The month of November, occasionally a disastrous time for the Nation, for my City, and for my loved ones, has been rather good to us this year.  Barack Obama is to be our New President, and already his decisions appear (cautiously) promising.  George W. Bush, the undoubted worst President in our History, is preparing in his habitually sly way to leave another failed job and move on blithely to some new disaster, leaving the Nation, it is true, in economic shambles.  Even that last situation, with Obama coming to office, has promise because the absurd theory of Supply Side Economics would seem to have been exploded for at least another generation.

   Personally, my younger son returned last week to live in the Bay Area, after many years of separation in Nevada, and we had a reunion.  Then, too.  I came into a small sum of money unexpectedly this month, perhaps with the promise of more  to come in the New Year.  I can certainly use it. I may actually be able to live out a month soon without going pretty uncontrollably broke and further in debt. 

   [Possibly, I shall be able to scrape together enough to take my little brood  to Tommy's Joint for what is the most reasonably priced commercial Thanksgiving Dinner in the City.]

   But, of course, there remain eight days to go.  Anything, in my experience, can happen in the month of November:  National  and local  assassinations, massacres, further economic declines, the death of loved ones.  I should not dwell on the possibilities.

   And so, as midnight approaches, I think back on the Assassination of JFK, which obsessed me for years.  Often, I thought that the disaster of his death, from which one can trace the rise of the Neocons, and all the others I've mentioned, was receding in the national consciousness, in addition to my own.  But then, some new revelation, a legal hearing, a witness, an overlooked theory, a photograph, a declassified documents, a deathbed confession would bring the most debated assassination of the last century back, front and center.

   This November, only a senile old sheriff's "spoof" novel, on  heels of  an abandoned transcript  said to have been concocted for a movie  about Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby that Dallas District Attorney Wade was considering, stirs the old Assassination Stew.

   Though the pain of November 22, 1963, remains a never forgotten ache, I thought that I would post, over the next several days, a series of my essay-style reviews dealing directly with that event from which America has never recovered.

    As Mary McCarthy wrote so memorably at the time:  "All right, we are Romans."  The Rise of our Roman Empire ensued from the event; George W. Bush ensured with remarkable swiftness its Decline and Fall.

    Here are the articles (still relevant, I think) which I'm going to post:

           A review of Oliver Stone's brilliant, largely misunderstood and trashed JFK.

           A review of a fascinating German-made documentary curiosity:  DEAR FIDEL.

           A collection of  research  upon the tantalizing if preposterous DEAR FIDEL.

   In a few moments, I am about to post the JFK piece.  The others will follow on the morrow and Monday.

   Keep me company until Midnight, will you,  and in the remaining seven days until we are safely out of November?