JayC3

“Attention must be paid.” — Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman ​Lee Harvey Oswald. Born October 18, 1939. New Orleans, Louisiana. His father died two months before he arrived. That's the first thing you need to know. He came into the world already owed something. ​He never collected. ​His mother moved him eleven times before he was seventeen. Eleven schools. Eleven sets of strangers. The psychiatrist who evaluated him at twelve called him emotionally disturbed due to lack of normal family life. An observation rather than an indictment of the circumstances that produced it. Very American. ​He joined the Marines at seventeen. Taught himself Russian in his bunk. Worked as a radar operator on the U-2 spy plane project in Japan, either the bio of a lone nut or the most interesting Cold War resume, depending on which files you believe are classified. He got an honorable discharge, told his mother he was going to New Orleans, and boarded a boat to England. ​Then he defected to the Soviet Union. ​He walked into the American Embassy in Moscow to renounce his citizenship. The Soviets didn't want him either; they gave him a six-day visa and told him to leave. He slit his wrist in his hotel bathtub rather than go back. The Soviets, fearing an incident, gave him a work visa, an apartment in Minsk, a radio factory job, and a stipend. He hated it there too. ​He married a Russian woman named Marina. Moved back to America. The US government gave him a repatriation loan of $435.71 and asked no further questions about why a former radar operator on classified spy planes had spent three years in the USSR. ​This is the part that should bother you more than it does. ​He couldn't hold a job. Beat his wife. Tried to go to Cuba and couldn't get in. Handed out Fair Play for Cuba pamphlets on a street corner in New Orleans while photographed by people who may or may not have been intelligence assets. Moved to Dallas. Got a job at the Texas School Book Depository sixteen days before the presidential motorcade route was announced. ​November 22, 1963. Three shots or two. From the sixth floor or the grassy knoll or both. The Warren Commission said lone gunman. The House Select Committee on Assassinations said probably a conspiracy. The files are still not fully released in 2026. Sixty-three years later. Make of that what you will. ​Two days after the assassination Jack Ruby walked into a police station and shot Oswald on live television. Ruby was a nightclub owner with documented mob ties. He said he did it to spare Jackie Kennedy the trauma of a trial. He died in prison of cancer before his appeal was heard. ​The most important murder of the twentieth century was solved by a man who was immediately murdered by another man who immediately died. ​Here is what Lee Harvey Oswald actually was: a broke, fatherless, restless American kid who the country failed at every possible turn, who the government used and discarded, who couldn't find a place that would have him in America or the Soviet Union or Cuba, who beat his wife in a Dallas boarding house and worked a minimum wage job and may or may not have killed a president and was dead at twenty-four. ​He is every American political failure dressed up in one biography. The poverty. The neglect. The military that takes you and discards you. The intelligence apparatus that watches you and never explains why. The violence. The television. The quick clean ending that raises more questions than it answers. ​Nothing has changed. The files are still sealed. The powerful still escape accountability. The broke and the restless still get used and discarded. The motorcades still roll. ​Lee Harvey Oswald would recognize 2026 immediately. That's the most frightening thing about him. ​Patron saint of everything America produces and refuses to look at. ​Special Thanks: ​Stephen Sondheim (@sondheimlyrics) Tim Fattig (@timfattig) John & Amanda Milius (@AmandaMilius)

From the heart of Coachville Gardens Mobile Park, Ypsilanti, Michigan — James Newell Osterberg Jr.

"Get Pissed, Destroy"

Michael Tracey collection, eh'

Fantastic post.