Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [26]
A day later, after we’d driven by a dozen more of these “authentic trading posts,” I realized these were the McDonald’s of Native Americans. I understand commercialism, but it’s disheartening to realize that even American history has suffered a corporate takeover. It was actually kind of heartbreaking for Terry, because she thought we’d stumbled onto something unique. And it isn’t at all.
Road signs noted in Terry’s journal:
Native American Cherokee Trading Post—24-Hour Restaurant and a Subway.
Rattlesnakes Exit Now.
Pumpkin Maize and Pizza Farm.
Dinosaur Park and Petrified Forest—free polished petrified wood, meteorites fifty percent off!
Navajo Feed and Pawn.
Approaching on the border between Oklahoma and Texas, we saw signs for the Gene Autry Museum. You had to pull off the main highway and drive about twelve miles to get there and, unfortunately, when we arrived, it had closed a half-hour before. Terry had seen something very disturbing on the way in, and alerted me to look for it on our way back. I won’t soon forget it. It was what we presumed was a scarecrow. But it had a black bowling ball for a head, the holes being the eyes and nose. And it had a noose around its neck.
I looked at Terry and said, “Wow, are we really in the twenty-first century?”
Dallas isn’t that far, once you cross the border into Texas. We were going to pay a visit to an old Navy buddy of mine, a physician who lived in the suburb of Arlington. I’d been to Dallas twice in recent years. The first time, as governor, I wanted to see Dealey Plaza. After leaving office, I came back in 2003 to participate in commemorating the fortieth anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
I’d been a young teenager when Kennedy was killed. I remember the country being sad but, at the time, numb and surreal. Then, when I was at junior college in the 1970s, Mark Lane came to speak about the questions he had concerning the Warren Commission. I started to wonder. When I went into my wrestling career, on airplanes I started reading all the books I could about the assassination.
It caused quite a stir when I told an interviewer from Playboy that I did not believe the official conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone. That was my first year as governor and, as far as I’m aware, I was the highest ranking official who’d ever made that statement. My most basic reasoning is this: If Oswald was really who we were led to believe—a disgruntled little Marine private who got angry with capitalism and became a communist, tried to defect to Russia, came back and thought he’d make a name for himself in history by shooting the president—then why would any of the evidence need to be withheld and locked away in the National Archives for seventy-five years because of “national security”? As a Navy SEAL, I had top-secret clearance. That was higher than Oswald’s, and I know a few secrets, but not enough to jeopardize national security.
When I was traveling around the country to promote my first book, the publisher said I could go to either Houston or Dallas. I said, “Give me Dallas.” First I went to where Jack Ruby shot Oswald, inside police headquarters. A cop gave me the tour. The eerie part was that there was the elevator we all saw on TV—and down on the floor, almost on the exact spot where Oswald lay dying, the tile had oil on it that still looks like blood.
From there, I went to Dealey