So, about last week. Between plant and Day Job obligations, a big smiling reminder of my old writing days arrived last Tuesday in the form of Australian author Stephen Dedman, and poor Stephen got the barest beginnings of a Dallas tour. That is, he got a firsthand experience with the insane sprawl of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, as with how our roadways were inspiration for those in R’lyeh. Even worse, he had to deal with my babbling about minutiae on Dallas, from the geology and palaeontology (we drove within spitting distance of the Arlington Archosaur Site) to the backhistory of the Fair Park area to our current surreal impending celebration of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That’s when Stephen inspired a particular bit of japery for the end of November.
For the last fifty years, anything involving John Kennedy in Dallas has been a circus. There’s the actual assassination, of course, as well as the tourist industry that built up around it. Then there’s the backstory, which entities such as the Dallas Morning News want to bury and pretend didn’t happen. Then there’s the current effort for a massive panegyric the weekend before American Thanksgiving, simply entitled “The 50th”, which intends to “celebrate the life of Kennedy” without, you know, actually saying what happened to end it. Complete with efforts to make sure that nobody “extreme” gets anywhere near it. If there’s one thing any good circus needs, because it already has plenty of clowns, it’s costumes.
So here’s the idea. It’s a dangerous vision, but one that should be the maraschino cherry atop this gigantic, indigestion-inducing banana split of an event. It’s open to everybody who wants to participate, and it won’t cost a thing.
The idea: on November 22 of this year, Dallas gets a flood of time travelers. Famed travelers from fiction alongside ones brand new to the continuum, with outfits to match. Before you know it, the streets of Dallas are full of temporal explorers, cartographers, and marauders of all sorts, all asking the same question: “Which way to Dealey Plaza?”
At this point, half of the fun will be the responses. After all, if time travel is possible, then (barring the Morphail Effect, of course) an event as big as the Kennedy assassination should be so flooded with time travelers that they should outnumber the temporally static by a thousand to one. There’s no reason to believe that you wouldn’t have visitors planning to change the time line, keep it static, or take out anybody trying to do either. That’s why, when asked by reporters or passersby as to what’s happening, just hinting “I’m here to see history” is a good start.
The punchline comes around 12:20 Central Time, as the streets continue to flood with the Displaced. By this point, there should be more Daleks on the streets of Dallas than on those of London in 2100, and I won’t even start with the Yithians. At that point, everyone looks down the road where Kennedy’s motorcade drove a half-century ago, pulls out watches, clocks, sundials, chronometers, and hourglasses, and all exclaim at once “Right time, but WRONG YEAR!” before evacuating downtown.
And the best part? We can do this every November 22. We can even retire from the field of ostentation to hang out at the best party in town that weekend afterwards. What say you?