It should be clear that deceit is the nature of a mind at war with itself – and thus with everyone and everything. But step outside the framing of its illusion and see it is but a sick parody of life. A self-evasion set in a script of seeking OUTSIDE for what its very seeking denies and fears within.
Guilted fear seems to create a hollow and sick or indeed sinful world from which no escape is possible and so ‘making the best of a bad or corrupted Job seems the only life and world there is. Thus the power struggle for ascendency and privilege within the prison, and for the fantasy escape in repetitive and addictive private gratifications.
That the ‘Emperor is naked’ is not a means of getting legitimacy FROM the revealing of sin or invalidity of being in another. It is the condition in which to release the framework of self-lack or self-doubting division to that which embodies or expresses us – regardless the overly or imposition of the scripted fig-leaf thinking of an interjecting priesthood or financial sector.
One definition of ‘good tv’ from the perspective of the purpose of its broadcasting/suckling is anything that gets attention and keeps it. Thinking operates the same device of keeping attention diverted – until and unless there is an awakening or expanded and ‘upstream’ perspective that notices and observes and discerns the thoughts and their feelings for their resonance or relevance to the likewise conscious active purpose being lived.
To let thoughts steal our attention and awareness to be fitted or entranced to fictional substitutes for real relationship and communication is to accept insanity while accusing it in our world.
“Everything is BACKWARDS; everything is upside down! Doctors destroy health, Lawyers destroy justice, Universities destroy knowledge, Governments destroy freedom, Major media destroys information, And religions destroy spirituality”. ~ Michael Ellner
The release of a reversal in mind is the automatic or spontaneous appreciation of SEEING it.
So it is ‘natural’ to the attempt to survive in a false (in) vestment to employ division and conflict in any and every guise so as to rule OUT a direct awareness – or indeed a true Intimacy of being.
In this sense the fear of loss of self is framed as the greater ‘evil’ that the ‘devil we know’ protects us from. But the nature of a lie given power over truth is the sacrifice of truth as a prodigal journey to nowhere in terms of desecration and depletion set in a script of ‘knowing more and more about less and less’ – until ‘bottomming out’ to the direct seeing of the script as it is – and not as its thinking entrances or phishes the intent and a-tempt to USE it as a private agenda set apart from and over Life.
Leaving the bait hanging is freedom to discern a true movement of being instead of thinking you are separate from your Source and Nature – and thus from Life and the Source of Life. Captured thinking ‘does’ this – but only though attunement and allegiance to its purpose.
I was looking at ‘rattlebacks’ prior to reading this article. (These go back to ancient cultures). In the light of this response I see an example of being spun against our nature such that the spin sets up a wobble dissonance that sets up an oppositional rotational torque to the spin, which brings to a stop – and then turns to spin the other way than its original impelling force.
Dissonance may start out as a ‘symptom’ to excommunicate or eradicate – but is in fact genuine feedback to the currently accepted ‘structure, framework or template’ of thinking. An Internment of Things coupled to an energy-guilt driven Economy may seem a way to ‘control’ or manage conflict, and thus enable an unsustainable ‘backwards’ thinking to persist in complex devices of delay, but only by embodying the very hate that was originally sought escape from – and as a monopolar ‘Victory’ over an unworthy and hateful ‘life’ relative to idolised images of a fantasy seeking to determine truth.
The grace of noticing is a gift of a true Inherence. Honour the gift and let an appreciation, appreciate.
Or use every moment of insight to fuel the mind of judgement – as a marketised and weaponised subversion of Life to possession and control – by which we are dispossessed and powerless but for an illusion of ‘security’ or ‘freedom’ under a protection racket of death and taxes.
Find a true communication within – from which – as surely as night follows day, thou canst then be false to no man. That is – what you give, sets the measure of your receiving – and NOT a set of built in meanings assigned to the conditions – although these MAY be deeply habituated by reactive response. Freedom from old habit is freedom to notice it and thereby bring it to the realm of choice. persistent choosing sets the new or currently accepted value FROM which you live. This is backwards to the world that is trying to ‘get it’ in some other moment under some other circumstance as a mind so full of its own entangled investment – a relational awareness is forgot or rendered ‘unconscious’ to the active priority.
The Call to joy or wholeness of being is always now. Not ‘after you’ve mended your nets’. Borrowed time is stolen from presence- but aligning in true presence (from thinking to already know) is the growing recognition of a timelessness that cannot be encapsulated or mine and mind-defined but can be aligned in and embodied as a regenerative expression of the truly sustaining.
