Not the same country we were born in

I interviewed Joan Mellen about her book "A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK's Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History." In it, she mentioned Garrison's remark that he got obsessed with the Kennedy assassination because he was under the illusion he was living in the same country he was born in.

Don't know what to make of that book. I think he and Mellen may well be on to something. Certainly it looks as if higher-ups in our government were covering up something. The case attracts so many cranks, you don't know whether to trust a writer who comes along with the latest theory of what happened.

I know the feeling Garrison spoke of, however. I felt it--like a blow in the stomach--the day the feds burned down the Branch Davidian compound at Waco. I remember seeing it on TV at work. I was the only one at the public radio station where I work who was horrified by it. The consensus was that the Branch Davidians were a bunch of religious kooks who deserved whatever they got. That opinion has never wavered since then here in the media, through the days of the transparent government cover-up and the pathetic hearings the Stupid Party organized to "investigate" what happened. We are paid, after all, to be mouthpieces for Power, and God forbid that anybody should step out of line and ask inconvenient questions.

When I saw those burning buildings, I felt it in the pit of my stomach: this isn't the country I was born in and grew up in. That feeling of alienation, of being a stranger in a strange land, has only increased in the years since.