FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Number 10, Part 2
Number 10, Part 2
(NEW SERIES—2007)
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(Read, Print, or Download in >PDF>> Format)
..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
A LETTER OF LAMENTATION
TO
AMERICA:
THE UNITED STATES
IS NO LONGER
A SERIOUS PLACE
A LETTER OF LAMENTATION
TO
AMERICA:
THE UNITED STATES
IS NO LONGER
A SERIOUS PLACE
..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
................................................................................What [was] really remarkable about [a New York Times article on George W.
................................................................................Bush published a week before the 2001 inauguration] [was] not Bush, but
................................................................................the Times. What [was] the Times trying to tell us? Once it was settled that W.
................................................................................was going to be president, the Times seemed very concerned with making
................................................................................it believable.
..........................................................................................—David Cogswell, "Usurpation: The Coup of 2001 and the Inaugural Cry,"
..........................................................................................a Post-Script to Fortunate Son (2001), by J. H. Hatfield (New York, Soft Skull
..........................................................................................Press)
................................................................................[M]ost of Congress and the American public cannot imagine the degree of insanity
................................................................................that lies behind the Bush administration.
..........................................................................................—Paul Craig Roberts, "The Neoconservative Threat to American Freedom,"
..........................................................................................June 11, 2007
................................................................................Schizoid anxiety separates the 64% who tell pollsters they don't think [9/11] was
................................................................................an inside job from the 36% who know it was. Among the 64% who are in denial,
................................................................................internal schizoid anxiety. . . throws up a mind-smothering smokescreen of fear and
................................................................................revulsion.
..........................................................................................—Kevin Barratt, "No Baggage: A Report on My Trip to Morocco in Search of
..........................................................................................the Alleged Suicide Hijacker Waleed al Shehri"
................................................................................[T]he Bush regime will do everything in their power to promote our denial, pretense,
................................................................................and silence. Our becoming silent is the very thing which allows them to literally get
................................................................................away with murder.
..........................................................................................—Paul Levy, "Denial: the 51st State"
................................................................................How did we get to the point where vast numbers of citizens turn a blind eye by
................................................................................choice?
..........................................................................................—Carla Binion, Online Journal, "Knee-deep blood in the land of make-believe,"
..........................................................................................April 26, 2007
................................................................................If a war crime was committed, it is elementary that those that aid and abet this crime
................................................................................are also war criminals. This includes the Congress. . . It also includes the soldiers. . .
................................................................................And, yes, to the extent that we don't publicly object to it, you and me.
..........................................................................................—James Rothenberg and Otto Hinckelmann, "Why Being 'Worst President Ever' Is
..........................................................................................Not Enough," June 6, 2007
................................................................................Everyone around the world has both the right and the duty under international law
................................................................................to resist ongoing criminal activities perpetrated by the Bush Jr. administration and its
................................................................................foreign accomplices by all nonviolent means possible.
..........................................................................................—Francis A. Boyle, Destroying World Order, 2004
..........
..........For ease in picking up where we left off, let's have a few paragraphs from near the end of "Empty America" as they appeared in FFT 10.1:
..............................But before we return to the clear and present danger to the republic—and the world—
....................represented by the Cheney-Bush administration, we have some unfinished business to attend
....................to. My imaginary roomful of students went nearly berserk with their sense of the absurd when
....................I asked them why a person would go into "denial," with "denial" being defined as "a person's
....................refusal to accept one fact or thing or event or another, usually because the fact or thing or
....................event is in some way very, very threatening."
..............................The students' answer, of course, was the obvious and perfectly circular one that "People
....................go into denial because something is very, very threatening." And yet at the same time they re-
....................jected my lunging pit bull analogy, arguing that to go into denial in the pit bull case would be "in-
....................sane" and furthermore implying, I believe, that I was insane for so much as coming up with the
....................analogy.
..............................But as we've ascertained already, I hope, and as it certainly seems to me, that kind of
....................denial is exactly the kind that the entire population of made-in-America-morons has gone into
....................starting with 9/11 and has continued in for the entire six and a half years since—a denial, I re-
....................peat, that has resulted in extraordinary and all but unspeakable dangers to us all.
..............................But even so, no matter how unequivocally important those dangers are, before looking
....................at them again we've somehow got to get my imaginary students to come up with a better an-
....................swer to the denial question than they did—which is to say, as said before, an answer that's
....................more interesting, more insightful, more penetrating, more useful, and more revelatory than the
....................one they gave. An answer, that is, that's not just circular.
..........I can imagine readers—some readers—getting impatient, asking what difference it makes, so what if the answer is circular, who cares if the reason a person goes into denial about something is because the thing they're going into denial about is threatening to them?
..........And to such readers, I answer, in short, that it matters, first, because circularity alone is all but meaningless as a means of thought ("Sugar is sweet. I like it." "Why do you like it?" "I like it because it's sweet"). And it matters, too, even more importantly, because responsibility matters.
..........And now that we've got it waked up and looking us in the eye, that word, "responsibility," is going to require that we make a digression back to A Nation Gone Blind.
..........In that book's first chapter, "Watching America Go Blind," a good part of the discussion has to do with the phenomenon of American literary intellectuals having become simplified and also with the way they've become simplified.
..........One of the literary figures in the chapter complains about having been required to read, back in college, writers who, as she put it, were "foreign to [her] natural sensibility." She herself, as it happened, was of neither American nor European extraction, while this particular class or set of required writers was. As a result, she tended to see them not just as "foreign" to her own "sensibility" but also irrelevant to it. To her, their significance was therefore dubious. She tended to resent them, disparage and minimize them, and then—well, what would logically be next? Doesn't intelligent conjecture suggest that next would be to ignore them?
..........In other words, putting her case from then into the terms of our present subject now, we could say that she went into a certain form of denial in regard to that body of writers.
..........So? Well, so this: What she did was set aside or toss away any responsibility for them.
..........These paragraphs from A Nation Gone Blind (pp. 39-40) take up the matter:
..............................When people used to read Emerson, for example, or Melville; or when people used to be
....................serious about writers like, say, Camus, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir—in those times, the idea of
....................self-reliance was still very much alive, widely understood to play a vitally important part in much
....................of the greatest American and European literature. Self-reliance was centrally important in the art
....................of figures as different from one another as, say, Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain, or as both of
....................those are different from Fyodor Dostoevsky.
..............................Now, though, self-reliance has disappeared almost entirely from the worlds of academia,
....................literature, and the arts: the concept—in the French writers I've mentioned, in Beckett, in countless
....................others—that each and every human being is a free agent and accordingly is responsible not only
....................for everything he or she does, but also for everything that he or she doesn't do. This grand,
....................high, austere, profoundly serious, intense, and demanding idea, however, has, in the Age of
....................Simplification, been taken over and replaced by the simple, in fact the puerile, concept of rights.
..............................There was a time when, if a person, particularly in academia, felt that their natural sens-
....................ibilities weren't in tune with, say, a certain literature, music, artistic period or genre, it was up to
....................that out-of-tune person to discover what merit, if any, resided in the genre or period sufficient
....................to make it part—perhaps a required part—of an education. In other words, it was once understood
....................that the world did not turn around any one individual or exist to please one person, but that, in-
....................stead, the world held treasures that were greater than any one person, and that it was up to
....................each to become familiar with the world, not for the world to bend to the pleasure of each.
..........Now, keep in mind the kind of person described above, since this is the kind of person we're about to turn to now. It's not a type from among people of a certain time ago, who might have actually subscribed to the idea that "the world held treasures that were greater than any one person, and that it was up to each to become familiar with the world," but, instead, it's a person of today; a person solipsistic; a person born, baptized, and bred inside the culture and confines of consumerism; a person very likely indeed to think it the responsibility of the world "to bend to the pleasure of" the individual self; a person no longer familiar with (having been encouraged throughout life to become unfamiliar with it) the very idea that thinking itself does have or should have its first basis in empiricism.
..........In short, a typical made-in-America-moron.
..........And now this is the person whose motives, qualities, or capabilities we're going to analyze—motives, qualities, or capabilities, that is, either needed or useful for going into a state of denial of things that are or may—or even may not, for that matter—be threatening.
