The Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. thing REALLY isn’t happening at this stage. He’s too eccentric, too admired by toxic Trumpies, too disliked by MSNBC’s Laurence O’Donnell, too caught up in conspiracy interpretations, and his speaking voice is impossible.

If Woody Harrelson had worn this hat a few months ago, okay, but it’s kinda crazy to align himself now after most of the thoughtful centrists have said “naah, later.” It calls his judgment into question.

COVID renegade Eric Clapton is another Kennedy admirer/donor.

Kennedy is polling decently (i.e., around 17% or 18%) because many Dems and independents are profoundly uncomfortable with re-electing an octogenarian President — a guy who will be 86 when he leaves office on 1.20.29. They’re terrified of another Woodrow Wilson presidency, and especially of Kamala Harris stepping in if, God forbid, something were to happen.

You know what I would respect and salute? If Woody had worn a Chris Christie hat. Christie is the only Republican primary candidate who talks straight about The Beast. An adaptable, transactional politician, okay, but one with actual balls.

The late Abraham Zapruder was a good fellow and family man who, through sheer happenstance and an odd quirk of fate, captured the most famous home movie footage of all time.

But in my heart of hearts I can’t help regretting that Zapruder was the one who happened to be filming from that Dealey Plaza slope on 11.22.63. In my heart of hearts I wish that a more devotional movie nerd had been standing there instead of unexceptional, penny-pinching Abe.

8mm home movie cameras were the default choice for tens of millions of families in the mid 20th Century, but the 8mm images were jumpy and hazy and basically looked like shit compared to 16mm, and Abraham Zapruder KNEW that.

Did Zapruder care about the difference in quality? Above and beyond being a decent man who loved his family, I’ll tell you one thing Abe cared about. Like most responsible-minded fathers and business owners, he cared about SAVING MONEY.

You know who cared much more about visual values and cinematic quality? 17 year old Steven Spielberg, a fledgling filmmaker who in late ‘63 was living in Arizona with his family (and who shot his first feature, Firelight, the following year).

If only Spielberg had somehow made his way to Dallas (a school trip? a special family adventure?) and shot the assassination footage in 16mm color instead of Zapruder with his boilerplate 8mm family-man camera!

On top of which Zapruder’s amateurish eye for framing was atrocious. He allowed the Kennedy limo to sink to the very bottom of the developed image during the low 300 cycle of frames (the final 15 or 20 before the explosive head shot). 85% to 90% of these frames captured almost nothing but green grass and a few spectators.

The truth is that unexceptional, well-meaning Abe almost managed to eliminate JFK and Jackie plus John and Nellie Connolly altogether, but they clung to the bottom of the frame for dear life.

So Zapruder earned two failing grades — one for using a vagueiy shitty 8mm camera when he could have bought and used a vastly superior, professional-grade 16mm device, and the second for exhibiting piss-poor visual framing instincts.

I know this article sounds a bit silly, but imagine what the JFK assassination community would have had to work with if a serious cinema worshipper, a devotional, Gregg Toland-like crazy man with a 16mm Arriflex or Bell & Howell, had been standing in Abe’s shoes.

The MI:7 shortfall has already been kicked around, but what in blazes is happening in this world? Aced out by Sound of Freedom, okay, but by anemic Haunted Mansion?

Shakeman, Bloomfield Ave., Verona, N.J. —3:45 pm.

…for not just the diminished returns of Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Daryl F. Zanuck’s “monumental mouse” (Judith Crist’s term) but about the dwindling power of the old studio system itself.

This morning HE commenter Dean Treadway wrote something curious in the thread for “Annoying Beefalo on Baltic Beach.” He wrote “you must have been a terrible bully in school.”

Au contraire — it was often the other way around. During my horrible gulag youth I was occasionally victimized by bullies, both in fraternal and official realms. I was a provocateur, true, but the social punishment measures were brutal, even fiendish.

“Hardly a bully,” I replied. “I frequently felt alone and isolated and picked on. Mainly starting in my teens. Not always but often among rancid, herd-instinct groups in junior high and senior high (i.e., mainly in toxic New Jersey, hardly at all in Fairfield County).

“I consequently withdrew to some extent. I felt much more attached to movies and TV shows than to real life, which struck me as characterized by tiresome duty and drudgery and regulated boredom with very little in the way of discovery and adventure or, as Jim Morrison put it, “true sailing”.

And yet I had a perverse streak from an early age, rarely adhering to the straight and narrow. An instinctive oddball contrarian thing. Perhaps on some level an anarchist instinct, but more simply a healthy anti- authoritarian urge.

The first long word I learned to spell was anti–disestablishmentarianism.

Example: My Cub Scout group was hand painting fake-leather folders for personal diaries — we were simply supposed to try our hand at stylized caligraphy with the word “DIARY”’ front and center plus our names and birthdates at the bottom. I wrote the word “DAIRY” because I found it amusing.

I’m still pushing back against the bullies, except now they’re mainly from the ranks of Millennials and Zoomers.