re: #150 Absalom, Absalom, Obdicut

I like how glum Dallas looks. Who thinks that ‘Dallas’ killed JFK? Like, what the spirit of Dallas possessed Lee Harvey Oswald?

People blamed Dallas for a long time, “city of hate” and all that. Basically had to do with it being a central location for Bircher operations in the South, and the infamous wanted flyer that went out just prior to Kennedy’s visit.

Heard this on NPR yesterday:

After the assassination, a grieving nation turned its anger upon Dallas. The feeling was that if the city leaders didn’t actually pull Lee Harvey Oswald’s trigger, they practically loaded the gun. For the first time in its swaggering existence, Dallas was ashamed of itself.

“I had operators when I went off to college who wouldn’t place my calls to Dallas,” Wright says. “One time in Mexico, we were on a family vacation, a couple at the table next to us asked us where we were from, and when Daddy said Dallas, they just got up and left their meal sitting on the table.”