The Cain Scrutiny
McGrath, Joseph P.
"The Cain Scrutiny" and in the box for the following Tuesday, she 'rote, " Jim—Dinner." Tuesday fell on 'the second day of that week. Late in the afternoon the sun put on a gaudy show—its reddish-hued light...
...But in the end it is difficult to imagine Cooper's thin volume making a dent in the myth...
...is the familiar riposte...
...ihe importance of thoroughly investigating assas- sinations central to our cultural self-image could hardly be better illustrated than it is in a forthcoming book...
...Although each of these leads is more or less intriguing, none of them, nor the aggregate, carries weight enough to refute the explanations of the "official version...
...and this despite Johnson's own suspicion that Castroite Cubans were involved in the assassination...
...And since the events in Dallas are considered by many a watershed in American political history, to ignore sincere pleas to reopen the investigation may prove highly corrosive to the social fabric...
...flawless documentary record of the year 1066...
...Of necessity, many of Professor Cooper's own interpretations are highly speculative...
...TO BE CONTINUED NEXT ISSUE Joseph P. McGrath The Cain Scrutiny None dare call it reaction, but many otherwise sen- sible people have allowed themselves to be stampeded into an unreasoned acceptance of the Warren Report in response to the wild and paranoid charges of the professional conspiracy-mongers...
...his last chapter attacks this problem head on...
...The past is prelude and the Warren Report, like the Genesis Report before it, is essentially a work of contemporary history...
...Cooper is right to call it the "smoking gun...
...Says Cooper, "this is hardly a 3-Star rating in the Guide Michelin—or a spur to fratricide...
...You will search the Genesis Report in vain for answers to these questions...
...Who knows, for example, whether "Cain" [from the Hebrew "Kayin," or "Smith"] was an assumed name, as Cooper suggests...
...If Did Cain Act Alone...
...Did Cain Act Alone?, by Mark Cooper, drives the point home with jarring clarity, and while the book's message is widely resonant, it has immediate significance for the House Special Committee on Assassinations...
...Last week," Jane said while they lingered over their coffee, "you started telling me about a former patient of yours who died, but then you stopped...
...The American Spectator February 1978 25 The technical problems inherent in such a study do not seem to have fazed Mr...
...Every member of the House Special Committee on Assassinations should read it, study it, and absorb its lessons...
...Although such pressure may now seem an abstraction, it was then a palpable presence...
...But Jim arrived too late to see it...
...Sloane Coffin Remembers Vic Gold Roone Arledge's Small-Screen Monster Robert A. Scalapino Why We Should Stand By Taiwan John P. Sisk Sex and Love in the "New Age" the Lord says, "If anyone slays Cain, vengeance shall be taken upon them tenfold...
...Cooper's thesis will be quick to seize upon his assertion here—that the "Lord would naturally steer clear of a sacrifice of cereal, which has been found to have almost no nutritional value"—as an anachronistic irrelevancy...
...It is content to tell its little story, and about here the plot thickens considerably...
...Are you familiar with the phrase 'ennui ecrasant...
...He did, after all, have the example of his parents who had abundant evidence of His temper...
...Poetry she had given up, at least for the time being, but prose, with its rigorous discipline of sentence and paragraph, was an avenue for self-exploration and self-expression still open to her...
...The Lord confronts Cain: "Where is Abel your brother...
...But her recovery was rapid and amazingly complete—last year everything seemed to be going wonderfully for her...
...its desire is for you, but you must master it...
...26 The American Spectator February 1978...
...It was this factor, moreover, which prompted LB J to pressure the Chief Justice into releasing the Oswald-aslone-madman verdict before the final report...
...did the destitute Cain finance this real-estate venture...
...Even the dispassionate scholar pores over the passage time after time, giving the benefit of every doubt, trying to rationalize, desperate despite oneself to come up with an explanation that does not point to a conspiracy of a kind which is unspeakable...
...Does this mean that Cooper's book is irrelevant...
...Then "the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest anyone who came upon him should kill him...
...The primary source, Chapter IV of Genesis, is considered by many to be an eyewitness account, but there is little independent evidence to corroborate this...
...The official version has congealed in the popular imagination and it is destined to remain there...
...That was something else about Ceci—she was brilliant at languages...
...Cain allegedly invites his brother "out to the field" where he kills him...
...Why has this aspect of the story been ignored by generation after generation of commentators...