..........And, once again, this time we're not going to allow our analysis to take the form of simple or fallacious circularity: Neither the circularity that such a person goes into denial because the denied thing is threatening, for example; nor because the person is threatened by the thing; nor because the person is frightened of it or by it, nor any other such fallacies parallel to these.
..........Now, let's go on to some real possibilities. Let's even go ahead and number a few of them.
..........1)
..........One of the person's motives, qualities, or capabilities leading to "denial" of something threatening or potentially threatening might be that he or she is a coward and has never been trained, raised, or educated to be otherwise.
..........2)
..........One of the person's motives, qualities, or capabilities leading to "denial" of something threatening or potentially threatening might be that he or she is at ease with lying, since "denial" of the kind we're talking about can—must—be considered a matter of lying, albeit it mainly or even only lying to the self.
..........3)
..........One of the person's motives, qualities, or capabilities leading to "denial" of something threatening or potentially threatening might be that he or she is ignorant—of the world and the nature of the world, of the putative threat and the nature of the threat—and has never been trained, raised, or educated to be otherwise or to prefer to be otherwise. The person, that is, knows little or nothing and chooses to learn little or nothing.
..........4)
..........One of the person's motives, qualities, or capabilities leading to "denial" of something threatening or potentially threatening might be that he or she is solipsistic, vain, voluptuary, self-involved, and ego-driven and has never been trained, raised, or educated to be otherwise or to prefer to be otherwise.
..........5)
..........A near-corollary of number three: One of the person's motives, qualities, or capabilities leading to "denial" of something threatening or potentially threatening might be that he or she prefers always to remain free from responsibility—from responsibility, especially, that in any way has to do with responsibility for others—and has never been trained, raised, or educated to be otherwise or to prefer to be otherwise.
..........Unfortunately, it's necessary to make one last qualifier before we can get to the conclusion here and find exactly what it is we've gotten by gathering up these five "motives, qualities, or capabilities" that are either helpful or needed for people to go into "denial." That is, we've got to distinguish between two very broad kinds of threatening things or potentially threatening things, and then we've got to identify which one of these two distinct kinds is our real subject here. The other kind we'll leave alone.
..........It seems true that threats or threatening things, generally speaking, can come from one of two places: They can come either from inside a person or from outside a person.
..........If a person suffers from bipolar disorder, say, or clinical depression, or if a person is diagnosed with cancer—the threats or threatening things that bipolar disorder or depression or cancer either are, or that they represent, or that they can grow into—these, we can say, all come from inside a person, not outside. Now, we know very well that in actuality there can or may be external causes of any of them—environmental, genetic, viral, and so forth. And yet the manifestation of the threat, to the person who possesses or suffers it, very reasonably is felt or considered to come from within.
..........On the other hand, things like war, social change, neighborhood deterioration, global warming, decay of inner cities, obesity caused by over-use of high-fructose corn syrup, top-soil erosion, air and water pollution, and so forth—these kinds of threats or threatening things can reasonably be considered to come from without, even though, again, an argument can indeed be made that every one of them originates in some way within the psychology or instinct of human beings and that those are inner, not outer things.
..........Generally, though, in plain laymen's, non-specialist terms, we can distinguish between threat that comes from within and threat that comes from without. And it's the kind that comes from without that we're concerned with here.
..........And now with that agreed on, we can take our next two steps toward our great subject of unseriousness. Each step can be a question. What did we discover by gathering up the four "motives" that we identified above? And what exactly is the threat or threatening thing—how big? what kind?—that people seem to be going into denial of?
..........I'll use numbers again, but this time only two.
..........1)
..........Here's a proposal for an experiment. If someone were to take our four potential motives for people's going into "denial" and put them all into one single person, what do you think would happen? What would be the result? What or who would be created?
..........I say let's try it and find out.
..........So take a person, then, and prepare him or her for insertion of traits. First, cowardice. Very simple. In it goes. Next we lay hold of the ability or tendency to lie, inserting it in with its predecessor. Ignorance isn't difficult to handle, and there it goes, into the mix. The gathering up of the essences of vanity, egotism, and self-involvement may take a minute or two, but once the three are mingled and placed in a proper container, in they go, too, just like those before them. Then, finally, irresponsibility. Most specifically, as said, this is irresponsibility toward any other than the self. In it goes. And, with all these traits or ingredients—these motives, qualities, or capabilities—successfully inserted into the person, what is it that we've come up with? Well, what we've got is a vain, deceitful, uncourageous, irresponsible, ignorant person.
..........In other words—can it really be so?—we've gotten ourselves—a consumer!
..........2)
..........And so, in this little experiment of ours, that's what we're left with for raw materials: not citizen, not thinker, not critic, not activist, not historian—but consumer.
..........And what, exactly, is it that this consumer, or this nation of consumers, went into denial about six and a half years ago and has remained in denial of ever since, as if it were a matter set in stone? And what, exactly, is it the consumer-nation has remained in denial of in spite of the emergence of ever-greater, ever more abundant, and ever-increasing evidence of various kinds that in a normal or thinking world or in the case of a normal or willing psychological patient would have served to diminish, break down, and dissipate this epidemic of denial long before now? Is the thing being denied small? Is it subtle, or is it explicit and obvious? Does it have few ramifications or many? Does it have the capacity to touch on the lives only of few, or on the lives of many? And is it something that could, in "touching on" those lives, whether many or few, alter them in any ways, and, if so, would it be in ways that are small, minor, and benign, or would it be in ways that are enormous, powerful, and pernicious?
..........Well, let's look for our answer in as plain, direct, succinct, and factual a manner as possible. Let's do it, that is, through good clear writing—the sort almost always to be found, say, in Online Journal, a source of news, analysis, and information that, in my view, everybody should keep up with daily. Let's look for our answer, in fact, from the pen—or keyboard—of Larry Chin, who, it happens, is associate editor of Online Journal.
..........Let's turn to a Chin piece dated April 16, 2007, that, while giving us our answer, touches also on other matters—on Bush's appointment of a "war czar," for one, on the hired-killer uses in foreign affairs of the for-profit military machine known as "Blackwater USA," and also on the Bush administration's voracious appetite for spying on U.S. citizens. Chin's piece, which touches on all of these matters, is entitled "Bush administration pushes for expansion and deepening of police state." Because they provide us with the answer we're looking for, I quote here Larry Chin's opening paragraphs:
....................The George W. Bush administration seized the White House in 2000 by way of an openly
....................stolen election, then cemented its criminal power into place with the unprecedented 9/11
....................mass murder, and its two resulting abominations: the fabricated "war on terrorism" (the
....................pretext for endless global war), and the USA PATRIOT Act (the full-scale destruction of
....................the Constitution, and the militarization of the US homeland).
....................The deepening of the war and security state continues unabated and relatively unopposed,
....................in spite of meager posturing of (largely complicit) congressional Democrats. Nothing has
....................been done to stop, reverse or undo the Bush administration's boundless criminality, its wide
....................open corruption, or the absolute and systematic rape of law itself. Few if any of Bush's
....................criminals have been brought to justice.
..........After that opening, Chin briefly discusses the topics I mentioned above—illegal domestic spying, the appointment of a war "czar," and the nature and uses of Blackwater USA, calling them "Three new examples [that] leave no doubt" of the truth of what he said in his introductory paragraphs.
..........He ends his piece this way:
....................As written by Mike Ruppert in Crossing the Rubicon [2004], "American fascism is some-
....................thing different now. It's not just private, elite control over the legal system, nor private
....................evasion of the rule of law. It's a crisis-induced transition from a society with a deeply
....................compromised legal system to a society where force and surveillance completely sup-
....................plant the system."
....................Consider the system supplanted.
