There’s not a lot fresh that can be written about Lee Harvey Oswald. He was a weirdo, a loner, an idiot kicked out of the Marines for firing indiscriminately into a jungle in the Philippines when he was supposed to be guarding a base, a communist who went through all sorts of bureaucratic bullshit to defect to the Soviet Union only to realize communism sucks and move back home to the US.

Pretty much every news site on Wednesday the internet marked the 60th anniversary of Oswald showing up to work at the Texas School Book Depository on Elm Street in Downtown Dallas and probably fired three shots killing President John F Kennedy, something we neglected to cover due to various circumstances, one of which again was that we weren’t really sure what we could’ve written that was particularly original. Especially when the legacy outlets like the New York Times, NBC, CBS, etc had their own archival coverage to draw from to the commemorate the occasion.

It was one of the most significant moments in American history, probably second only to World War II in the 20th century, changing the course of future events in ways few can contemplate. The assassination of John F Kennedy would absolutely still have been the subject of so much coverage for the last six decades whether or not Oswald was himself shot dead two days later.

Compare it with Abraham Lincoln’s death at the hand of a similarly unhinged, megalomaniacal asshole who himself was shot dead several days later by an overeager avenger before the justice system could get to the bottom of it. It was literally a conspiracy as in partisan agents of the Confederate States of America conspired to eliminate the President of the United States of America.

But, you know, different time and culture aside, were there still people obsessed with the how and why Lincoln was shot 60 years later? Was anyone in 1925 really ruminating about how Union Army Sergeant Boston Corbett shot Booth dead when he was under orders to take him alive?

This isn’t to say there were zero questions about it, with some suspecting involvement by Confederate leadership, obvious enough of culprits given that the fighting was still ongoing despite Lee’s surrender in Virginia days earlier. In 1937 an Austrian chemist named Otto Eisenschiml wrote a book saying a conspiracy had been orchestrated by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to knock Lincoln off for going too easy on the rebels, obviously it didn’t catch on.

Overall however the means, method, and motive were accepted by the vast majority of the populace because Booth’s accomplices were tried, convicted, and executed in the right order. Americans got more or less the answers they needed and deserved after the Bad Time at Ford’s Theater.

It also helped that Booth screamed “Sic Semper Tyrannis!” and then jumped down and breaking his leg rather than mumbling “I didn’t shoot anybody” and “I’m just a patsy.” Booth had a flair for drama.

This fucking guy. Tempted to call him the true father of QAnon and the rest of conspiracy theory culture but that would’ve been an exaggeration. Not a huge one. What isn’t in doubt is that he could’ve saved those of us who reside mostly in reality a lot of headaches if he had just stayed at his strip club and gotten drunk instead of silencing the only person definitively connected to the assassination of President John F Kennedy. So much of the fringe in the last 60 years has been animated by Jack Ruby’s bullet. In a lot of ways denying the justice system the chance to work Oswald was more damaging to the American psyche than Oswald’s original crime.

And without getting deep into the weeds here about Ruby’s history and connections we’ll just say that it is extremely hard to square his murder of Lee Harvey Oswald as simply motivated by revenge.

It’s like sixty years ago on Wednesday was the exclamation point but sixty years ago on Friday was the question mark that will hang over us forever even as the living memory of JFK fades.