10: The Magic of Reality

Within a few years of its appearance in 1964, the Warren Report had become a joke, a punchline. And the funniest thing about it, according to the critics, was the Single-Bullet Theory: the idea that a single bullet fired by Oswald had gone through both President Kennedy and Governor John Connally. The conspiracy theorists had a name for this bullet. They called it the Magic Bullet, because they believed that no bullet in the real world could possibly have behaved the way the Warren Commission said this bullet had behaved. If the conspiracy theorists were right to believe that, then the whole Warren Report was a fiction. If on the other hand the Warren Commission was right about the single bullet, that would tell us something important about conspiracy theory. It would tell us that the conspiratorial worldview is too limited and one-dimensional, and that it fails to grasp how rich and surprising the world can sometimes be. If a single bullet did go through both Kennedy and Connally, then reality itself is more magical than conspiracy theorists are capable of imagining …

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