..........Now, just exactly why is it that Larry Chin can see that this is the situation, while the population of made-in-American-morons can't see it, but instead, with a snap of their psychological fingers, wish the entire matter out of existence? Why can Larry Chin see it, and not Amy Goodman? Why can Kevin Barrett see it and not Robert Silvers of The New York Review of Books? Why can I see it, and why can Michel Chossudovsky, Randall Tillotson, Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed, Barrie Zwicker, Webster Tarpley, Jim Marrs, Sander Hicks, Bev Conover, David Griffin, Jim Fetzer, Karen Kwiatkowski, Alan Miller, Colleen Rowley, Catherine Austin Fitts—why can they all see it while Frank Rich, Matthew Rothschild, Ariana Huffington, Rodrigue Tremblay, Mark Steyn, Jacob Weisberg, Thomas de Zengotita, Katie Couric, Noam Chomskey, Adolph Giuliani, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Nicholas Lemann, the Rabbi Michael Lerner, Barack Obama, Larry Silverstein, Richard Posner, Bill Keller, Andrew Rosenthal, Leon Wieseltier, Keith Olbermann—and, obviously, many, many more—can't see it?
..........Is it because they're non-readers, that is, illiterates, who therefore can't read even one solid and scholarly book on, say, the subject of 9/11?
..........Is it because they're so deeply and so profoundly anti-intellectual that they never read any books whatsoever, even though they spend their "professional" lives posing as editors, writers, journalists, opinion-makers, and commentators?
..........Is it that they're afraid to read even one solid and scholarly book on, say, 9/11?
..........If that's true, if they're afraid of reading even one such book because they're afraid of the truth they'll discover through that reading, aren't they themselves, then, actually, really, clinically, in denial?
..........Now, supposing that they are in denial of that kind, so afraid of the actual news that they can't bear to think about it—should they really continue to hold the positions of power, authority, and national influence that they do hold? Should Robert Silvers continue to edit The New York Review of Books if he's so afraid of the single most important truth in domestic political affairs to have occurred within the past seven years, or maybe the past hundred-and-fifty, that he can't bear to think about it?
..........Should Bill Keller continue to edit The New York Times if he's so afraid of the single most important truth in domestic political affairs to have occurred within the past seven years, or maybe the past hundred-and-fifty, that he can't bear to think about it?
..........Should Amy Goodman continue to host Democracy Now! if she's so afraid of the single most important truth in domestic political affairs to have occurred within the past seven years, or maybe the past hundred-and-fifty, that she can't bear to think about it?
..........Should David Corn continue to be Washington Editor of The Nation if he's so afraid of the single most important truth in domestic political affairs to have occurred within the past seven years, or maybe the past hundred-and-fifty, that he can't bear to think about it?
..........Should Alexander Cockburn continue to edit CounterPunch if he's so afraid of the single most important truth in domestic political affairs to have occurred within the past seven years, or maybe the past hundred-and-fifty, that he can't bear to think about it?
..........We could go on, asking this very same question, over and over, of a very, very great number of people. But, everybody is likely to agree, it would quickly become tiresome.
..........So let's try another approach, one that can lead us to a slightly different question and that can also begin gathering up the threads of our discussion as it draws toward its close—for the time being, that is.
..........Back at that point we agreed that if these qualities were rolled up into a single person, the result would be a consumer.
..........But since that point, there's been change. Since that point, we've covered certain fresh ground, observed new things, and have arrived at certain very important new conclusions. One result of all this is that we're no longer talking about the same thing we were talking about then. Then, we were talking, really, just about plain regular people, about the great American masses, the somebodies and the anybodies everywhere whom we've identified as being in 9/11 denial and therefore as making up the Bush administration's "base."
..........Now, though, we're talking about a different group entirely. Now, we're talking not about a mass, but about an elite, and an educated one. The group we're talking about are the members of the elite professional class in America who make up, support, operate, maintain, fund, shape, direct, and control the power of the mass media and the press, the institution that we'll call here the "media journalism" of today.
..........Unarguably, there are vast, enormous, obvious differences between the whole of mass America on the one hand and, on the other, the small, distinct, and extremely powerful media elite on the other. And yet, even so, our primary concern with each of these groups remains absolutely identical. Just as with the millions who make up what you could call the Consumers of America, so, too, with the relatively tiny media elite, we're concerned with the same and identical question we were concerned with before: Namely, whether the powerful elite, just like the amorphous many, also possess those traits, qualities, motives, or capabilities that are either needed or useful for going into a state of denial—not a denial of things minor and sundry, but a denial of matters earthshaking and great. To wit: The loss of the republic of the United States, beginning with the treason-trigger and inside job of 9/11, going on to the subsequent and carefully planned transforming of the nation into a fascist state, the replacing of its system of law with a system of force, and the undertaking of the complete annihilation of the United States of America as the republican Constitutional democracy that it has been—until now—since 1776.
..........And now in just exactly what way does our question change after the recognition with clarity such as this that those who make up our small, privileged, educated, and above all powerful American media elite also have the same denial-enabling qualities, motives, capabilities and traits as the hapless and helpless masses of plebeians do—after recognizing that the elite, too, are vain, deceitful, uncourageous, irresponsible, and ignorant in ways that lead or allow them into ruinous and ongoing denial—just exactly now, after such recognitions, does our question change?
..........It seems to me that it changes in this way. No longer can that question be the simple one of whether Frank Rich, David Corn, Matthew Rothschild, Ariana Huffington, Rodrigue Tremblay, Mark Steyn, Richard Posner, Thomas de Zengotita, Katie Couric, Noam Chomsky, Adolph Giuliani, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Nicholas Lemann, the Rabbi Michael Lerner, Barack Obama, Larry Silverstein, Richard Posner, Bill Keller, Andrew Rosenthal, Robert Silvers, Leon Wieseltier, Keith Olbermann—whether people of these kinds should continue to hold the jobs that they now hold, to perform the "tasks" that they now perform, or exert the dictates that they now exert.
..........No, the question no longer has the least thing to do with whether or not they "should" continue doing the "work" they now do.
..........It has become a "why" question. It has, in fact, become an urgent, pressing, and vitally important "why" question. Here it is, a question that the welfare of the nation and very probably the welfare of the world depend on:
..........Why is it that the following people, themselves only examples of many, many others like them, who should also be considered a part of the following list, have not been prosecuted under the law for suppressing evidence of mass murder, treason, and the destruction of a crime scene in a treasonable act; for aiding and abetting each of these crimes through the deliberate suppressing and withholding of evidence indicating that each such crime has in fact taken place; and for complicity in criminal acts through the lie and criminality of remaining silent while observing, and in some cases actually participating in, crimes of war, crimes against humanity, and treasonous crimes taking the specific form of the deliberate, knowing, and purposeful destruction of the Constitution of the United States.
..........To wit, these and numerous others: Frank Rich, David Corn, Robert Silvers, Richard Posner, Matthew Rothschild, Ariana Huffington, Rodrigue Tremblay, Mark Steyn, Thomas de Zengotita, Katie Couric, Noam Chomsky, Adolph Giuliani, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Nicholas Lemann, the Rabbi Michael Lerner, Barack Obama, Larry Silverstein, Jacob Weisberg, Richard Posner, Bill Keller, Andrew Rosenthal, Leon Wieseltier, Eliot Spitzer, Keith Olbermann, Amy Goodman, etc.
..........
..........Said in all seriousness? Yes, absolutely. Put too strongly? No, absolutely not. In any way likely to be of a practical application, use, or importance? Well, I wish so.
..........But before going further, another glance at Dante's Inferno for some clarification of my reasoning in asking—yes, it's what I really am asking—for the prosecution of those on my list. What the list-people have in common, of course, is that they're all journalists, commentators, editors, columnists, writers, or bloggers of one kind or another—with the exception of a few who have made their way onto the list for special reasons of one sort or another, like Adolph Giuliani, for example, or Eliot Spitzer. But, for the most part, the list is made up of the names of people who are serious journalists and, often, are well known or famous.
..........Those who are lucky enough to have read the Inferno already, or to have studied it in, say, college with a decent instructor in a decent course, will know the things I'm about to say. So those people can skip if they like.
..........Thanks in good part to Homer's first examples of it, the genre of the epic is huge—not just long, but a poetic form distinguished by its attempt to take in everything, the whole world, all of existence and all of its aspects. Dante is the important late-medieval or early-Renaissance literary figure that he is partly because when he set out to write his own epic, the so-called Divine Comedy, he had aims every bit as high and all-inclusive as Homer's had been, or, more recently, Virgil's.
