Okay, maybe Bill Clinton was too young to shoot JFK--still, you just know he had something to do with it. And that Hillary? Don't get me started!

"At the end of the clip, as the camera focuses on the backs of the president and first lady, Kennedy's suit is significantly bunched up, with several layers creased together. Only 90 seconds before Lee Harvey Oswald fired the first shot, Kennedy's suit jacket was precisely in the position to misrepresent the bullet's entry point."
--investigative reporter Gerald Posner (see below)

I've talked here before about my theory of reality substitute, that mysterious phenomenon whereby people prefer a carefully coiffed substitute for reality to the real thing, with the curious but inviolable proviso that the substitute version come with some certifiable link to reality.

Take "reality TV"--or, better, TV movies. If you've never been privy to the inner workings of a TV network, you may not realize how desperately important it is in the acquisition process that the story be "based upon" real events. From what I've heard, those people will go nuts over this, making sure that the story started out as something that really happened.

Of course everyone involved knows that once the property goes into development--through the numerous script drafts, the actual filming, and editing and the rest of postproduction--no disagreement, however large or small, will ever be influenced in even the most minuscule way by the phrase: "But that's not the way it happened." In fact, if the process is completed successfully, the picture will be a living lie in every particular. But a lie "based upon" a true story! (Yes, there's often an exclamation point to highlight what Stephen Colbert might describe as its "truthiness.")

In simplest terms it's not hard to understand why people are so eager for a substitute for reality. Reality is so big and complicated and messy, and often tiresome if not outright boring. Above all, it just friggin' won't let you go! It just won't cut you any slack. It's always there, all around you, that big bully reality!

Who wouldn't prefer a nice substitute, one that's well-crafted to suit the way one wishes reality really were (or imagines that it really is, if one has a limited grasp of the real thing). Of course this may entail substantial outrage, because being outraged can be fun too, if the cause and target are chosen for appropriate entertainment value.

(Witness the new genre of right-wing propaganda "fact-based" movies like the famous ABC crock of lies about 9/11, cunningly concocted to press all the buttons of outrage that the master liars of the right have learned many people love to have pressed, like the one that produces the automatic response, "Ooh, that Bill Clinton!")

No, it's not hard at all to see why many people prefer an alternate reality to the real thing. The part that fascinates me is the requirement of that certified link to real reality. Oh, sure, there are lots of people who don't care, who are perfectly happy with any mode of fiction. But it appears that a lot of people do care about the link and demand it, even when the link shrinks so fine as to be virtually invisible, as in the case of what Keith Olbermann calls Fox Noise. And my gosh, when John "I'm the Craziest Thing on the Planet, Alive or Dead" Gibson [left] or Sean "The Big Lug" Hannity or Bill "I Lie Because I Can" O'Reilly is in full yammer, it's often hard to spot any link to reality beyond the occasional use of nearly real person or place names.

One of mankind's favorite genres of reality is the conspiracy theory. We tend to think of these as a modern development, but I suspect they go back as far as man himself. There's no doubt, though, that modern science and technology have made possible a brave new world of superconspiracies. Now that science has taught us that there's an explanation for everything, for example, all we need is a tiny hole to pick it, and we're in. Off to the races, as it were.

Of course scientists also tell us that the real world is so complicated that a complete explanation for even a fairly simple event may be beyond our powers, simply because, however much we may learn, there's still so much we don't know. And there's always information missing. What scientists can't help us with much is figuring out which of those missing details are significant. Well, it's hard. And as so often happens in human behavior, at the very moment when we most need the wisest and most cautious counsel, we usually send in the clowns.

At the top of the list, of course, are the conspiracy theorists. In their world, of course, it's the missing or contradictory detail that's always the most important. And of course "importance" is generally judged, as we know, by entertainment value.

I'm sure some of you know by now what's set me off. Let me clue the rest of you in.