...Cooper one bit...
...Abel, the herdsman, offered the "firstlings of the set forth the prevailing judicial ethic...
...Professor Cooper: "Eureka...
...The above is a sampling of the many anomalies and contradictions which characterize the Genesis Report...
...Am I my brother's keeper...
...Jim paused...
...You saw how upset I was," Jim said...
...The Charles River is in some ways like the ocean, only much calmer...
...The current reevaluation of the evidence now being conducted by the House Special Committee on Assassinations will, it is hoped, illuminate the case afresh and, finally, provide a clear, unbiased judgment which will attract a consensus...
...Just by writing...
...Personally she was pretty, bright, kind, and seemed to have everything—money, looks, married parents, a small stature...
...Did Cain Act Alone?—a chilling question, a haunting book...
...After Cain complains about his punishment there is recounted the most disturbing exchange in the Genesis Report...
...Cooper is convinced that the exchange "just does not ring true" and suggests that Cain may have been "putting up a front for the benefit of passersby" or that the conversation was simply manufactured out of whole cloth later on...
...It was there she was assigned to read Baudelaire and taught about 'ennui ecrasant.' "That Ceci is not alive today I hold the designers of the advance placement program in French directly responsible...
...Without really thinking about it Jane had all along been writing words—on her messages to Lisa, in the boxes of her calendar, in other places...
...In- response to Cain's remonstrances, flock," while Cain made a "cereal" offering...
...of Abel...
...Under such conditions, to accept the Warren Report at face value is like endorsing the Bayeux Tapestry as a Joseph P. McGrath writes from New York City...
...Someone once remarked that the last organism to discover water will almost certainly be the fish...
...But there is more...
...Professor Cooper finds Cain's response suspicious and doubts that "Cain would have chosen such a time to crack wise...
...it cannot be explained away, and all the separate bits of evidence seem instantly to coalesce around it...
...No such consensus exists regarding the Warren Report today...
...The narrative proceeds...
...With what resources (with Whose funds...
...Greene survived and later wrote a series of novels and 'entertainments.' For Ceci, though, there was no second chance-60 Seconal capsules don't miss...When I look back upon my own life I can't help thinking, 'Thank God I got a C in French fifth form year!' " It was past eleven when the couple stepped out of the restaurant and started walking back to Quincy House by the long route—along the river...
...Eight days," she thought, "survived...
...and Abel, a shepherd by trade...
...He adds that "to this day the official version is widely distributed, with virtually every bookstore and several university libraries boasting copies...
...To accept it blindly is to ignore the sage advice of the profoundest practitioner of the art in this century: "The most important tool of the contemporary historian," wrote Michel Simeon-Brauh in 1953, "is a large supply of erasable paper...
...startles some members of the House Special Committee on Assassinations into a remembrance of this lapidary prescript it will have rendered a service of inestimable value...
...The moon's light has a bluish hue...
...A little way past the Weld Boathouse they sat down together on a bench facing the water...
...Her name was Ceci—I first got to know her the summer before last when I was a counselor at the Corn Union anorexia clinic...
...a similar myopia afflicts us culturally and it is doubtful that even so illuminating an analysis as this will prove capable of penetrating the gauze of centuries of "tradition...
...One may wince a bit at Mr...
...Its message is a warning beacon to all of us and it could not be more timely...
...Ingeniously, he invokes Scripture (the chapter is entitled "What is Truth") to buttress his arguments against blind acceptance of the Genesis Report...
...Feeling the night air, Jane pulled her cardigan sweater more tightly around herself and under her on the bench tucked her pale, slender legs, which were five years younger than his own...
...Later, alone in her room, Jane walked over to the wall calendar, and under the words "Jim—Dinner" wrote in a print so small it was legible only to herself: "Frederico's, later walk by river...
...Though no one will claim that the investigation was cursory, we tend to forget the massive pressure exerted on the commissioners by the circumstance of a shocked and bewildered nation, in deep mourning, awaiting some "official finding" with which to punctuate its grief...
...But are there realistic grounds for viewing the findings of the Warren Commission with suspicion...
...Before preparing for the night Jane returned to the calendar and carefully drew a diagonal line through the box for Tuesday...
...He asks...
...You are very beautiful," he told her, "and that scares me...
...I've thought a lot about it since then...