The personality cult is a casting out of personae in a scripted diversion. But only to the wish NOT to know which is inherent to wanting Reality to be OTHER than (it) Is. Once you assume a PERSONAL possession of control, even through the generation of an experience of chaos that then demands limitation – you are phished. Harmony is the result of listening or receptivity to the ‘field’ of relation to the point of recognition or discernment of a true ‘with-ness’ and ‘worth-ship’. When you are truly seen or heard, you know it as a quality of relational acceptance. Give as you have then in truth received and don’t let ‘falling over’ be anything other than learning to walk.
I have no idea what you’ve said here, but I agree with it completely.
In the fields the flowers all die,
but in time they grow in straight lines.
I remember the above lyrics from a song but I cannot remember now who wrote it. These words often go round in my mind as I survey the world we inhabit and they instantly came into my mind while I was reading this piece.
This is what is being done to us subtly and manipulatively until we all march in straight lines to the tune they give us. We must all resist there drum and dance to our own tune.
Agreed. What we have is the politics of spectacle – utterly without any meaning and designed to give the populace at large a blown up farce presented as being something very significant and important. It is the same with political parties.
I remember for a (a very) short time I was once a member of the Labour Party. Frankly, I cannot remember a more boring, meaningless and vacuous experience. There was a sort of deadly routinism during the meetings on matters of monumental importance such as ‘minutes of the last meeting’, ‘matters arising’ and so forth, and a total absence of any substantive political content or awareness. Being in a safe Labour seat, politics, such as it was, was rarely discussed and anyway under the control of senior members including the sitting member whose position was virtually guaranteed since this was a safe Labour seat.
The membership of the party at local level consisted of old codgers who had been doing the same routine thing for years, similar to a social club and much like coffee morning gatherings at the Women’s Institute. Then there were the young pushy middle-class types, just down from Oxford with their PPEs, who were clearly on the make and angling for a safe seat in somewhere like Sunderland in the north of England. Tony Blair anyone?
I attended Ruskin College Oxford before I moved on to Oxford proper. Originally known as Ruskin Hall, Oxford, it is an independent educational institution in Oxford, England. It is named after the essayist and social critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) and specialises in providing educational opportunities for adults with few or no qualifications. All very noble, but frankly I have never seen so many opportunistic people with their own personal career agendas. There were one or two lads from mining constituencies who I never saw with a book in their hand, and who were always in the games room or the bar who but are now – no names mentioned – Knights of the Realm for services rendered no doubt. Both backed the war in Iraq for example.
In short the Labour Party was and is an utterly conservative oganization; there was a brief awakening in 1945, and then it was downhill all the way. The present Labour party is now dominated by middle-class metropolitan Remainer types a species found in the large cities and university downs. This group is characterised by the usual non-issues: identity politics, post-modernism, and various other middle-class preoccupations thought to be so important such e.g., ‘safe spaces’ pulling down statues, or transgender toilet rights. The working class has been left behind and there is a vacuum were a left-wing party should be.
Who will fill it.
Sounds to me like you fled at the first hint of live fire Francis.That “routinism” as you call it is what a properly run meeting does in order to provide structure and an understood process for debate to take place.That you failed to take advantage of it is surely down to your failings as well as the lack of fire in the “old codgers” as you so elegantly put it.Your comment,like the article above is just one long whine.
“Sounds to me like you fled at the first hint of live fire Francis.”
Rubbish. He got further than me and I’m surprised that he or anyone ever did even that. I cleared off out of it after attending a few open meetings that were meant to entice new members in, before they even handed out the Kool-Aid. It was back in the heady, white heat days of Harold Wilson and freshly unWedgewooded Benns, but even then the stench of social decay was worse than that in a back-street undertaker’s outdoors toilet.
No, no. The routinism is the end, not the means. And the organization of, the party itself has undergone what sociologists call ‘goal displacement’, whereby the means, i.e., the routine, actually replaces the ends which in any case were thought irrelevant, largely forgotten or non-existent.
Face facts, Social-democracy is on the wane all across Europe, in Germany, France, Greece. It’s constituency is no longer the working class, and it has become an increasingly middle-class party, with middle-class values and preoccupations as well as a career vehicle.
There is nothing wrong with left or centre left parties contesting for power and attempting to change the world. The thing is, Labour isn’t one of them.
It’s like Winston Smith’s fate after his session in Room 101.
