Fix the Bus

Is life precise?

Even in this age of computers, can we achieve perfection?

Can we know it all?

We certainly delude ourselves that we can.

The not knowing in life can bother people.

Not knowing can bother us even more if we have attended a professional school that ingrains within us the belief that life is a precise game.

Academics who live in the ivory tower love precision.

That is why they’re there.

They love number theory, utopian worlds and purity in life.

Unfortunately, the real world outside the ivory tower does not often comply.

The real world is messy.

Especially when it comes to the JFK Assassination.

We delude ourselves that we can figure it all out with tools that can measure things.

We obsessively measure and compare.

There has to be an answer there somewhere, we tell ourselves.

The precision that we have achieved with our computers and their sharp, bright screens convinces us of that.

But the more we look, the further we get away.

There are limits to the value derived by excessive examination.

Prominent events are usually there to be seen.

Our mind can deceive itself into believing that significant events are buried within minute or microscopic details.

Besides, we see things.

I’m not talking about dead bodies.

There are many innocent artifacts within a picture that can get our mind going.

The more we look, the more we find.

We exaggerate molehills into mountains.

Our minds are often our worst enemies.

Those of us who “know” that the CIA killed JFK are determined to find evidence for it.

And we are going to find that evidence even if we have to make it up.

The Zapruder film is a good place to start.

Many researchers have pointed to blurs and lack of blurs in various frames as evidence that the CIA altered the film.

Maybe the film was altered.

What I know is this.

JFK and the people in Dealey Plaza lived in the real world.

It was an an analogue world where motion was constantly in play.

Zapruder and his camera were part of that moving world.

We, on the other hand, when we examine the film, do not live in that real world.

We live in an ivory tower outside of it.

What we view are snapshots, selected slices, of what happened. Permit me to explain.

A barge moves down a canal in front of us. On the barge is a theater group performing a play. We watch from one or multiple vantage points. Our job is to figure out what is going on in the play.

We are only permitted to look straight ahead.

To get multiple glimpses of the play, we must necessarily pause and walk away from it.

Within the context of the JFK Assassination play and the Zapruder film which recorded it, these pauses represent the spacing between the individual frames, when the shutter or aperture is closed.

The Zapruder film will always be an incomplete depiction of the play that happened that day.

What we view are imperfect snapshots of reality.

The film can never be as real as what happened that day.

Our frustration mounts when we don’t have all the pieces to the puzzle.

This can bother us to the point that we desire to fill parts in.

We make assumptions.

We see things that aren’t there.

Or we make a bad case out of things that are there.

People aren’t perfect and neither are the machines made by man.

There is inherent imperfection in everything.

The limo did not move at a constant speed, nor did Zapruder’s camera.

Zapruder’s camera was not yanked out of God’s perfect hands to shoot that film.

The film moved across that aperture in an uneven manner. The thickness of the film was not uniform to the micrometer. The gears essential to running the camera were not perfectly symmetrical. There was uneven drag on the film from one frame to the next no matter how small.

The shutter wheel did not come from Krypton. It too was imperfect.

In a perfect world it would move with relentless uniform precision.

But here on Earth, like everyone else, if it damn well feels like slowing down and taking a break, it will.

The lens on Zapruder’s camera was not perfect in all dimensions.

Complete elimination of image distortion is an impossible goal.

Nor was Zapruder’s vertical angulation of the camera from one millisecond to the next.

The wind and the cooler weather affects how a camera performs.

So might the squeezing of the camera case.

When a person in Zapruder’s lens raises their arms, or waves their hands, it only appears from a distance that such movement is uniform.

But life is not that way.

Life abhors uniformity.

Life moves in stops and starts.

Life moves to the left. Life moves to the right.

Life is always changing directions even at the smallest level.

We are the ones who fill in the blanks from a distance and say imperiously: Aha, well this must be the case.

But life doesn’t give two flips what we think.

Life does what it does.

The camera doesn’t always capture everything.

The camera blinks.

Sometimes there are no answers as to why things are the way they are.

Sometimes the truth is in the future.

Copyright 2018 Archer Crosley All Rights Reserved