[REVIEW] Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History

Vincent Bugliosi, most famous for his book Helter Skelter about the Charles Manson killings of 1969, has just come out with a new and very impressive tome. Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy is, Bugliosi tells us, is the culmination of two decades of writing and research into the Kennedy assassination following his 1986 televised prosecution of Lee Harvey Oswald at "trial". I strongly dislike Bugliosi's chatty and digressive writing style--a co-writer might have helped make the tone of the book less distracting--but I can't disagree that it is a vast and accomplished book, "1600-plus page[s] with a CD ROM of more than one thousand pages of endnotes," noteworthy for its assessment of different conspiracy theories (LBJ, the mob, the CIA, the FBI, the KGB, Castro, the Far Right, et cetera). After reading it, I'm still pretty sure that the evidence suggests that Oswald acted alone, more, likely on the spur of the moment.

With all respects to Bugliosi, this book won't convince many people. It's not just a matter of length, but it's a matter of human psychology. Consider the rumours that Barack Obama is a Muslim. Even though Obama has denied this numerous times, even though critical third-party research has confirmed Obama's stories, a non-trivial proportion of the American population--something in the neighbourhood of 15%, I think--believes that Obama is. Why? As one blogger points out, not only might the question-and-answer style of many of the denials confuse people, but some demographics (including conservative Republicans) may be particularly resistant to efforts to set things straight. Part of it is self-interest: Daniel Pipes, who wrote an entire book about conspiracies has devote significant time to helping out the "Barack is a Muslim" meme as a consequence of his on mad-on against Muslims. Some demographics, including those demographics inclined to suspicion of the government, will but it.

More important, I think, is the bias held by many people against the idea that vast changes can start from small beginnings. Who would have thought that the decision of someone somewhere in French Equatorial Africa to kill and inexpertly butcher a chimpanzee would lead to an epidemic that would kill tens of millions by the end of the 20th century? Who would have thought that one consequence of those shots fired in Sarajevo would e the near-complete emptying of central Europe, outside of a shrunken Germany and a much-shrunken Austria, of ethnic Germans? Who would ... ? People can walk around boulders, but we can't escape pebbles. The sense that these consequences are impossibly disproportionate to the causes is unsettling. It's more comforting, perhaps, to believe that a broad conspiracy of some of the most powerful people and organizations in the world killed Kennedy, rather than one unstable man with a desire to be a world-historical figure and a mail-order rifle.

But who am I kidding with all this? Three-quarters of the American population believe in a conspiracy, at least according to a 2003 Gallup poll, and I'd be surprised if Canadian figures are much different. Why should I belong to such a solitary minority? In fact, while reading Reclaiming History, I came across the truth of the Kennedy assassination, the one that Bugliosi was trying to hide. Ready?

( Blame the Luxemburgers. )

I'm happy to tell you that the book contract negotiations look promising. Would anyone like a signed copy?

[LINK] "subway stations - all of them"

Over at the toronto community, subjectivism posted a fun photo art project. To wit:

Out of curiosity and sheer boredom last year, my friends and I went to every subway station on the university-spadina-yonge, and newly built sheppard lines and took a photo. Yesterday, we finished the project with the bloor-danforth line and scarborough rt.

This isn't exactly an informative post but it's Toronto-related and I guess if you're curious like we were, it's kind of neat. And some of them are funny/reference something dorky - I don't know, this may or may not amuse you.

It amuses, and they amuse. Go, see.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the Samuel Golobchuk case

From the CBC, comes the news that the sad story of Samuel Golobchuk, a brain-dead Manitoba man who was kept on life support at his family's insistence, has come to an end.

An elderly Manitoba patient who was at the center of a debate over whether doctors have the right to end a life died of natural causes Tuesday.

Samuel Golubchuk, 85, of Winnipeg had been on life-support since last fall. He died around 11:30 a.m. Tuesday at the Grace Hospital.

"We don't know the exact cause, but I think he died a natural death, and that's what he wanted. And he was with competent medical people who wanted to be there and wanted to help him," family lawyer Neil Kravetsky told CBC News Wednesday morning.

"As far as we are concerned, Sam Golubchuk didn't die for nothing. He died for what he believed in, and he died naturally."

Golubchuk's controversial case made national headlines when the elderly man's family, who are Orthodox Jews, took the hospital to court earlier this year and got an injunction forcing doctors to keep him on life-support.

Doctors wanted to remove support systems, including a ventilator and feeding tube, because he showed no chance of improving, but his family argued that would hasten his death, an act that goes against their religious beliefs.

Three doctors chose to resign from their duties at the hospital over the case, with one commenting in a letter that he felt keeping the elderly man alive was "tantamount to torture."

Dr. Anand Kumar, who made the original decision to end life-support, said continuing court-ordered efforts to keep Golubchuk alive were "grotesque" and "immoral," citing newly developed ulcers and other problems.

Apart from making the obvious point that keeping someone brain-dead alive using artificial life support isn't natural either, reiterating John Derbyshire's point of two years ago re: Terry Schiavo that Golobchuk was conscious it surely must not have been an enjoyable existence, and wondering about the ethics of any religious tradition that hasn't adapted to the milieu of 21st century technology, all that I can say is that I don't ever want to be placed in a comparable situation by anyone no matter how well-meaning (by their lights). If someone does, because of misplaced hope or because of grotesque religious faith or because of some other reason, I promise to haunt them to the end of their days.