..........In 1953, Archibald T. MacAllister put it this way:
..............................In the Divine Comedy we must remember that Dante had for his subject the whole world,
..............................the entire universe, all of man's history, his learning, his beliefs, plus his [Dante's] own
..............................particular messages.¹
..........Now, if Dante wanted to include all humanity, he needed to include all kinds of humanity—the good, the medium, and the irredeemably bad—with the result that he created Heaven—for the good; Purgatory—for the medium, aka redeemable; and Hell—for the irredeemably bad as the three (in his own 13th Century view) logical places to be filled with each of the three kinds of humans.
..........As I mentioned once earlier, Hell is the place that we (in our own 21st Century view) tend to be most interested in.
..........And a deftly and fascinatingly designed place it is. Since there are essentially three kinds of sins—of carnality, of violence, and of fraud or malice—Dante provides his Hell with an appropriate place for each. And he does something else, most ingeniously: He ranks the sins in such a way that, as a visitor goes down into Hell through its first third, then through its middle third, and finally to the very bottom of it, that visitor will also move from the least bad type of sin (the carnal) through the more bad type (the violent) to the most bad of all (the fraudulent).
..........Any of the three kinds will get you into Hell for eternity, but that doesn't really matter: they still comprise the least bad, the worse, and the worst. Dante's reasoning as he ranks them this way is fascinating. Of carnality, we can observe that it's the least bad because it has to do with natural things—feelings, emotions, and physical delights, things that become sinful only when they get out of control. For example, eating isn't a sin, yet gluttony is. When a person loses control of a natural function—desire for food or sex—the desire then controls the person instead of vice versa. And the person becomes a sinner.
..........Descending to the sins of violence, we find that these are indeed worse but not the worst. There are two reasons for this middle designation. As with the sins of incontinence, the body is once again—or is still—involved in the sins of violence. What's been added is will. In our own psychology—our "modern" psychology—we're likely to blame will in one way or another for all sorts of behavior—if someone is a failure, they must have wanted failure, or ditto if they're a drunk, or obese, or bad at "relationships." Even for Dante, the distinction between sinning through incontinence and sinning through will isn't always an absolutely clear one. The gluttons and the lustful, for example, are up there among the incontinent, while the sodomites are placed down among the violent—as if lust is something that must or can be contained lest it turn into sin while sodomy is something that must or can be willed in order for it to manifest as a sin.
..........But let it go. The really interesting distinction is now about to come—the really interesting one, that is, in light of our project here of discussing journalists who do "see" 9/11 as opposed to those who don't.
..........And so, as we find our way to the third and worst of the three great classes of sin, down in the very bottom of Hell and at the very center of the Earth, the great question again arises: What exactly is it that makes these, the sins of fraud and malice, not only worse than the sins of incontinence but worse even than those of violence?
..........A second question comes up as well: Why, exactly, does Dante see fit to divide the sins of fraud into two types, "simple" and "compound," with the latter thus becoming, down in the central pit of Hell, the very worst of the very worst?
..........And we mustn't forget to ask, "What does all this have to do with Amy Goodman? With Frank Rich?"
..........
..........The first question first. If you're one who enjoys hair-splitting—significant hair-splitting, of course—in your aesthetics or in your thinking life, Dante may be your man. Examples by the barge-load are available in The Inferno, but let's be practical and focus on just this one: Why are the sins of Fraud and Malice worse than those either of Incontinence or of Violence? Why are graft or hypocrisy or the giving of evil counsel, for the sake of heaven, worse than, say, murder?
..........Well, let's start by thinking about animals for a moment. Of course, we know that animals can't sin at all—not really—since they don't have souls. But let that go. Let's also leave aside the quibble as to whether animals do or don't have volition, as opposed simply to instinct. Instead, let's look just at the comparison between human and animal behavior, leaving altogether aside, for the moment, the whole question of sin.
..........So. Dante names as sins of incontinence lust, gluttony, wastefulness, hoarding, wrath, and sullenness. We ask, then, can animals eat? Have sex? Can they be wrathful? The answers are, of course, yes, yes, and yes. Much less clear, however, is whether they can be gluttonous, or whether they can be lustful. Dogs growl and snarl and bite, but whether they're wrathful is in doubt. And it's obvious that squirrels do hoard, but no one really blames them for it.
..........Our conclusion? Animals can't really qualify for any of Dante's sins of incontinence. But people who commit those sins are like animals because they're committing sins that in the main and in their essence are animalistic sins.
..........Questions about violence, clearly enough, will produce some more "yes" answers, since animals, like people, can obviously kill, claw, attack, rip, tear, and so on and so forth. That Dante includes suicide—can animals commit suicide? is that what the lemmings do?—as well as blasphemy, sodomy, and usury as sins of "violence" doesn't need detain us here, even though we know full well that animals can't commit a single one of them. And that fact, as we turn to the sins of fraud and malice, is about to reveal itself as bearing on our real point and helping answer our one real question of central significance.
..........Here's Dante's list of those committing the sin of simple fraud,² and it's comically evident and patently clear that no animal could ever manage to be one of these types of sinner:
................................................................................Seducers and panderers
................................................................................Flatterers
................................................................................Simoniacs
................................................................................Fortune tells and diviners
................................................................................Grafters
................................................................................Hypocrites
................................................................................Thieves
................................................................................Evil counselors
................................................................................Sowers of discord
................................................................................Counterfeiters and alchemists
..........Nor could any animal manage to commit any of Dante's sins of compound fraud:
................................................................................Treachery against kin
................................................................................Treachery against country
................................................................................Treachery against guests and hosts
................................................................................Treachery against lords and benefactors
..........And so now at last we can conclude. We can at last answer our question. The reason that the sins of fraud and malice are the worst kinds of sins is not just because they're the furthest removed from the sinners' animal nature; and they're not the worst sins just because only human beings can commit them; but they're the worst also because they can't even come into existence, let alone be committed, without the sinners' reliance upon the application and use of the human mind.
..........The highest gift given to mankind by the creator is the gift of mind, the one gift alone, the one tool, that wholly and unarguably distinguishes human beings from the animal world. And for Dante, man of faith but also early Renaissance humanist, to pervert that high gift, to use the human mind for the creating or bringing about not of good but of evil instead is the worst, the most despicable, the most loathsome, the most repulsive, the most degraded, the most repugnant, the most thankless and irreverent, the most wretched, the most corrupting, the most vile, and the most unforgivable thing that any human being can ever or ever have done.
..........
..........I can only hope and trust that readers by now (have you stuck with me all this way? Send email if you're still here!) are beginning to sense the coming together of things as we approach the end of this section of "A Letter of Lamentation to America." The overall point is the same now as it was all the way back at the beginning of Part 1—that "the United States is no longer a serious place." How can it be a serious place? Between the year 2000 and now, among some of the things it has lost or allowed to be tossed out or torn away are its three-part government, its balance of powers, its Bill of Rights, one entire and historic major American city, the guarantee of habeas corpus, the protections of a world court, protections against and treaties governing biological warfare, and the respect of very nearly all the peoples and nations of the world—to the point where just about the only country left with people who would rather rush up and tousle Bush's hair than send him back to Texas air mail special delivery are the people of Albania, for god's sake.
..........If the United States were still a serious place, with serious people dominant in it, how could so ruinous an extent of loss and depredation have been allowed to come about in so extraordinarily short a time as it has?
..........And, if the United States were still a serious place, how could it conceivably be the case that the situation now remains as it does remain: a nation that's inert, a nation that's empty, a nation that's in "denial," a nation that's unaware of and unresponsive to the true cancers that are eating it alive, a nation that shows no significant evidence of any functioning ability to save itself and restore its own health?
..........That's not what I call a serious place. It's what I call a pitiable, absurd, near-ruined, very possibly tragic place.