...Cain's sacrifice was disdained by the Lord, which reportedly infuriated the young farmer...
...And what are we to make of clues later in the Genesis Report which name a certain Cain as "Founder" of Enoch, the first city...
...Professor Cooper then recounts how "at some ill-defined point in time" they each offered a sacrifice to the Lord...
...There they had the full meal—cocktails, four courses, two wines—all capped off with cups of caffeinated coffee...
...In the darkness he and Jane walked to Frederico's...
...Cooper concludes that the "official version provided a convenient myth," and he strongly implies that simple "fear of the Lord" led to a rubber-stamping of the report...
...Late in the afternoon the sun put on a gaudy show—its reddish-hued light illuminating the old colonial college buildings...
...Cooper makes the additional point that, "Although the Lord did apparently pass up Cain's offering, He merely 'had regard' for Abel's...
...What are they thinking of—assigning high school seniors to study the concept of `overwhelming boredom' ? Graham Greene has written about how as an adolescent he would stick a revolver in his ear and pull the trigger—anything to relieve the tedium...
...But he denies the implication of the narrator that this scolding, even coupled with the presumed resentment engendered by Abel's besting him in the sacrifice contest, provided a motive for the subsequent murder Coming Next Issue: Joseph W. Bishop, Jr...
...What weapon was used...
...Cooper's dubbing this document the "Genesis Report," a melodramatic conceit doubtless suggested by his publisher...
...There is next recounted a long harangue by the Lord directed against Cain at the conclusion of which the Lord banishes Cain to wander in the Land of Nod, East of Eden...
...After Adam and Eve were evicted from the Garden they had a couple of kids: Cain, who became a farmer...
...The Lord lets the word go out that whoever trifles with Cain will have to answer to Him...
...The Warren Report must not be "rubber-stamped," as was the Genesis Report, out of cowardice or a misguided sense of loyalty to institutions...
...the biblical narrative is almost totally devoid of significant evidentiary detail...
...Probably, yes...
...What are we to make of this 'punishment,' " asks Cooper, "especially at a time when the slogan 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth' quite accurately * Critics of Mr...
...Yes, from advance placement French—Baudelaire and the Symbolists...
...This fall she was starting her senior year at Dana Hall...
...Gently Jim took Jane in his arms...
...It has instead a quality reminiscent of July nights by the ocean or old songs playing on the radio...
...Naturally, she was put in advance placement French...
...Cooper is correct...
...Where was the field located...
...But after reading the book through, one is hard put to deny his conclusion that the well-known biblical narrative is "a whitewash from the word go...
...Cooper again: "Who overheard this invitation...
...Then Jane turned to look out the window...
...One fails...
...The words her upper level expository writing teacher had said at the end of the semester came back to her: "How is one a writer...
...The Genesis Report simply records this devastating statement without batting an eye...
...There is something not entirely realistic in love...
...Even at the clinic it was always `merci' for thank you, `bon soir' in the evening, and garcon' or `cheri' when addressing me...
...The raw materials at his disposal were almost unbelievably restricted...
...Cooper, currently Laing Professor of Alternative Reality at Bowdoin College, has done a rare thing: He has pivoted all the mirrors so perfectly that we are confronted with ourselves...
...But Cooper is certainly on the track when he asks about the "Land of Nod, East of Eden" wherein Cain was condemned to wander and which, according to Mackenzie's Dictionary of the Bible, "has no known geographical location...
...Then, she trembled...
...Indeed, when Cain responds to this "suspended sentence" with the statement "My punishment is greater than I can bear," we find ourselves saying with Cooper, "the lad doth protest too much...
...Professor Cooper's first objection arises from what he sees as a basic conflict between the role of the Lord as both narrator and "Prime Mover in the incident...
...Cooper makes a valiant try...
...Cooper admits that "to the rambunctious Cain, such Holier-Than-Thou sentiments must surely have rankled...
...Professor Cooper has, indeed, taken on a Goliath...
...Every schoolboy is familiar with the story...
...She then looked like a long-sleeved shirt and a pair of dungarees hanging on a skeleton...
...proved...
...This is the stuff of basic cultural reformation—if it could be...
...The narrative goes on to record that the Lord noticed Cain's displeasure and said to him, "Why are you angry...
...Several times he played Russian roulette and won, but after a while even that got boring...
...Sin is couching at the door...
Vol. 11 • February 1978 • No. 4
