A conspiracy of dunces

From the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, you can look down and see the X’s on Elm Street that mark where John F. Kennedy was hit on November 22, 1963. Like many famous places, this one seems smaller and more prosaic than you might expect. The distances seem shorter. From here, it’s not that hard to imagine an odd little loser named Lee Oswald getting off a couple of lucky shots at the guy in the slow-moving car below.

The other interesting thing about the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas is the visitors who file through, and how little credit most of them give Oswald for the actual assassination. Even here, amid the painstaking factual reconstructions of how the day went down, most seem to regard it as just another part of the decades-long cover-up. When we were there, well-dressed guy was standing with his kids by a diorama of Dealey Plaza. “And here,” he said,” pointing out the Grassy Knoll, “was where the third gunman was positioned.” Everywhere you can see otherwise intelligent people shaking their heads gravely and explaining to bored wives and children how things really happened.

Personally, I subscribe to Occam’s Razor: the explanation relying on the fewest number of unknowns is probably the right one. To the extent that anything can be proven to anyone in 2011, it’s been pretty well proven that Oswald alone killed the president. At this point I guess I’m like everybody else with an opinion on the assassination: I’ll never be convinced otherwise.

And maybe that’s why I got such a kick out of this clip from filmmaker Errol Morris, in which yet another expert on the Kennedy assassination discusses “The Umbrella Man,” the well-dressed bystander who curiously was the only person in Dealey Plaza holding an umbrella aloft on that sunny day. If you check out the video, check out the comments too: About 80 percent appear to come from conspiracy theorists. And remember that these are readers of the New York Times.