Work Text:
And they called you ‘fame-ridden’.
Stubborn, erratic, single-minded.
Another raging Marxist with an ego high above his head and a singular dream of bloodlust for the nation.
Whatever words go for the failing American Dream, they’ll say it.
After all, what else can white suburbians say when you take away their favorite capitalist with three single shots?
But I never truly listened, even though I probably should have.
Instead, I had spent my last few weeks of ninth grade searching up stupid facts with your name pinned to it.
Researching you.
Finding your life,
Your words,
Your story that isn’t being retold by either a nutjob or motherfucking Stephen King, who’s sitting in some fancy chair proclaiming that all you ever wanted was your face printed on a crumbling newspaper.
(“And buy my newest book 11/22/63 as well, just ignore how I’m a known creep who likes to spend his time on Twitter trying to convince people that the Epstein Files don’t exist!”)
But that isn’t true, either, is it?
Because you didn’t do it for that.
If you did, you would have acted much differently, like every other pronounced American assassin before you.
You would have fought more,
You would have admitted to the whole damn thing by then,
Hell! You would have jumped out of that Book State Depository after Kennedy’s head exploded, waving that Mannlicher-Carcano like a freak shouting “sic semper tyrannis!”
But instead, you did none of that,
And now your whole legacy is based on countless conspiracies; meanwhile, Texans spent the first decade after your death harassing your former wife and daughters.
Funny, isn’t it, how you become a completely different person to every American when asked.
To some you’re a heartless monster who took away the most liked man of the whole country,
To others, an intellectual carrying the greatest secret above all that they wish so desperately to know,
But to me, specifically, you were none of those things.
Perhaps you were just a guy.
One caught between one of the most questionable cases of the whole 20th century.
You can call me ‘delusional’ and ‘naive’ when I say this, but I really believed you when you told them that you were just a patsy.
Someone used and discarded like trash, because that’s how the world treated you.
How your mother treated you,
How those social workers treated you,
How those sergeants treated you,
(Marines Build Oswalds)
And they wonder why the ‘American Dream’ they offered never truly worked out.
Because the fact is that it never actually existed.
You knew it, and now I know it.
It was all a fake, a lie that the bourgeoisie tell the proletariats in hopes that you believe them and don’t look at the actual statistics.
(Unless it’s their statistics, of course)
And looking back now, almost sixty-three years after Kennedy and your death, I can see that it never changed for the better.
In fact, it’s gotten so much worse since you’ve been gone.
And what would you think of the fact that they’ve learned absolutely nothing from you?
That countless people are still walking around this country suffering the same consequences you did?
Would you be upset?
Demand action like you tried to do?
Or just look blankly at it all like you do in those grainy images I see when I search your name up?
Would you have ever thought that an idiotic teenage girl would do anything to talk to you about something this stupid?
Who worships the grainy images of you and begs for more scraps from the U.S. government to give me more?
Anything would work when it comes to you.
Sometimes– No, all the time, I wonder who you truly were.
Not what they proclaimed you to be,
Not whatever they tricked your wife into saying,
And sure as hell not what your inconsiderate mother wanted you to be.
Who you were.
What did you dream about as a child?
What were your true opinions on your birth religion, Christianity?
Did you ever have second thoughts about your cruelty to your own half-brother?
Did you really do all this to escape a life you felt was too late to be fulfilled?
Is me doing a psychoanalysis on a long-dead political assassin just pathetic?
Yeah, it probably is, but I’ll keep writing this message in hopes that wherever you are now,
Up in the clouds or down burning in hell,
(Or as we both believed in, nothing at all)
That you’d listen.
That you’d like to hear what I have to say.
And be interested in the fact that I hate them just as well as you did,
That I adore ‘paper-back trash’ and horrible television,
And that I too am a socially awkward teenager in this capitalistic playhouse.
I’m now over a month into tenth grade and still thinking of your ghost.
Mourning who you were and what you could have been if society had actually tried to help you instead of putting all that responsibility on your older brother, Robert.
Mourning a dream where the social workers had taken you and your brothers away from a mother who never truly loved you as you deserved,
Where the educators had helped you with your dyslexia instead of throwing you away like trash,
Where you never dropped out of high school for the Marines and their pathetic hope,
Where you got an education,
A stable job,
Where you went and finally called your brother John to make things right.
Where you didn’t take your trauma out on Marina and treated her well.
Where you got to see both your daughters grow up and be in their lives as their father.
And if you did, a dream where you never took that shot and just went home early.
Because I truly believe in all my heart, sir, that this possibility could have happened for you and more if you were given the chance, which you weren’t.
And I can only dream of the day when I will see you beside my bed,
Solemn and brooding with those dark eyes of yours that burn through my Wikipedia screen like stars in an inconsiderable night,
Where we will sit down together and talk for hours about what you dreamed about as a child,
What your true opinions were on your birth religion,
If you ever had second thoughts on your cruelty to your own half-brother.
And we would forget all about Stephen King sitting in his plastic chair,
Telling the world that all you were was simply fame-ridden.
[PASTY /ˈpatsē/ - A PERSON WHO IS EASILY TRICKED, CHEATED, OR MADE TO TAKE THE BLAME FOR SOMETHING THEY DID NOT DO]