Who Killed Kennedy

Solares Hill, the free weekly paper subsumed into the Key West Citizen's empire has not been my favorite paper for a while. I used to enjoy the Thursday read when Nancy Klingener used to edit the paper. She was the best to come after David Ethridge got tired of running the paper and faded away to retire someplace Up North. These days I feel the paper is being edited by a reporter, and to me that's not a great thing. A good reporter isn't necessarily a good editor and it shows in the weak articles Solares Hill seems to be ready to settle for. there are those who will tell it was only great decades ago when everything in key west was great and it has all been polluted mercilessly by outsiders and people of low morals from elsewhere.Be that as it may Solares Hill has been off on a bizarre tangent all it's own lately, reporting sporadically on the Key west links to the John F Kennedy assassination in Dallas lo those many years ago. This past week (Solares Hill appears nowadays as a supplement to the Sunday Citizen)the paper offered a solution to the enduring mystery of who killed the President in 1963. In various articles over the past couple of years the paper has woven an incredibly complex tale drawing in various Cuban exiles and anti-Castro personalities in South Florida and the Keys, including the training on No Name Key of the potential Bay of Pigs invaders and it talked at some length about the CIA front company operating on Stock Island to monitor Cuba and infiltrate agents onto the island. The articles are numerous and the links are incredibly complex.

If I have it right Solares Hill suggests that Cuban exiles posing as Communist sympathizers of Castro hoodwinked Lee Harvey Oswald to murder the President, and they were planning in spiriting him away after the assassination, a plan thwarted by Oswald's early arrest. Apparently the murder involved Cuban exiles who were angry about Kennedy's lack of enthusiasm for an invasion of Cuba and hoped to pin the murder on Castro, thus prompting an all out retaliation by the US. They were apparently backed up (this is a complicated long drawn out story and I may be missing some key points here) by members of the mob who were also keen to get back to Cuba to pick up where they had been forced to leave off by the fall of the Batista government.

One can well imagine the Mob doing the deed and saying nothing, but it's harder to imagine the Cuban exile keeping their mouths shut about such a monumental thing. It appears word did leak out, but I suppose the Anglo press in the US isn't going to pick up the hints and rumors that Solares Hill's correspondents have managed. I find the story fascinating, I confess, even as I wish Solares Hill would give this sort of coverage to the daily dramas of the Keys, more consistently and more forthrightly than they have lately. Nevertheless I also hope they get recognition for this crazy plausible tale of who it actually might have been that organized the unsolved mystery of who killed Kennedy.

Mailboxes Etcetera

This post is along overdue promise for Celia who wanted mailboxes on my blog. I now know where to find a vast assortment to spice up my blog when I feel like it.

I used to think the idea of a mail box project was overwhelming until I ended up on Caribbean Drive on Summerland Key. Every other mailbox was personalized:

This one was one of those East Coast style lighthouses built on land. Not the metal screw type used in the Florida Keys rock:

I liked the mermaid with her rouged cheeks and lips in a permanent pout:

I hope I can get closer than this to a manatee this winter, above, or this grouper (?) below.

While I grant you this stand pipe isn't technically a mail box I have never previously seen such a thing do double duty as a house number marker:

And to close out this series of tropical mail boxes here is mine on Indies Road on Ramrod Key. In the picture I managed to mask the fact that I recently dropped a coconut on it when pruning the tree above it, giving it a large, unsightly dent. My wife, who warned me of potential missile damage as I pruned the fruit had not a harsh word to say to me after I bombed our own mailbox. It is thanks to such forbearance that our marriage survives.

Mind you it took a fair bit of work on my part to bury this bugger in a bed of cement. We may tire of the decorated box but I promise you, that post is there to stay, come hell or high water.

Thanksgiving

Im Abendrot- Evening's Glow

Through want and joy we have walked hand in hand;
We are both resting from our travels now, in the quiet countryside

Around us the valleys fold up, already the air grows dark,
Only two larks still soar wistfully into the balmy sky

Come here and let them fly about; soon it is time for sleep
We must not go astray in this solitude

O spacious, tranquil peace, so profound in the gloaming.
How tired we are of travelling – is this perchance death?

( Joseph Eichendorff )

In Im Abendrot, at the line “can this then be death,” Richard Strauss quotes the Transfiguration motif from one of the tone poems that made him famous, Tod und Verklärung (“Death and Transfiguration”). Strauss wrote in 1894 about Tod und Verklärung: “The hour of death approaches, the soul leaves the body in order to find gloriously achieved in everlasting space those things which could not be fulfilled here below.” On his deathbed, Strauss said: “Dying is just as I composed it in Tod und Verklärung.”

Thanks to my wife for learning to understand me and the patience to put up with me and the promise to be there at the end. It's been an excellent trip. Long may it last.