[BRIEF NOTE] The Franco-Americans

Wikipedia reports that roughly 13 million people identify themselves as Franco-American, but that term is misleading. By the time that the great transatlantic migrations began in the mid-19th century, rapid economic growth and slowing population growth combined to make France not a source of immigrants but a magnet for immigrants. Rather, this number includes people of French stock. Most of these Franco-Americans aren't French per se, but rather trace their ancestry to one or another of the well-rooted Francophone community established in North American even before American independence. As Pierre Anctil writes in The Canadian Encyclopedia, immigrants from a relatively agrarian French Canada--from Québec and Acadia--to an industrialized New England played a leading role in the formation of the modern Franco-American community.

From the mid-19th century to around 1930, over 900 000 francophone Québecois emigrated to the US. They migrated in waves, especially after the American Civil War, and around 1890 managed to feel at home and, in a few generations, adopted the habits and customs of their new surroundings. Their descendants are known as Franco-Americans, though the term did not appear until the end of the 19th century. The approximately 5 million Franco-Americans constitute the largest element within the Québec diaspora in all North America.

The magnitude of the huge migration ("La Grande Hémorragie") shook Québec society and led to a renewal of nativism in New England, where almost half the emigrants settled. Most of the emigrants came from rural areas of Québec. They were looking for financial and job security, especially in textile and shoe factories. Franco-Americans' job skills diversified over time, however, and they gained access to commercial positions and to the liberal professions. Around 1930, when the Great Depression put a stop to emigration, the New England states had gained a significant Franco-American population, most of it in industrial cities like Lowell, Lawrence and New Bedford (Mass), Woonsocket (RI), Manchester and Nashua (NH), and Biddeford and Lewiston (Me).

These French Catholic Franco-Americans created "little Canadas" in some districts in the major American cities, reproducing their cultural life and French-Canadian religious institutions. Until WWII, and despite their Americanization, the descendants of the Québecois emigrants probably managed to preserve their identity better than other ethnic groups.

Strong French Canadian identities did little to halt the assimilation of these immigrants and their American-born families, as it happens. Just in time for Fête nationale du Québec or St. Jean Baptiste Day, the Montreal Gazette published John Kalbfleisch's article Francophone émigrés came home for St. Jean Baptiste Day". Even early on in la grande hémorragie, Franco-Americans were decidedly unwilling to respond to the calls of their former homeland's nationalism.

It was a St. Jean Baptiste Day with a difference. Not only was it the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Société St. Jean Baptiste, main sponsor of the day's activities. In addition, thousands of visitors from French-Canadian communities in the United States had flooded into Montreal to join the celebration.

Mainly from New England, they had emigrated over the previous decade in search of jobs in towns like Lowell and Manchester. As many as half a million people, by some counts, had bled away in La grande hémorragie. Now, perhaps 18,000 were coming back, if only for a few days.

They had been invited by the SSJB chiefly to help mark the society's birthday. But men like Father Jean-Baptiste Primeau and newspaper editor Ferdinand Gagnon had a different motive in urging their fellow émigrés to accept. Quebec's economy was picking up and, seeing this, perhaps some of the visitors would decide to return home for good.

[. . .]

There were speeches seemingly without end, not only back on the Champ de Mars after the mass but that evening at a dinner for 1,000 people in the Bonsecours Market building. Gagnon, we reported, assured the evening's banqueters "that if Canada ever required the help of her sons in the States, she would see ... the strength of their arms and the devotion of their hearts."

Over the next two days, the various St. Jean Baptiste societies from Canada and the United States met in the Église du Gesù on Bleury St. to debate the future of la francophonie in North America. They urged the Quebec government to expand land grants to franco-Americans proposing to return home. There was even talk of a new, independent country, a wildly improbable union of territory on both sides of the border where francophones lived.

In March 1875, the Quebec government appointed Gagnon as repatriation agent, with a mandate to encourage the diaspora to return. Alas, things didn't work out the way they had hoped.

A large part of the problem was those 18,000 émigrés who had visited Montreal the previous June. There was no mistaking the prosperity that many had found in the States. It showed in their clothing, in the money they splashed around and in the stories of the better life they had found.

That year, according to émigré journalist Alexandre Belisle, there was a renewed mass desertion toward the United States, "a small-scale evacuation of the province of Quebec."

In an essay on Gagnon, historian Yves Roby writes that "for every émigré who returned, five or 10 persons crossed the border in the opposite direction. The invitation extended by Quebec had almost no appeal for a person who had already succumbed to the attraction of the United States and left everything." Significant emigration to New England would continue until the onset of the Great Depression more than half a century later.

The Canadian Encyclopedia article concludes that "most Franco-Americans succumbed to the attractions of the American way of life and the English language, especially since they lived primarily in urbanized surroundings," and since cultural developments in French Canadian--particularly the transformations wrought by Québec's Quiet Revolution--had no parallels in local Franco-American life. Assimilation to an enthusiastically capitalist, mass media-consuming and Anglphone society won out in the end over very porous borders and fairly strong group identities. (Yes, I'd say that comparisons with Mexican-Americans are actually probably pretty well-grounded.)