One Second Everyday

Thursday's discussion about how videos change the way we view historical events reminded me of the app that I have called One Second Everyday (ISE) (http://1secondeveryday.com). It is an app that cuts one second out of any video that you take throughout one day, and mashes the one-second clips together into a sideshow-like video. You can pick only one clip per day, so you have to be really selective.

This is like the Zapruder film because with videos, you can only get one side of the whole picture. If I choose a clip of Memorial stadium during the Illinois Marathon, it is easy for a viewer to assume that all I did that day was sit in the stadium among the crowd of runners. But there is always more to my day than just the one second that is stored in the 1SE app. You can talk to people that I've met that day to see what else I've done that day. You can go to restaurants and libraries to find my paper trail. But it is much easier to just accept the one second clip as a full representation of my day.

With the Zapruder film, there is a limited view that the viewers of the video get to see.
Physically, you can only see the right side of the car with JFK in it, and not much else in the surroundings. You can't see Lee, or Zapruder himself, or the bullet that hits Kennedy. I guess this has the opposite effect of One Second Everyday, because the lack of image evidence lead to conspiracy theories and complicated the event, while the 1SE app tends to simplify a day's events into one moment. The Zapruder film is still similar to 1SE because recording something and having a purely factual piece of evidence prompts people to come up with fictions to make sense of it.

People that pump up Lee

In Libra, Bobby Dupard and David Ferrie are similar in that they both point out coincidences to Lee in order to get Lee to assassinate famous people. Lee, who is trying to get in the history books and is probably seeing himself as the main character of a novel, thrives off of this feeling of coincidence, that the events around him revolve around him.
On page 275, Dupard points out that Walker is coming to live in Dallas. "'You think it's some coincidence this Walker come to live in Dallas? Get off, man. He is here because the fury and the hate is here. This is the city he made up in his mind.'" While Dupard is saying it's not a coincidence, this line will certainly make Lee think that it is a coincidence.

We can see this mentality take hold in Lee's mind after Lee and his family moved to Neely Street. Here, he has already purchased a 6.5-millimeter Italian rifle under the name of Hidell and is preparing to assassinate General Walker: "What a sense of destiny he had, locked in the miniature room, creating a design, a network of connections. It was a second existence, the private world floating out to three dimensions"(p. 277). Lee can sense the connections that he's making and he sees his private world expanding into the real world, which is testament to the fact that Lee constantly observes himself from the outside from a historical perspective.

David Ferrie points out these coincidences to Lee even more blatantly: "You spend most of your day on the sixth floor, don't you? His car is coming along Houston right straight at you. Then dipping away down Elm. Moving slowly and grandly past. The one place in the world where Lee Oswald works. The one time of day when he sits alone in a window and eats his lunch. There's no such thing as coincidence. We don't know what to call it, so we say coincidence. It happens because you make it happen."

In this passage, Ferrie says there is no such thing as coincidence, which is really saying that Lee is a part of some greater planned narrative that he will follow, that there's nothing left to chance.  He is also saying that such opportunities arise solely because of Lee's own actions. This puts Lee into the same frame of mind that he'll be making history pretty soon, which is something that Lee has dreamed about for a very long time.

Sympathy for Jack Ruby

In class someone mentioned that Jack Ruby was portrayed in depth as being rough in his actions but insecure and emotional inside. I think DeLillo is setting up Ruby as the perfect person to kill Oswald. Even before Jack Ruby kills Oswald, DeLillo is already preparing excuses for readers to make for Jack Ruby. Two of Jack's traits that set him up to kill Oswald are his naive aggressiveness and his emotional pride, both of which made him a sympathetic character for me.

Jack Ruby is violent in a defensive way, which can be seen on page 264, where Jack is attacking a man who had "grab-assed one of the waitresses." Jack's anger pushes him to extreme lengths and soon Jack isn't defending the waitress who'd been groped but rather trying to harm the perpetrator. We can see that Jack's anger can push him to do irrational things and go the extra mile.

Jack is also full of emotion. He is very considerate of others, and this can be seen on page 267, where he buys sandwiches for the policemen: "These cops of ours deserve the best because they put their lives on the line every time they walk out the door." Although it is mentioned that Jack does this to stay on the good side of the police force, his respect for the policemen seems genuine. "He felt blood seeping into his shoe. But just seeing these men in uniform, clean shaven, he wanted to say it is the proudest feeling of my life being a friend of the police in the most pro-American city anywhere in the world" (p. 268).

Additonally, Jack is sympathetic character because we learn of a lot of his physical flaws.
Jack keeps taking Preludin pills, which is an appetite suppressant. On page 257: "Jack took a Preludin with a glass of water at the bar for a favorable future outlook." We sympathize with Jack Ruby here because he is trying to overcome one of his flaws and is looking to the future.
Jack is also balding: "He didn't like being without his hat because the balding head is here for all to see. He took scalp treatments that he felt were doing some good although the doubted it" (p. 267).

I feel like now in the chapter "In Dallas",  when Jack Ruby shoots Lee, we are less likely to see Jack Ruby as a bad guy.