..........Among these—if we can take a moment for what may seem a digression—I include America's academic writers, and I include also what we wrongly call America's literary writers—the novel-writers, for one example, for whom 9/11 has been a source of facile plot-trickery and sweet-theme-pudding allowing for long, winsome, bitter-sweet tales, or a way of letting a couple break up (each allowing the other to believe him or her dead in the towers), or that impels a gray dean of American letters to reveal for us all, in fiction, just precisely and exactly how it is that a "home-grown" "terrorist" can come into existence here in the land of the free, a young person Islamic in religion and Arabic in ethnicity who is angry at the U.S. and simultaneously standard-issue-envious and standard-issue-resentful of it.
..........Factoid stereotyping, content-free fluff, in other words, the sort of thing every editor—mainly big-house but little, too— knows, loves, and encourages: The politically safe, empty, inert, unserious "literature" that's not really literature at all—it's escapism—but a form of production that comes from deep, deep ignorance—from people who have no knowledge whatsoever of 9/11, its origins or its real nature or its implications or its dangers, and no curiosity whatsoever to find out—and that serves ever so perfectly as propaganda, in this case propaganda suited particularly well to helping maintain the status quo. To help keep us all dumb.
..........In a condemnation of this kind—it's not a "criticism," it's a condemnation—the question of complete unawareness, of complete ignorance, must and will arise. This question essentially asks, "If someone has no idea of what they're doing, can they be blamed for the result of it?"
..........And the answer is yes. Don't forget that the subtitle of this long essay is "The United States Is No Longer a Serious Place." And one of the most commonplace signs of its being no longer a serious nation is the widespread—and widely encouraged—assumption that ignorance is harmless, that not knowing things doesn't really matter, that in fact people in a free country like ours have a "right" to be ignorant or uninformed, and, finally, that ignorance doesn't matter because it's without consequence.
..........I beg of you, I implore you, to read this brilliant, reasoned, and indispensable piece by Scott Ritter, even though its title, "Repudiation, Not Impeachment," may make it sound as though it's not about the dreadful weight and import and results of ignorance. But it is.
..........Ignorance, except in children, is not and cannot be blameless. The trouble is, of course, that in the United States too many people remain—and are encouraged to remain—children for their entire lives.
..........But back to our "novelists" and "editors." If in real life an author or editor of the kind we've been alluding to didn't have even the faintest or foggiest notion or idea of what damage they were doing or perpetuating through the writing, pandering, and peddling of such stuff as the fake-lit I've described—or even the foggiest idea of what they were failing to do in the doing of it—well, in that case we'd have to conclude that such an author or such an editor was either empty, inert, in denial, utterly incurious intellectually, powerfully ignorant, and grotesquely unserious—or all of the above at one and the same time.
..........The only remaining possible case is the truly blood-curdling one. That's the case when the author or editor—or columnist, commentator, or interviewer, since it's time to bring back into the discussion all writers and all of media-journalism—when the writer or journalist knows the truth but lies about it anyway, whether the lying is done by dodging, twisting, smearing, gloating, denouncing, or just plain ignoring.
..........This is the situation where I place figures like Robert Silvers and Frank Rich and Bill Keller and Amy Goodman. How can this not be the place for them? And, it hardly need be said, this place, of all possible places, is the bottom. Like Cocytus, it is the worst of the worst.
..........Understanding exactly what this place or situation is will require returning to Dante, from whom we can learn the difference between "simple fraud" and the very worst of the very worst, "compound fraud."
..........
..........And it's very clear, really. Malice and fraud are "simple" when either of them is committed by one human being against another human being. But malice and fraud instantly become "compound"—they become "treachery"—when either is committed by one human being not against just any other human being, but against another human being "TO WHOM THEY WERE BOUND BY SPECIAL TIES."
..........And there you are. The four types of compound fraud identified by Dante are the exercising of treachery against—that is, the betraying of—first, kin; then country; then guests or hosts; and, finally, benefactors, lords, or masters.
..........The traitors here, frozen eternally in deep, deep ice, lie "in Cocytus, / the bottom of all guilt." ¹¹
..........Our now long-ago question ("Why is it that the following people. . . have not been prosecuted under the law for suppressing evidence of mass murder, treason, and the destruction of a crime scene in a treasonable act; for aiding and abetting. . . ") still remains. It also still remains unanswered. Why have they not? It's possible that it will never be answered. But on the other hand, at the very least, we certainly know a whole lot more now than we did earlier about, first, the appropriateness of the question itself, and, second, about why it must be asked.
..........We're in deadly, awful shape. Our political party-system is inert, as so is our constitutional system of checks and balances, in good part thanks to the diabolic— and fraudulent—invention of "the unitary executive" and the many power-grabbing crimes that have been committed brazenly under the extraordinarily treacherous and devious cover that it provides. With the inertness in the political-cultural life of the nation, there automatically also comes emptiness. After all, without opposition in a political system—or a cultural one—that system cannot be generative. That is, ideas cannot be generated, and, even if generated "technically," cannot be acted upon toward practical or applied or productive fruition of any kind.
..........And so what happens when there's an inert and therefore an empty system that cannot be generative? Precisely: The system becomes imperative. Or, to put it another way, the system having reach this condition cannot be anything other than imperative.
..........That's why the United States is no longer a republic but an empire. And that's also why George W. Bush is no longer a president. Inside this inert, empty system, he's a command-giver. Emperor, it's known as.
..........And just exactly how is it that all of this has been allowed to happen? The answer is very simple. For a very long time before 9/11, large numbers of traitors lived among us, preparing the way for the great "trigger" that eventually took the form of the phony "attack" of 9/11 itself. The three best books known to me that include the history preceding 9/11 are probably those by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Michel Chossudovsky, and Webster G. Tarpley. These are among the large number of scholarly, revelatory, truth-telling books that we're actually expected to believe have not been read by Bill Keller, Robert Silvers, Amy Goodman, Frank Rich, and great numbers of others in positions of high journalistic and cultural responsibility such as theirs.
..........If they haven't read them, these people are fraudulent, derelict in their professional claims and responsibilities, akin to a person with a practice in throat surgery who in fact has never studied or been educated in the anatomy of the throat.
..........Where in Dante's Hell would you put them if this were the case, and why? Email me, why don't you. Let me know. It's not a good place.
..........On the other hand, if they have read the books—as they must have! How could they not have read at least some of them and still be sentient, living and breathing public intellectuals?—if they have read the books—or even if they haven't read them but have just absorbed enough information (after all, they are supposedly news people) to have joined or even simply to have become aware of the existence of the thirty-six percent of Americans who "know" that 9/11 "was an inside job"—if they have advanced to any such or any equivalent degree of consciousness of the truth about 9/11 and have continued nevertheless to deny it, or to falsify it, or to misrepresent, twist, smear, ignore, demean, dodge, malign, or in any other way to behave fraudulently in regard to it—well, then they are, all of them, clearly guilty of compound fraud; they are, all of them, clearly guilty of treachery against "those to whom they were bound by special ties"; and they would, all of them, if Dante Alighieri were in charge of such matters instead of the likes of Dick Cheney, or the likes of they themselves, they would all be destined for Cocytus, for the ice, for "the bottom of all guilt."
..........And to whom are these traitors and criminals "specially bound"? First, they are specially bound to us, the citizen-readers of the United States, specially bound, as journalists, to provide us with the truth or provide us with nothing, absolutely analogous to a physician's being specially bound to his or her patient, bound to provide truth in diagnosis and best effort in cure—and, to do no harm. (For a note on the purity and extent of hypocrisy that underlies the compound fraud we're looking at, click here and then do a page search for "Hippocratic." What you'll find there isn't good.)
..........And what further "special bond" is it the traitors are being faithless to? I'll provide you with John Ciardi's version of Dante's list of the bonds. Then you do the choosing. Email me, why don't you. I think everyone will be in agreement.
......................................................................1) kin
......................................................................2) country
......................................................................3) guests or hosts
......................................................................4) benefactors, lords, or masters.
..........This is part, but only part, of the reason why traitors and criminals ranging from the very topmost Dick Cheney and Nancy Pelosi and Scooter Libby down through the middle regions of Bill Keller and Frank Rich to the foul pits of a hundred-thousand Bill O'Reillys—why these traitors and criminals routinely, consistently, and conventionally go unpunished.
