A Little Bit of This and That

Today I wanted to try something new for dinner. A few weeks ago I saw a casserole recipe that Jackie Kennedy had served at the White House that looked pretty darn good. As loathe as I am to admit it, eastern Montana much more resembles the Midwest than the mountain states as far as cuisine goes. Casserole is a core part of the culture and features prominently at church potlucks, and any Midwestern housewife can work miracles with sour cream or jello..

As I was chopping chives and boiling pasta, it struck me how much the theories about the JFK assassination being kicked around online resemble a casserole. There’s a little bit of this and that, you measure with your heart, you see if you can use up odds and ends from the fridge, and you keep adding things until it looks right. The key word in the mix is, “feeling.” There are more theories about the JFK assassination than the Midwest has casseroles, and most of them are based on emotional reasoning, like suspicion and fear.

The theory that Jackie herself shot her husband, despite her clearly not having done so in the Zapruder film, surfaced twice over the last two weeks on either the Reddit sub or the Facebook groups. Thankfully, most people reject such a silly notion outright, but there are a lot of folks who are attracted to other fringe theories, even if the one regarding Jackie is too far out there for them.

There are a lot of folks who view the people wrapped up in the assassination as objects, painting them in a one-dimensional manner that best serves their pet theory. They so easily forget that these folks were real people, and they suffered real consequences from being accused. The little left that my Aunt Mary had after Uncle Guy scorched their lives into the ground was further heavily trampled by the grandiose proclamations made by Jim Garrison.

So, in memory of Jackie, who most definitely did not shoot her husband, I made a little bit of something she loved, remembered she was a real human being, and fed my family, just like she did.