Attending endless committee meetings to decide whether some word or other should be allowed in Newspeak.
The Party would have been more humane if it had simply bumped him off.
Exactly right.
That’s the best description of Labour I’ve heard recently.
A friend of mine used to live round the corner from Ruskin.
Hopefully come 31st October Labour and Tories will both implode.
Farage might fill that vacuum, ironically, but hopefully something else will materialise.
How exactly did the war criminal John Fitzgerald Kennedy turn against the war agenda? By sending troops to Vietnam and blockading Cuba?
As stated, it was in his last year, when he and his brother had discovered a few things about the nature of the government they served.
Here is an example of the kind of speech he was beginning to give:
https://youtu.be/BHCPj7VDX6o
Excellent post thank you.
I’ve never really been a fan of JFK’s, mostly because of sycophantic liberals (The US created the Cuban crisis) but he sure does put modern liberal politicians to shame with this speech, it’s almost like he meant what said!
Well I suppose that’s why he had to meet his maker in Dallas in November 1963 … because The Powers That (Shouldn’t Have) Been at the time thought the same as you did.
You know what they say about liberals, ‘You can’t live with em & you can’t shoot em’, I guess they hadn’t got that memo back in 63. It’s time the law was changed we need a liberal purge day, desperately !
From JFK’s notes for the speech he was on his way to give, when cut down in a public execution by the ‘crown state and NWO’ that wanted a war, including Tactical nukes, far from their Texas home.
‘Finally, it should be clear by now that a nation can be no stronger abroad than she is at home. Only an America which practices what it preaches about equal rights and social justice will be respected by those whose choice affects our future. Only an America which has fully educated its citizens is fully capable of tackling the complex problems and perceiving the hidden dangers of the world in which we live. And only an America which is growing and prospering economically can sustain the worldwide defenses of freedom, while demonstrating to all concerned the opportunities of our system and society.’
https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/dallas-tx-trade-mart-undelivered-19631122
Reading it completely, shows that JFK was saying the US didn’t need to deploy troops in SEA – that the correct route was more ‘Foreign Aid’; also that the Space Race and spend on it was a better proxy than nukes and war to settle which is a better system for Human progress and would benefit the MIC in Texas just as much as their planned war economics already did.
(Incidentally, He identified the countries where the US had been interfering
‘About 70 percent of our military assistance goes to nine key countries …. Viet-Nam, Free China, Korea, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Greece, Turkey, and Iran.’
Notable for which states are missing? )
He may have said more – whether that has been taken out of the notes at the Library, is not known, but the closing passage where he stated what should have been the guiding principle for his next term and would have guaranteed his re-election and ended the ‘Cold War and nuclear MAD threat and waste of resources and money – we would be a lot further in exploring the solar system.
‘Finally, it should be clear by now that a nation can be no stronger abroad than she is at home. Only an America which practices what it preaches about equal rights and social justice will be respected by those whose choice affects our future. Only an America which has fully educated its citizens is fully capable of tackling the complex problems and perceiving the hidden dangers of the world in which we live. And only an America which is growing and prospering economically can sustain the worldwide defenses of freedom, while demonstrating to all concerned the opportunities of our system and society’
So, if the Americans can find the political voice and personality to take on the neocon regicides and global barons, who have no interest in the ethos of that last passsage, then there may be hope for the US to get back on track and join the rest of humanity as equals not servants, but definitely not masters.
If Trump ain’t up for it – Paul and Gabbard are the only two i’ve come across who may talk that talk.
Thank you for that link. I wasn’t aware of that speech.
Thank you for that too, Dun.
Despite my highlighting the more inspiring of Kennedy’s words, I am of course no apologist for his less inspiring characteristics.
That said, when any politician talks about “an America which practises what it preaches about equal rights”, or “an America which has fully educated its citizens”, I always listen, and I believe JFK had a lot of courage where it counts.
We have our work cut out if we want to put a spanner in the works of those currently devoting all their energy to stupefying America.
Forcing the Soviet Union to remove nuclear weapons is very anti war.
Forcing the US to remove nuclear weapons from Turkey is also very anti-war.
Is their any purpose in this point scoring other than attempts at cheap point-scoring?
Doubtful that the USSR placed top of the line, highly classified anything on an island 90 miles from Florida, an island that also had a 45 square mile full spectrum US military base on one end.
Just another hoax to jerk the People around.
JFK retired Nov 22, 1963 to live quietly with Lem Billings, his gay lover and perpetual house guest, until 1969.