Tag: 9/11

Posted on in commentary, creative writing, essay, Uncategorized

Inconvenient Truth Meets Manufactured Consent.


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Nobody wants to hear about who killed Kennedy or who did 9/11. Not current, not sexy. Tin foil hat stuff.

Surely no one believes the official narrative, right? I know I don’t. Even so, nobody wants to hear about it anymore.

My attempts to encourage debate on social media end up getting nowhere. No new evidence means no debate, simply people in entrenched positions calling each other names.

The only points I can score with anyone who disagrees with me are that the Invasion of Iraq was contrived and misguided. People will grant you that. Beyond that point, all debate ends because there isn’t a common ground of agreement from which to proceed. It would be like trying to get an atheist to debate the proposition, “are we saved by grace or works?”

It seems that we aren’t simply bored by the questions but afraid of what the answers might obligate us to do. We might have to change everything. We might have to hold trials of rich and powerful people who are still alive and active. These might make waiting for Trump’s impeachment seem quick and easy in comparison.

Mark Twain said “it’s easier to fool people than to convince them they’ve been fooled.” He lost a fortune investing in a complicated pants-pressing machine, and had money problems until the day he died. A lot of his public speaking tours late in life were by necessity rather than choice. So he knew what he was talking about.

How does a nation come to grips with its past? Stalin is still popular with some elderly Russians, members of cult religions that are convinced the world is ending keep their faith even after the fateful day passes. Women stand by men who beat them and molest their children. It’s hard to admit you made a wrong turn a long while ago and you’re simply going to have to retrace your steps and start over.

But what’s the alternative? To live a lie is to court perpetual disquiet. It gets worse over time, never better.

Nations and people need to have a certain degree of integrity in order to avoid cruelty. Deception leads to violence because the lie must be defended at all costs. If our country is allowed to keep its secret lies, then for decades, maybe centuries, it will have to defend those lies. It will become neurotic, then psychotic, and not know why.

We are the stewards of our democracy. There’s nobody else who can take the job. We the people. If we’re afraid to face the truth, then we will be complicit in our descent into the hell that awaits those who are afraid to get and stay real. We will act out in all sorts of ways, none of which will seem to be connected to our self-deception.

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Posted on in commentary, Uncategorized

The Fix Was On


That first crisp day in September we were all watching the same thing on television, but it wasn’t happening then, rather it had been prerecorded. Live action is much more compelling than its videotaped cousin, so they were fooling us when they could.

I remember watching TV when I was a kid when dramatic shows were live, and if the actors forgot their lines, you could hear someone off-camera whisper the line until the actor could pick it up again. Those days before videotape I watched Pinky Lee have his heart attack as he danced wildly for laughing children, and I saw Jack Ruby shoot Oswald.  I saw it happen right in front of me.

As we watched the collapse of World Trade Center Building Seven, the announcer made it seem like it was happening right now, but he was unaware of the embarrassing fact that another network had reported the collapse of this building a half hour earlier. So some of us knew the fix was on. We were being lied to by our newscasters. No doubt they were being lied to and pressured by people who could have them fired or arrested. Dangerous times.

The initial reports of the explosions on the towers failed to mention an airplane, just explosions, and people interviewed on the street below the twin towers neglected to mention a plane, as well. Within a half hour that all changed, and everyone started talking about the plane they saw, but they were talking about what they saw on television. In the years since, most of us have seen those planes hit the buildings a thousand times, but with each intervening year, the special effect seems cheesier.

If you watch the original King Kong movie, or Rodan, the creature’s movement seems laughable. But not so when these films premiered. Maybe someday, hopefully soon, the airplane impact effects that seemed so convincing fifteen years ago will elicit general laughter. “Whom do they think they’re kidding?”

By then George W and Dick Cheney will be comfortably retired in Paraguay.

Witnesses interviewed shortly after the twin tower collapse talked about seeing molten steel pouring out of the buildings for a good half hour before they collapsed, but in the days afterward we never saw those interviews again. Firemen talked about huge amounts of molten gold in the basements of the towers, and how that had to be allowed to cool for days before it could be retrieved. The site was off limits for weeks, people who had lived nearby and were evacuated, not allowed to return for ten days, found that their apartments had been ransacked during the interval, computers taken and never returned.

