The Andrew Extravaganza

And I quote:

"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can’t ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can’t lose what you lacked at conception.

Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight.

The real Trinity of Camelot was Look Good, Kick Ass, Get Laid. Jack Kennedy was the mythological front man for a particularly juicy slice of our history. He talked a slick line and wore a world-class haircut. He was Bill Clinton minus pervasive media scrutiny and a few rolls of flab.

Jack got whacked at the optimum moment to assure his sainthood. Lies continue to swirl around his eternal. It’s time to dislodge his run and cast light on a few men who attended his ascent and facilitated his fall.

They were rogue cops and shakedown artists. They were wiretappers and soldiers of fortune and faggot lounge entertainers. Had one second of their lives deviated off course, American History would not exist as we know it.

It’s time to demythologize an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars. It’s time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time.

Here’s to them."

So begins James Elroy’s brilliant novel American Tabloid, an effort that earned Time magazine’s Novel of the Year recognition in 1995. Parker described it as "the most exciting fever dream ever by a conspiracy nut." He also said," It’s absolutely brilliant. I couldn’t stop reading."

A fever dream. That certainly describes the incredible violence and intense, staccato hard-boiled pacing that Ellroy has finally mastered with this novel; however, I think it sells the book short on content.

The book ends as JFK gets assassinated in Dallas. Oswald was there, but he was the fall guy. Ellroy’s version of history has the plan going down as a Mafia/CIA operation with the unspoken consent of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The message was for Bobby Kennedy: back off the crusade against the mob; your brother’s blood is on your hands. The CIA wasn’t involved at the administration level, but several operatives were pissed that JFK held back on the Bay of Pigs.

I’m not going to say that this novel is anywhere close to non-fiction, but I do find the broad ideas much easier to swallow than a lone gunmen theory.

Adios Camelot; I never really saw the appeal anyway.

The Cold Six Thousand is James Ellroy’s follow up to American Tabloid. Two of the three main characters remain intact; one more main character is introduced. The Cold Six Thousand meanders through the aftermath of JFK’s assassination, Vietnam, heroin pushing, and race relations in the south and culminates with the assassinations of MLK Jr. and RFK. It’s good, but a notch below American Tabloid because it can’t match the frenzied pace or the historical intrigue surrounding the material.