..........Such a nation cannot any longer be called a serious nation. It can be called a criminal, monstrous, unleashed, military, or violent nation; it can be called a thuggish, brute, or greed-driven nation; it can be called an unscrupulous, murderous, rapacious, and conscienceless nation; but it cannot any longer or in any way be accurately or truly called a serious nation.
..........And yet I keep writing these "Food for Thought" pieces and sending them around because I can't yet, and I won't yet, give up hope entirely.
..........Next time, the subject will be the "seriousness" itself that has now left the nation, the seriousness that once gave America not only great life and the potential for great life but also the ability to give the gift of life to others. That seriousness has now been murdered. That seriousness has now been smothered, scorned, abused, driven away, pushed into exile—and all but forgotten. Without its return, if we can't somehow reawaken it or retrieve it or re-create it—then we are doomed, with an absoluteness and certainty that cannot be eschewed.²²
..........I'm going to end, for now, with a longish quotation from an immeasurably important essay by Michel Chossudovsky. First, though, two things.
..........One. With the serious exposure of the truth about 9/11—exposure by, from, and through those very traitors and other criminals and failures who now do all in their power to avoid such exposure—with such serious exposure, the other seriousness I'm talking about could be brought back into the country, could be brought back to life, and could help save us from political, spiritual, and—with particular certainty—cultural destruction. Without such exposure, never.
..........Two. A reference to "The Oxen"; a reference to "Church Going"; and, like last time, a prayer:
..........O, non-god, protect us all! O, non-god, protect us all!
..........
..................................................................................................................................—Eric Larsen
..................................................................................................................................—July 14, 2007
...................................................................................................."Another [9/11 type terrorist] attack could create
....................................................................................................both a justification and an opportunity that is lacking
....................................................................................................today to retaliate against some known targets"
....................................................................................................(Statement by Pentagon official, leaked to the
....................................................................................................Washington Post, 23 April 2006)
..........9/11 and the threat of a second major attack on America are ostensibly part of the building block of the US National Security doctrine. While, the threat of an impending 9/11 type attack by "Islamic terrorists" is a fabrication, extensive media propaganda, supported by covert intelligence operations, has ensured that the "Global War on Terrorism" or GWOT is widely accepted both by the supporters and opponents of the Bush administration.
..........Visibly based on an outright lie, GWOT has nonetheless gained in legitimacy among America's European partners and allies, which have adopted their own ("copy and paste") anti-terrorist emergency procedures.
..........Despite mountains of evidence, the 9/11 attacks continue to be upheld by the US and its NATO allies as a bona fide act of war by a foreign power. Since 911, the GWOT is supported by the governments of more than 90 countries. (President George W. Bush, CENTCOM Coalition Conference, May 1, 2007)
..........Ironically, the Global War on Terrorism is also endorsed by several prominent and authoritative "progressive" intellectuals, who condemn US foreign policy and the Middle East war, while upholding the legitimacy of America's campaign against "Islamic terrorism."
..........An important segment of the US antiwar movement has a similar stance. While calling for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, it denies the existence of a national resistance movement to the US led occupation: "We are against the US led war in Iraq, but we support the war on terrorism." Not surprisingly, Bush's "Catastrophic Emergency" Directive (NSPD 51) does not seem to have raised much concern within the US Antiwar movement.
..........Since 9/11, numerous lead stories and Op Eds outlining the nature of the "Global War on Terrorism" have been fed profusely into the news chain. A worldwide Al Qaeda legend has emerged.
..........Repeated ad nauseam on a daily basis, the GWOT has also become part of a shaky bipartisan political consensus. Despite the blatant contradictions and the political lies, in particular in relation to 9/11 and the possibility of a second large scale terrorist attack, the GWOT is nonetheless accepted by an increasingly skeptical US public.
..........Behind this diabolical "catastrophic emergency" scenario, which ultimately hinges on the powers of media disinformation and deceit, is a profit driven war.
..........The spiraling multibillion dollar "defense" budget, which according to independent estimates has reached the trillion dollar mark (more than double the official figures), is barely acknowledged, nor is the privatization of war itself.
..........The US military industrial complex which produces the numerous "humanitarian weapons" including the mini-nukes and bunker buster bombs used to go after the terrorists, would be the direct beneficiary of a war on Iran, together with Wall Street and the Anglo-American oil giants, which vie to appropriate and privatize the region's extensive oil and gas reserves.
..........This war is not led by the military but by the civilian corporate interests which lie behind the Bush administration. The military takes orders from civilians acting on behalf of those dominant economic interests.
..........The Wall Street financial establishment, the military-industrial complex, led by Lockheed Martin, the big five weapons and aerospace defense contractors, the Texas oil giants and energy conglomerates, the construction and engineering and public utility companies not to mention the biotechnology conglomerates, are indelibly behind this militarization of America.
..........In turn, the Worldwide demonization of Islam is part of this profit driven war. Three quarters of the World's oil reserves lie in Muslim lands. (World Oil 2004, see also Michel Chossudovsky, "The Demonization of Muslims and the Battle for Oil," Global Research, January 2007).
..........Vilification of the enemies of America, portrayed as fanatic "Islamic terrorists", is part of the Battle for Oil. If the oil were in countries occupied predominantly by Buddhists or Hindus, one would expect that Bush's entire National Security agenda, including the recent "Catastrophic Emergency" Directive NSP 51 would be directed against Buddhists and Hindus.
..........How to reverse the tide?
..........The threat of a Second Al Qaeda "Attack on America" is being used profusely by the Bush administration to galvanize public opinion in support of a global military agenda.
..........Known and documented, the "Islamic terror network" is a creation of the US intelligence apparatus. The "war on terrorism" is bogus. The 911 narrative as conveyed by the 911 Commission report is fabricated.
..........The Bush administration is involved in acts of cover-up and complicity at the highest levels of government.
..........Revealing the lies behind 911 would serve to undermine the legitimacy of the "global war on terrorism" which constitutes the main justification for waging war in the Middle East.
..........Without 911, the war criminals in high office do not have a leg to stand on. Their entire National Security construct collapses like a deck of cards.
..........
¹ ..........Introduction to John Ciardi's translation of The Inferno, New American Library, 1954.
²..........Throughout, I'm using John Ciardi's terms for the sinners and their sins.
³..........Ciardi, Inferno, p. 266.
¹¹..........Inferno, XXXI, 102-103
²²..........See Geoffrey Chaucer, "The Nun's Priest's Tale," in The Canterbury Tales (line 3338). Works, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd Edition 1957. "O destynee, that mayst nat ben eschewed!" [O destiny, that can't be avoided]
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................................................................................Bush published a week before the 2001 inauguration] [was] not Bush, but
................................................................................the Times. What [was] the Times trying to tell us? Once it was settled that W.
................................................................................was going to be president, the Times seemed very concerned with making
................................................................................it believable.
..........................................................................................—David Cogswell, "Usurpation: The Coup of 2001 and the Inaugural Cry,"
..........................................................................................a Post-Script to Fortunate Son (2001), by J. H. Hatfield (New York, Soft Skull
..........................................................................................Press)
................................................................................[M]ost of Congress and the American public cannot imagine the degree of insanity
................................................................................that lies behind the Bush administration.
..........................................................................................—Paul Craig Roberts, "The Neoconservative Threat to American Freedom,"
..........................................................................................June 11, 2007
................................................................................Schizoid anxiety separates the 64% who tell pollsters they don't think [9/11] was
................................................................................an inside job from the 36% who know it was. Among the 64% who are in denial,
................................................................................internal schizoid anxiety. . . throws up a mind-smothering smokescreen of fear and
................................................................................revulsion.
..........................................................................................—Kevin Barratt, "No Baggage: A Report on My Trip to Morocco in Search of
..........................................................................................the Alleged Suicide Hijacker Waleed al Shehri"
................................................................................[T]he Bush regime will do everything in their power to promote our denial, pretense,
................................................................................and silence. Our becoming silent is the very thing which allows them to literally get
................................................................................away with murder.
..........................................................................................—Paul Levy, "Denial: the 51st State"
................................................................................How did we get to the point where vast numbers of citizens turn a blind eye by
................................................................................choice?