By the time the internet grew more omnipresent, and YouTube videos became ubiquitous, the American people were already sick of hearing conspiracy theories. It was the JFK assassination all over again. Nobody wanted to hash through another decade or so of alternative explanations for something most of us would rather forget.

Besides, we were at war. A War on Terror. Our enemies hate us for our freedoms so it’s bombs away all over again. Teaching towelheads who’s boss is a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it. Mission Accomplished.

The obfuscation of the 9/11 Commission report seems obvious, the lies blatant, yet most continue to accept the official explanation because creating and examining an alternative requires too much effort. The conspiracy videos on YouTube are often amateurish, repetitive, lacking production value. We’re already tired of the narrative and the cast of characters is neither cute nor compelling.

 

Posted on in commentary, essay, philosophy, RETIREMENT

PURE VITRIOL


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I’m retired and for that reason have few demands on my time. I’m free to waste countless hours trolling through Facebook posts and sifting through thousands of pictures served up by Google image searches to find some to post on Facebook and caption, often to the delight of friends and strangers. But lately I’ve gotten a markedly different reaction to some of the YouTube posts I’ve shared.

I don’t remember how I got started watching these “it’s all a conspiracy” videos, but I’ve seen many in the last few weeks. Most of them are produced by people as lonely and disconnected as me, recording an echoey voice-over in their best fake Rod Serling voice, but others are quite well done, and heavily researched. This is especially true about those that deal with the Kennedy Assassination and 9/11. I’ve found some great ones that demand my full attention and reward me with a completely new explanation for these events, as well as an appreciation for the danger inherent in believing the official explanations offered by my own government.

When I post these on Facebook, I don’t usually even comment on them. It’s just one more item I’ve tossed into the stream that seems to go by more quickly as the number of “friends” I have increases. But the reaction I’m getting from some of these “friends” startles me. Pure vitriol. Rabid scorn. Threats to un-friend me.

Why such a departure from the customary lethargic likes? What button have I pushed? My critics attack everything about these videos, often focusing on production quality, as if that mattered in comparison to the depth of the subject matter. If the World Trade Center buildings were wired for demolition by agents of our own government, it seems that is a heck of a lot more important than the quality of the microphone used to interview firemen after the event.

I imagine within the next thirty years the truth will come to light about these events, and a consensus belief will emerge. It’s been forty years since the fall of Saigon and the end of our debacle in Viet Nam, and almost everybody by now agrees that war was a tragic mistake, as was the eight-year carpet bombing of nearby Laos, a country with no army to defend itself. The amount of unexploded ordinance still on the ground in Laos is shocking, and we are finally starting to feel shocked after our forty-year bout of amnesia and indifference.

So when we finally do realize that the Warren Commission report on Kennedy’s assassination was written by the man most probably responsible for the event, and that the myriad of facts surrounding the destruction of the twin towers had little or nothing to do with Arab terrorists, we’ll probably do something about it, though it will be too late to punish any but the longest-lived perpetrators. By that time the Bush family will be happily ensconced in their Paraguay ranch and the Cheneys and Rumsfelds will be but a bitter memory. Everyone will have forgiven Colin Powell, saying he was a good guy who had been given bad information.

I think the intense reaction to these posts of mine comes from the fact that nobody wants to think about it anymore, because it might require action, uncovering old wounds, changing the way we elect our governments, and that sounds like a lot of work. Far easier to make fun of the whistle-blowers, with their silly YouTube documentaries and calls to action. Lump them all together with the World Will End on September 23rd When A Giant Comet Strikes and Obama is a Shape Shifter videos.

By the way, it’s obvious that few of these YouTube posts have any original content, but are simply the conspiracy equivalent of rock videos, with snippets of horror movies mashed together interspersed with a few words here and there. They most often resemble History or Sci-Fi channel programs, except there is no premise, no discourse, no train of thought to follow. There is no script. They’re simply designed to get the least sophisticated of us to watch for a few minutes, in order to earn their “creators” ad revenue from Google.

I guess I’m a sucker for any old bald weirdo in a Montana trailer playing Dan Rather and giving us the straight dope on some problem he thinks we need to know about. Most of the time the camera is way too close (because it’s also the microphone) and I’ve seen one where the camera was sitting on guy’s chest and it rose and fell with his breathing.