Tight Sainthood

Rather Interminable

During one of those interminable retrospectives on Dan Rather that CBS has been showing lately, Rather remarks that so many people (himself included) were shocked by the Kennedy assassination because they felt it was the sort of thing that "just couldn't happen in America".

But the Kennedy assassination — and the associated phenomena over the years — has always struck me as a canonical American event: the use of guns, the fact that he was shot in a car, the paranoid conspiracy theories, the self-pity… above all, the belief that this quintessentially-American event couldn't happen in America almost defines it as American.

Posted by Jimmy Little @ 08:56; permalink