Surely by now everyone has seen that bit of suddenly surfaced 8mm film of JFK's car in the motorcade in Dallas taken mere seconds before the assassination. Well, writer Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK saw it too, and it led him to write this op-ed piece in today's New York Times:

New York Times
February 21, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor

Single Bullet, Single Gunman
By GERALD POSNER

THE ability to use advanced forensics and minuscule traces of DNA to solve crimes, even cold cases decades old, has turned many Americans into armchair sleuths seeking to "solve" the unexpected deaths of people like Princess Diana and Anna Nicole Smith. But sometimes, old-fashioned evidence is as useful in solving puzzles as anything under a nuclear microscope.

Last weekend, a never-before-seen home movie was made public showing President John F. Kennedy's motorcade just before his assassination. An amateur photographer, George Jefferies, took the footage and held onto it for more than 40 years before casually mentioning it to his son-in-law, who persuaded him to donate it to the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas. The silent 8-millimeter color film was of interest to most people simply because it showed perhaps the clearest close-up of Jacqueline Kennedy taken that morning.

But to assassination researchers, the footage definitively resolves one of the case's enduring controversies: that the bullet wound on Kennedy's back, as documented and photographed during the autopsy, did not match up with the location of the bullet hole on the back of his suit jacket and shirt. The discrepancy has given conspiracy theorists fodder to argue that the autopsy photos had been retouched and the report fabricated.

This is more than an academic debate among ballistics buffs. It is critical because if the bullet did enter where shown on the autopsy photos, the trajectory lines up correctly for the famous "single bullet" theory--the Warren Commission hypothesis that one bullet inflicted wounds to both Kennedy and Gov. John Connally of Texas. However, if the hole in the clothing was the accurate mark of where the bullet entered, it would have been too low for a single bullet to have inflicted all the wounds, and would provide evidence of a second assassin.

For years, those of us who concluded that the single-bullet theory was sound, still had to speculate that Kennedy's suit had bunched up during the ride, causing the hole to be lower in the fabric than one would expect. Because the holes in the shirt and jacket align perfectly, if the jacket was elevated when the shot struck, the shirt also had to have been raised.

Some previously published photos taken at the pivotal moment showed Kennedy's jacket slightly pushed up, but nothing was definitive. Meanwhile, conspiracy theorists have done everything to disprove that the jacket was bunched. Some used grainy photos or film clips to measure minute distances between Kennedy's hairline and his shirt, what they dubbed the "hair-to-in-shoot distance."

The new film has finally resolved the issue. At the end of the clip, as the camera focuses on the backs of the president and first lady, Kennedy's suit is significantly bunched up, with several layers creased together. Only 90 seconds before Lee Harvey Oswald fired the first shot, Kennedy's suit jacket was precisely in the position to misrepresent the bullet's entry point.

While the film solves one mystery, it leaves another open: estimates are that at least 150,000 people lined the Dallas motorcade route that fateful day, so there must be many other films and photographs out there that have never come to light. Those who have them should bear in mind that even the most innocuous-seeming artifacts, like the Jefferies tape, can sometimes put enduring controversies to rest. As Gary Mack, the curator of the Sixth Floor Museum [above] said the other day, "The bottom line is, don't throw anything away."

UPDATE--I HOPE EVERYONE READS MILT SHOOK'S COMMENT

Our old pal Milt Shook has added some extremely interesting thoughts about how conspiracy plot lines weave in and out of our everyday realities, including this striking suggestion:

The right's political strategy relies almost exclusively on spreading so much bullshit out there, that people don't know what the truth is. Fox News isn't out there lying because they think most people will believe their lies. They're out there spreading lies, because they know that with so many stories out there, people won't know what the truth is, and well eventually shrug and say "Oh, well."

That's why so few people have noticed that Bush is dismantling civil rights; that Bush is declaring most laws that Congress passes as irrelevant, and why it took so long for his natural approval rating to surface.

And just to clarify, I certainly didn't mean to suggest that there aren't any conspiracies. For example, now that Hillary Clinton has devoted so much energy to coopting or otherwise working around the very forces that made up the "vast right-wing conspiracy" she once accused of bedeviling her husband's administration, commentators seem to forget how she was ridiculed for making the accusation in the first place. Oh, so she wasn't imagining things after all?

As Milt suggests above, the Bush administration itself harbors a nest of evil conspiracies. Perhaps more than anything else, Karl Rove is the master conspirator of our times.