Dry Tortugas Thankfully

As you read this I hope to be with half a dozen or so friends settling into a campsite at the Dry Tortugas National Park. The house, the vegetable garden and the Bonneville (without the ignition key!), are in the care of a house sitter and for four glorious days and three cool nights we will be under canvas somewhere here.
The blog will have to soldier on without me, as will Key West PD until I get back on the Saturday afternoon ferry and rush off to my uniform waiting for me in my locker when I take up the reins of civilized life once again. I am very happy to be escaping the bonds of civilization for a few days, and I very much appreciate this ideal wilderness we have just 70 miles (110 kilometers) from Key West. At Fort Jefferson there is no food, no water, no cell phones, no nothing very much unless we load it on the ferry.
The weather forecast advises us a cold front is about ready to hit the Keys and we can expect rain in squalls with wind and cooling temperatures, possibly into the mid 60s at night (17C). We have a supply of extra blankets and red wine to fight off frost bite. As you might imagine, with half a dozen women in the party we will leave nothing to chance. Last May I was a pack mule getting our modest heap of stuff from the ferry to the campground.To those that wish it, I hope you get all the snow, yellow leaves and changes of season you can stand. To those forced to stand in line in airports, or in traffic jams on freeways, felicitations, I'm sure your families appreciate the sacrifice. To riepe, I apologize in advance for the posts the next few days which will look exactly like normal but I won't be available to be your whipping boy. Tell your bud in Alaska that if God and I were on speaking terms I'd be asking for a Government Writer's Program like the WPA had, for Christmas. Failing that perhaps we can ask China to annex us to Hong Kong and send us Cuban doctors to take care of our health needs. Remember: They may have a perfect welfare safety net in Norway but they don't have seascapes like these: Till next time then, I'm off to find a campsite and eat turkey on my very own, more-or-less private, desert island. Happy Thanksgiving Everybody! (Even Canadians who've hogged the turkey and had theirs in October, greedy guts).

Cudjoe Stumble

Last spring my colleague Noel told me of some adventures he had with friends on all terrain vehicles on Cudjoe Key. (Cudjoe is pronounced Anglo style: Kud-joe, not Coo-joe or even Coo-hoe, just so you know).It had been my ambition to check out the trails, but summer intervened, season of heat humidity mosquitoes and standing water. I decided November was a good time to check this place out, as the rains have dried up and one has to hope the mangrove bogs have too. The trail looked promising at the start, with a nice big red diamond marking the end of navigable pavement.
I paused to allow the ibis to do their foraging... ...and took off down what promised to be a simple enough exploration. The trail was hard packed, quite possibly an old planned development that never happened, and left behind a usable roadway. The bicycle coped just fine though I was tempted to ditch it. The problem with cycling the backwoods is that you are essentially using a vehicle and it demands your attention. The benefit is that you get where you are going faster, which, as benefits go, isn't much good if you are just out for a ramble. Pink Crocs haul you along just fine if you are walking.I have heard some people marvel at my audacity wandering the woods of the Lower Keys, as they fear rattlesnakes, and my defense that I have never met a rattler therefore they don't exist cuts no ice for them. Too bad because these areas are a great place to go for a walk, especially mid week at midday when no one else is around.
Besides, I am not out to chase, kill or harass snakes so I figure they will mind their own business if I walk with my eyes open. So far so good.

And then naturally we met our first impediment, standing water. This particular trail is pretty close to tidal waters on the edge of the island so I guess it is more prone to flooding. At first I planned to ride on through ( and wash the bicycle at home with copious amounts of fresh water), but a glance up the trail revealed the awful truth.This wasn't just a puddle, this was a state of mind. All I could see was a trail of water disappearing into the horizon. I surrendered. It wasn't the ride I had intended, but I got to enjoy a morning out, and as it's only five miles from my house I will have to come back later in the winter, deeper into the dry season, to see what other trails may poke their heads above water.

Going Rouge

I found this video on Huff Post. I do not believe it is a Saturday Night Live spoof, though perhaps it should be. On the one hand it is funny, and perhaps people who watch television have been exposed to this kind of stuff more than I have, and it may well be old hat to them. On the other hand it rather freaks me out. These are people who believe without evidence, and the same kind of conspiracy theory nonsense came from my side of the aisle as George Bush came down to the end of his second term- that stuff about martial law and an end to elections and all that. The endless lack of faith in the US Constitution and that binds us all together.

But beyond the general, unanswerable malaise expressed by these inarticulate Sarah Palin supporters, what we hear in this video is the voice of belief over empiricsm, the certainty of knowing without knowledge, the yearning for an America that never was, that has been promoted by the banksters and the traders and the clever operators who have traded these people's real work in factories, in sweat shops and mills and sold them a fantasy instead and sent their labor to the cheaper markets of the Far East. And now they lose their hold on reality because if they look reality in the face their America was taken from them by Americans and replaced by a bunch of false idols. What a nightmare. And the President isn't going to toss these yeast people (see J H Kunstler) a life belt. They drown in the rust belt of their dreams.

Call me a dreamer but this video summarises for me why I am ashamed of what our leaders, all of them, are doing to this country. Look into the eyes of these true believers and ask yourself if anyone really gives a shit about what they want or care about or believe in, be it nonsense or not. I don't think Sarah Palin cares anymore than President Barack Obama has shown any sign of giving a toss about them. I wouldn't have a clue how to reassure them that they can ever have America back, because as I go off for yet one more overtime shift at my secure job, I have no idea what the future holds for any of us, except that Goldman Sachs doesn't have anything good planned for us, that is for sure. And what do you suppose Sarah Palin's relationship to Wall Street might be?