A word of advice to Bishop John Magee. Remember the word "knoll". It is an interesting word. It has been around for as long time, and its roots go back to the Norsemen. But one event has transformed that word, has stolen it so completely that it has virtually no other meaning outside that event. The event was the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and term "grassy knoll" entered the English language for the first time as a single and virtually unsunderable phrase. It was on this thing, a grassy knoll, that a second gunman was allegedly seen; and the term grassy knoll, coined that day and repeated ever since, has a particular place not just in the English language, but in the psyche of popular culture.
Who invented the term? I have never heard an American use the word `knoll'. It was a linguistic eccentricity, to say to least, to refer to a piece of high ground in a park as a knoll; and more eccentric still to call it "grassy". Knolls by their nature are grassy. To call a knoll grassy is comparable to calling a field or a meadow grassy or a sea watery or a motorway concretey. Presumably the person who first referred to the high ground in the park as a knoll was not too sure of its meaning; and the term became as locked within the imagination of English-speaking people as an insect in amber.
World of secrets
But the real vitality of the term grassy knoll is not in the words themselves but in the world of secrets it conveys. The grassy knoll isn't just a herbaceous hillock; rather is it Alice's looking-glass, through which you enter the mythic world of unfathomable secrecy, of dark things hidden from the world with which to scare children at night. `Grassy knoll" means that the world is never as simple as it seems to be; it means that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was not what every serious investigation has found it to be - the work of a single killer - but was instead a vast conspiracy involving the Mafia, eccentric, right-wing millionaires, rogue communists, the Ku Klux Klax, which was followed by other, greater coverup conspiracies, involving hundreds, if not thousands, in a vast and clandestine network of mutual support.
A minute's contemplation tells us this must be rubbish. The Kennedy family have accepted the Warren Commission report, and the conspiracy which enlisted their support must either be truly diabolical, or composed of humanoids who have taken Kennedy form. And that is the point: we live in a popular culture which is obsessed with UFOs, with visitors from another galaxy, with time travellers, and with the power of the intangible. That culture prefers the mysterious to the simple, the dark to the bright, the conspiracy to the deranged individual, the clandestine operation to the simple accident.
This is not even a Western monopoly. The culture which invented the thousand and one nights of Scheherazade shares with the culture which concocted the myths of Roland, almost to the point of it being an article of faith, the belief that Princess Diana was killed by British Intelligence, bumped off because she was a nuisance or worse, because the mother of the future king of England was going to marry a mere Egyptian. Not merely does this theory neatly fit into shared cultural suspicions towards the English, but it conforms with the insatiable popular requirement for a conspiracy. If you want to give a French taxi driver or a fellah on the Nile a good belly laugh, say Diana died in an accident.
Mysterious
People want grassy knolls. They want mystery in their lives. They want to believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden and hobgoblins in the woods. They want reassurance in the unfathomable, the mysterious, the inexplicable; and as religion dies, and with it the belief in the greatest mystery of all, the appetite grows for dark things beyond our control.
Political life in many countries is distorted by the grassy knoll view of politics. For many years after Michael Collin's death, Fine Gael people would assure you he was lured to his doom with the promise of a meeting with Dev, who then shot him dead. The idea of Dev shooting anybody in cold blood is so wholly absurd that the word fabulous really does apply. But the theory served a double purpose; not merely did it neatly tie up Collins's death in a nice conspiratorial parcel with bows, but it demonised the man who inherited his mantle as national leader.
So we need Opus Dei, the Masons, the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of Columbanus, the CIA, MI5, the KGB under our beds; we want a world of mystery and incomprehensibility, in which dark forces toil and frequently triumph, their hands seen only in unclaimed effect. They gloat in cabal, and in cabal they hatch their next plot to foist on a vulnerable world. And what makes a perfect jewel out of such theories is that the speck of truth is there to be turned into a pearl by the oyster of public need. The KGB, the CIA, MI5, did subvert, did aid dictators, did arm the right villains. Eamon de Valera was just down the road from Beal na mBlath; Opus Dei did toil in secret to further its own ends.
Michael Collins
But we can reasonably say that Princess Diana was killed by bad driving, and no other cause; that Michael Collins was shot, almost by accident, by Sonny O'Neill; and that John F. Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald and no one else.
It makes no difference. People will cherish their conspiracies as dearly as they cherish life; and that is why the Bishop of Cloyne speaks in vain when he assures the world yet again - as he did this week in an Examiner interview - that Pope John Paul I died of a coronary in his sleep. People need to believe he was bumped off by nasty right-wing elements in the Curia.
The idea that the greatest influence in our lives is not human intent but random accident and human weakness is too subversive of our cosmos. We like our conspiracies. They reassure us of a Manichaean order in which diabolical purpose triumphs. We want spooks. They give our humdrum lives a dimension otherwise missing. Believing in grassy knolls is an essential part of being human.