by David D. Horowitz
The May Day rioters wear black hoodies, black jeans, and black shoes, and carry poles and rods with which they systematically, in a team of six or seven, smash plate-glass windows of various downtown Seattle stores. Their faces are masked. Perhaps their purposes are, as well. Have they joined the protest to vent against corporate greed? Are they agents provocateurs, allowed by the police to rampage so as to discredit peaceable protestors? Are they anarchists from Oregon, actors and spies on the FBI payroll, or something else entirely? Can we know? Is this a movie? I don’t see any subtitles…
In Dallas on Sunday, November 24, 1963, Jack Ruby (born Jacob Rubenstein) shot to death presumed JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. I watched it on live television when I was eight-years old. I did not know of Ruby’s possible ties to organized crime, the Dallas Police Department, or Texas politics. There were no subtitles detailing these connections. The Warren Commission Report of 1964 concluded Oswald acted as a lone gunman and that Jack Ruby was merely a “police buff.” Now, Earl Warren was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The report that “translated” the events was in his name, so who could doubt its accuracy? Still, it seemed odd that Ruby could be in such prime position to gun down Oswald. I might have to do my own translation, compose my own subtitles.
April 4th, 1968: Martin Luther King had been shot only hours earlier, on the balcony outside his Room 306 of Memphis’ Lorraine Motel. Snapping photographs of the scene and those there was Ernest Withers, trusted photographic chronicler of the Civil Rights movement—and an FBI informant. Learning of Withers’ clandestine employment forty-two years after the assassination, I wonder: how close was Withers to MLK-hater J. Edgar Hoover, and did he know of plans to assassinate King? Did we, and do we, understand the full meaning of Withers’ iconic images?
Two or more gunmen might have assassinated RFK—or so now claims Nina Rhodes-Hughes, a Canadian acolyte present that June 1968 morning when the shooting happened. Why have not official accounts acknowledged this all along? Who could dare revise the translation, to change the subtitles, forty-four years after they were written? We saw the movie! You mean we didn’t really understand what we were seeing?
“All the world’s a stage”—or, at least, it often is, which helps explain why clever fraud abounds. Thank you, Shakespeare, for helping me interpret the movie of life, for which I write poems, translations from a language I barely understand.