Collection of Assorted Newspaper and Magazine Clippings: Jfk Assassination, Conspiracy Theories, Etc

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

There's some little jerk in the FBI

Keepin' papers on me, six feet high

It gets me down

It gets me down.

—THE ROLLING STONES.

Fingerprint File

Widespread hysteria and mass confusion make it imperative that we intelligent thinking people sit down calmly and discuss this curious phenomenon known as paranoia. Without a doubt, it is a serious matter, one that must be analyzed in a cool, rational light, far removed from the heady manias that tend to obscure intellectual insight. So if you'll just bolt

your door, pull down the shades, unplug the phone and check one more time under the bed, we'll get right down to the matter at hand.

First off, notice the extraordinary vagary of popular speech in which so many people today are saving "I'm paranoid" instead of "I'm fearful." Now, the prevalence of amateur psychology notwithstanding, the word paranoia is not being used as a clinical diagnosis. Nor is it being used in its strictest definition, which, according to Webster's Seventh New Collegiate, is: "a rare chronic psychosis characterized

No, paranoia is commonly used today in a very loose manner to define an emotion much too complicated to be called simply fear. In the same way that Watergate has come to mean more than just an apartment building, paranoia has come to describe an entirely new reality. There are, in fact, solid historical reasons why people have discarded the plain, naked word fear in favor of the rich, glittery textures of paranoia.

by systematized delusions of persecution or of grandeur . . . a tendency on the part of individuals or of groups toward excessive or irrational suspiciousness and distrustfulness of others."

Once upon a time, people feared things, and that was a simple, straightforward emotion. When America was young, for example, people were afraid of Indians, witches, redcoats and foreigners. They dealt with their fears by massacring the Indians, burning the witches, kicking out the redcoats and oppressing the foreigners.

Fear stayed a simple, straightforward emotion during the World Wars because the enemy was so clearly defined. Everybody knew just when to fear and why, and most everybody was in agreement on how to act. "We have nothing to fear but fear itself," said F.D.R., who, along with Churchill, listed freedom from fear as one of the Four Freedoms in the Atlantic Charter. We were scared of the Huns and the Japs, who were

afraid of the Yanks and the Texmies, and the whole world was scared together. Perhaps, after all, it is universal fear that old soldiers remember most fondly.

The very last heyday of good old-tashioned fear was the Fitties. Today, we're up to our eyeballs in Fitties nostalgia, about how it was such an innocent, uncomplicated time, the Good Old Days of Golden Oldies, etc. One good reason for such misty recollections is that the Fitties was the last time there was a consensus about fear. Fear then was of Commies, polio and the Bomb. The rest of the time, you liked Ike, stayed off the guy's blue-suede shoes and everything was swell.

the United States, like any Red commissar, could be deceitful. The question was, it the Government was tooling all of the people some of the time with this U-2 business, could it be that the Government was tooling all of the people all of the time about other things?

With bewildering speed, the official definitions of reality became blurred. Beatniks with bongos were running around asking nasty questions, sick comics were poking holes through received truths, everything was breaking down and talling apart. The landmarks of a ten-year nervous breakdown were Selma, the Bay of Pigs, Dallas, Martin Luther King, R.F.K., LSD, hippies, Vietnam, campus unrest, crime in the streets and, finally, Watergate.