September - bad month for Presidents

On September 19, 1881, after only serving a few months in office, James A. Garfield became the second president to be assassinated.

On July 2, 1881, Charles Julius Guiteau shot the recently elected President Garfield in a train station next to Capitol Hill. Garfield languished three months before dying On September 19, 1881.

Guiteau had an amazing history of religious hysteria, sexual depravity and thievery..and wuddya bleeve it.. a loner.

Here is a site that tells of Alexander Bell's attempts to locate the fatal bullet using his newly discovered capacity to amplify sound from electrically charged wires. A clumsy first attempt at a sort of X ray or at least mapping of the internal organs.

On September 6, 1901, President William McKinley visited Buffalo, N.Y., for the Pan-American Exposition, a celebration of the United States’ emergence as an industrial and imperial power.In the crowd a a self-described anarchist, Leon Czoglosz advanced and shot the President.

Historian Eric Rauchway argues in his book Murdering McKinley that the assassination of William McKinley by Czoglosz, had far-reaching social consequences. In coming to terms with this national trauma, American opinion-makers faced up to some of the consequences of the country’s rapid industrialization: inequalities of wealth, overcrowding of cities, massive immigration. And they developed new public policies, from regulations of industry to school reforms, as a result.

Rauchway said that whatever the killer’s mental state, the act of shooting McKinley followed a brutal logic; it was cruel for its rationality, not for its senselessness.

By understanding the horrible logic of political violence, one can find a path between the dead ends of incomprehension and rationalization.

It is one of the coincidences of history that Lord Patel was lying on his bed reading an article in the Scientific American arguing that modern surgical practice could have saved McKinley's life, that a fellow student burst into his room to announce the death of JFK, another fall time faller.

A friend says that Dubya misses the assassins bullet because ... well look who is just a heartbeat away ... No wonder they are never seen in public together.