the corner office

Rule 1 of waking up in life: don't believe everything you're told.
Rule 2 of waking up in life: don't disbelieve everything you're disinclined to believe.

SABC3 just showed JFK. I remember the big hoo-ha when it first came out waaaay back when. I think it's safe to say that just about everyone I know, subsequent to that movie, believes there's some sort of conspiracy around John F Kennedy's murder. Unlike 1991, this time around I was able to hop onto the Internet, type the words 'Jim Garrison' into a search engine, and see a great deal of pro and con discussion and 'evidence'. The movie loses some of its appeal when you realise there's a great deal of material which vilifies Garrison and debunks many of the movie's theories and disputes many of the purported facts. All of a sudden, you're not quite sure what to think.

Of course, you're watching a movie that's precisely about how powerful the US government is and the extent to which it will pander to vested interests (can you spell Iraq?). The movie went to great lengths to show just how much effort went into discrediting Jim Garrison.

So was he the megalomaniac twat some sites portray him as, or was he the upright bloke that Oliver Stone presented? More broadly, does every discredited bit of conspiracy 'evidence' mean that there is no evidence of a conspiracy at all? To what extent do ridiculous fabrications simply serve to muddy the real evidence? How much 'evidence' from both sides can you trust? Reality and truth are rather tenuous concepts and heavily susceptible to overt and subconscious agendas. To what extent are we manipulated to believe what people want us to believe, to what extent do we simply like the idea of things being more suspicious than they are at face value?

Problem is, unless you have a great deal of time to research and personally verify facts, it hardly seems safe to hold a strong opinion one way or the other. Which is hardly fun, but there you go.