..........................................................................................—Carla Binion, Online Journal, "Knee-deep blood in the land of make-believe,"
..........................................................................................April 26, 2007
................................................................................If a war crime was committed, it is elementary that those that aid and abet this crime
................................................................................are also war criminals. This includes the Congress. . . It also includes the soldiers. . .
................................................................................And, yes, to the extent that we don't publicly object to it, you and me.
..........................................................................................—James Rothenberg and Otto Hinckelmann, "Why Being 'Worst President Ever' Is
..........................................................................................Not Enough," June 6, 2007
................................................................................Everyone around the world has both the right and the duty under international law
................................................................................to resist ongoing criminal activities perpetrated by the Bush Jr. administration and its
................................................................................foreign accomplices by all nonviolent means possible.
..........................................................................................—Francis A. Boyle, Destroying World Order, 2004
..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
3
(Continued)
EMPTY AMERICA
(Continued)
EMPTY AMERICA
..........
..........For ease in picking up where we left off, let's have a few paragraphs from near the end of "Empty America" as they appeared in FFT 10.1:
..............................But before we return to the clear and present danger to the republic—and the world—
....................represented by the Cheney-Bush administration, we have some unfinished business to attend
....................to. My imaginary roomful of students went nearly berserk with their sense of the absurd when
....................I asked them why a person would go into "denial," with "denial" being defined as "a person's
....................refusal to accept one fact or thing or event or another, usually because the fact or thing or
....................event is in some way very, very threatening."
..............................The students' answer, of course, was the obvious and perfectly circular one that "People
....................go into denial because something is very, very threatening." And yet at the same time they re-
....................jected my lunging pit bull analogy, arguing that to go into denial in the pit bull case would be "in-
....................sane" and furthermore implying, I believe, that I was insane for so much as coming up with the
....................analogy.
..............................But as we've ascertained already, I hope, and as it certainly seems to me, that kind of
....................denial is exactly the kind that the entire population of made-in-America-morons has gone into
....................starting with 9/11 and has continued in for the entire six and a half years since—a denial, I re-
....................peat, that has resulted in extraordinary and all but unspeakable dangers to us all.
..............................But even so, no matter how unequivocally important those dangers are, before looking
....................at them again we've somehow got to get my imaginary students to come up with a better an-
....................swer to the denial question than they did—which is to say, as said before, an answer that's
....................more interesting, more insightful, more penetrating, more useful, and more revelatory than the
....................one they gave. An answer, that is, that's not just circular.
..........I can imagine readers—some readers—getting impatient, asking what difference it makes, so what if the answer is circular, who cares if the reason a person goes into denial about something is because the thing they're going into denial about is threatening to them?
..........And to such readers, I answer, in short, that it matters, first, because circularity alone is all but meaningless as a means of thought ("Sugar is sweet. I like it." "Why do you like it?" "I like it because it's sweet"). And it matters, too, even more importantly, because responsibility matters.
..........And now that we've got it waked up and looking us in the eye, that word, "responsibility," is going to require that we make a digression back to A Nation Gone Blind.
..........In that book's first chapter, "Watching America Go Blind," a good part of the discussion has to do with the phenomenon of American literary intellectuals having become simplified and also with the way they've become simplified.
..........One of the literary figures in the chapter complains about having been required to read, back in college, writers who, as she put it, were "foreign to [her] natural sensibility." She herself, as it happened, was of neither American nor European extraction, while this particular class or set of required writers was. As a result, she tended to see them not just as "foreign" to her own "sensibility" but also irrelevant to it. To her, their significance was therefore dubious. She tended to resent them, disparage and minimize them, and then—well, what would logically be next? Doesn't intelligent conjecture suggest that next would be to ignore them?
..........In other words, putting her case from then into the terms of our present subject now, we could say that she went into a certain form of denial in regard to that body of writers.
..........So? Well, so this: What she did was set aside or toss away any responsibility for them.
..........These paragraphs from A Nation Gone Blind (pp. 39-40) take up the matter:
..............................When people used to read Emerson, for example, or Melville; or when people used to be
....................serious about writers like, say, Camus, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir—in those times, the idea of
....................self-reliance was still very much alive, widely understood to play a vitally important part in much
....................of the greatest American and European literature. Self-reliance was centrally important in the art
....................of figures as different from one another as, say, Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain, or as both of
....................those are different from Fyodor Dostoevsky.
..............................Now, though, self-reliance has disappeared almost entirely from the worlds of academia,
....................literature, and the arts: the concept—in the French writers I've mentioned, in Beckett, in countless
....................others—that each and every human being is a free agent and accordingly is responsible not only
....................for everything he or she does, but also for everything that he or she doesn't do. This grand,
....................high, austere, profoundly serious, intense, and demanding idea, however, has, in the Age of
....................Simplification, been taken over and replaced by the simple, in fact the puerile, concept of rights.
..............................There was a time when, if a person, particularly in academia, felt that their natural sens-
....................ibilities weren't in tune with, say, a certain literature, music, artistic period or genre, it was up to
....................that out-of-tune person to discover what merit, if any, resided in the genre or period sufficient
....................to make it part—perhaps a required part—of an education. In other words, it was once understood
....................that the world did not turn around any one individual or exist to please one person, but that, in-
....................stead, the world held treasures that were greater than any one person, and that it was up to
....................each to become familiar with the world, not for the world to bend to the pleasure of each.
·
..........And so now at last, with some groundwork laid, we're ready to do two things: First, come up with a better answer to our "why-do-people-go-into-denial" question; and, second, tackle the real subject of this essay, namely, the subject of the United States as no longer being a serious nation...........Now, keep in mind the kind of person described above, since this is the kind of person we're about to turn to now. It's not a type from among people of a certain time ago, who might have actually subscribed to the idea that "the world held treasures that were greater than any one person, and that it was up to each to become familiar with the world," but, instead, it's a person of today; a person solipsistic; a person born, baptized, and bred inside the culture and confines of consumerism; a person very likely indeed to think it the responsibility of the world "to bend to the pleasure of" the individual self; a person no longer familiar with (having been encouraged throughout life to become unfamiliar with it) the very idea that thinking itself does have or should have its first basis in empiricism.
..........In short, a typical made-in-America-moron.
..........And now this is the person whose motives, qualities, or capabilities we're going to analyze—motives, qualities, or capabilities, that is, either needed or useful for going into a state of denial of things that are or may—or even may not, for that matter—be threatening.
..........And, once again, this time we're not going to allow our analysis to take the form of simple or fallacious circularity: Neither the circularity that such a person goes into denial because the denied thing is threatening, for example; nor because the person is threatened by the thing; nor because the person is frightened of it or by it, nor any other such fallacies parallel to these.
..........Now, let's go on to some real possibilities. Let's even go ahead and number a few of them.
..........1)
..........One of the person's motives, qualities, or capabilities leading to "denial" of something threatening or potentially threatening might be that he or she is a coward and has never been trained, raised, or educated to be otherwise.
..........2)
..........One of the person's motives, qualities, or capabilities leading to "denial" of something threatening or potentially threatening might be that he or she is at ease with lying, since "denial" of the kind we're talking about can—must—be considered a matter of lying, albeit it mainly or even only lying to the self.
..........3)
..........One of the person's motives, qualities, or capabilities leading to "denial" of something threatening or potentially threatening might be that he or she is ignorant—of the world and the nature of the world, of the putative threat and the nature of the threat—and has never been trained, raised, or educated to be otherwise or to prefer to be otherwise. The person, that is, knows little or nothing and chooses to learn little or nothing.
..........4)
..........One of the person's motives, qualities, or capabilities leading to "denial" of something threatening or potentially threatening might be that he or she is solipsistic, vain, voluptuary, self-involved, and ego-driven and has never been trained, raised, or educated to be otherwise or to prefer to be otherwise.
..........5)
..........A near-corollary of number three: One of the person's motives, qualities, or capabilities leading to "denial" of something threatening or potentially threatening might be that he or she prefers always to remain free from responsibility—from responsibility, especially, that in any way has to do with responsibility for others—and has never been trained, raised, or educated to be otherwise or to prefer to be otherwise.
..........Unfortunately, it's necessary to make one last qualifier before we can get to the conclusion here and find exactly what it is we've gotten by gathering up these five "motives, qualities, or capabilities" that are either helpful or needed for people to go into "denial." That is, we've got to distinguish between two very broad kinds of threatening things or potentially threatening things, and then we've got to identify which one of these two distinct kinds is our real subject here. The other kind we'll leave alone.
..........It seems true that threats or threatening things, generally speaking, can come from one of two places: They can come either from inside a person or from outside a person.
..........If a person suffers from bipolar disorder, say, or clinical depression, or if a person is diagnosed with cancer—the threats or threatening things that bipolar disorder or depression or cancer either are, or that they represent, or that they can grow into—these, we can say, all come from inside a person, not outside. Now, we know very well that in actuality there can or may be external causes of any of them—environmental, genetic, viral, and so forth. And yet the manifestation of the threat, to the person who possesses or suffers it, very reasonably is felt or considered to come from within.
..........On the other hand, things like war, social change, neighborhood deterioration, global warming, decay of inner cities, obesity caused by over-use of high-fructose corn syrup, top-soil erosion, air and water pollution, and so forth—these kinds of threats or threatening things can reasonably be considered to come from without, even though, again, an argument can indeed be made that every one of them originates in some way within the psychology or instinct of human beings and that those are inner, not outer things.
..........Generally, though, in plain laymen's, non-specialist terms, we can distinguish between threat that comes from within and threat that comes from without. And it's the kind that comes from without that we're concerned with here.
..........And now with that agreed on, we can take our next two steps toward our great subject of unseriousness. Each step can be a question. What did we discover by gathering up the four "motives" that we identified above? And what exactly is the threat or threatening thing—how big? what kind?—that people seem to be going into denial of?
..........I'll use numbers again, but this time only two.
..........1)
..........Here's a proposal for an experiment. If someone were to take our four potential motives for people's going into "denial" and put them all into one single person, what do you think would happen? What would be the result? What or who would be created?
..........I say let's try it and find out.
..........So take a person, then, and prepare him or her for insertion of traits. First, cowardice. Very simple. In it goes. Next we lay hold of the ability or tendency to lie, inserting it in with its predecessor. Ignorance isn't difficult to handle, and there it goes, into the mix. The gathering up of the essences of vanity, egotism, and self-involvement may take a minute or two, but once the three are mingled and placed in a proper container, in they go, too, just like those before them. Then, finally, irresponsibility. Most specifically, as said, this is irresponsibility toward any other than the self. In it goes. And, with all these traits or ingredients—these motives, qualities, or capabilities—successfully inserted into the person, what is it that we've come up with? Well, what we've got is a vain, deceitful, uncourageous, irresponsible, ignorant person.
..........In other words—can it really be so?—we've gotten ourselves—a consumer!
..........2)
..........And so, in this little experiment of ours, that's what we're left with for raw materials: not citizen, not thinker, not critic, not activist, not historian—but consumer.
..........And what, exactly, is it that this consumer, or this nation of consumers, went into denial about six and a half years ago and has remained in denial of ever since, as if it were a matter set in stone? And what, exactly, is it the consumer-nation has remained in denial of in spite of the emergence of ever-greater, ever more abundant, and ever-increasing evidence of various kinds that in a normal or thinking world or in the case of a normal or willing psychological patient would have served to diminish, break down, and dissipate this epidemic of denial long before now? Is the thing being denied small? Is it subtle, or is it explicit and obvious? Does it have few ramifications or many? Does it have the capacity to touch on the lives only of few, or on the lives of many? And is it something that could, in "touching on" those lives, whether many or few, alter them in any ways, and, if so, would it be in ways that are small, minor, and benign, or would it be in ways that are enormous, powerful, and pernicious?
..........Well, let's look for our answer in as plain, direct, succinct, and factual a manner as possible. Let's do it, that is, through good clear writing—the sort almost always to be found, say, in Online Journal, a source of news, analysis, and information that, in my view, everybody should keep up with daily. Let's look for our answer, in fact, from the pen—or keyboard—of Larry Chin, who, it happens, is associate editor of Online Journal.
..........Let's turn to a Chin piece dated April 16, 2007, that, while giving us our answer, touches also on other matters—on Bush's appointment of a "war czar," for one, on the hired-killer uses in foreign affairs of the for-profit military machine known as "Blackwater USA," and also on the Bush administration's voracious appetite for spying on U.S. citizens. Chin's piece, which touches on all of these matters, is entitled "Bush administration pushes for expansion and deepening of police state." Because they provide us with the answer we're looking for, I quote here Larry Chin's opening paragraphs:
....................The George W. Bush administration seized the White House in 2000 by way of an openly
....................stolen election, then cemented its criminal power into place with the unprecedented 9/11
....................mass murder, and its two resulting abominations: the fabricated "war on terrorism" (the
....................pretext for endless global war), and the USA PATRIOT Act (the full-scale destruction of
....................the Constitution, and the militarization of the US homeland).
....................The deepening of the war and security state continues unabated and relatively unopposed,
....................in spite of meager posturing of (largely complicit) congressional Democrats. Nothing has
....................been done to stop, reverse or undo the Bush administration's boundless criminality, its wide
....................open corruption, or the absolute and systematic rape of law itself. Few if any of Bush's
....................criminals have been brought to justice.
..........After that opening, Chin briefly discusses the topics I mentioned above—illegal domestic spying, the appointment of a war "czar," and the nature and uses of Blackwater USA, calling them "Three new examples [that] leave no doubt" of the truth of what he said in his introductory paragraphs.
..........He ends his piece this way:
....................As written by Mike Ruppert in Crossing the Rubicon [2004], "American fascism is some-
....................thing different now. It's not just private, elite control over the legal system, nor private
....................evasion of the rule of law. It's a crisis-induced transition from a society with a deeply
....................compromised legal system to a society where force and surveillance completely sup-
....................plant the system."
....................Consider the system supplanted.
·
..........In other words, the thing that's being treated as if it doesn't really exist, the thing that people have gone into "denial" about, is not small, but big, not minor, but major: The loss of the republic beginning with the treason-trigger of 9/11, the transforming of the nation into a fascist state, the replacing of a system of law with a system of force, and undertaking the complete annihilation—albeit not, at least yet, physically—of the United States of America as the republican Constitutional democracy that it has been since 1776...........Now, just exactly why is it that Larry Chin can see that this is the situation, while the population of made-in-American-morons can't see it, but instead, with a snap of their psychological fingers, wish the entire matter out of existence? Why can Larry Chin see it, and not Amy Goodman? Why can Kevin Barrett see it and not Robert Silvers of The New York Review of Books? Why can I see it, and why can Michel Chossudovsky, Randall Tillotson, Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed, Barrie Zwicker, Webster Tarpley, Jim Marrs, Sander Hicks, Bev Conover, David Griffin, Jim Fetzer, Karen Kwiatkowski, Alan Miller, Colleen Rowley, Catherine Austin Fitts—why can they all see it while Frank Rich, Matthew Rothschild, Ariana Huffington, Rodrigue Tremblay, Mark Steyn, Jacob Weisberg, Thomas de Zengotita, Katie Couric, Noam Chomskey, Adolph Giuliani, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Nicholas Lemann, the Rabbi Michael Lerner, Barack Obama, Larry Silverstein, Richard Posner, Bill Keller, Andrew Rosenthal, Leon Wieseltier, Keith Olbermann—and, obviously, many, many more—can't see it?
..........Is it because they're non-readers, that is, illiterates, who therefore can't read even one solid and scholarly book on, say, the subject of 9/11?
..........Is it because they're so deeply and so profoundly anti-intellectual that they never read any books whatsoever, even though they spend their "professional" lives posing as editors, writers, journalists, opinion-makers, and commentators?
..........Is it that they're afraid to read even one solid and scholarly book on, say, 9/11?
..........If that's true, if they're afraid of reading even one such book because they're afraid of the truth they'll discover through that reading, aren't they themselves, then, actually, really, clinically, in denial?
..........Now, supposing that they are in denial of that kind, so afraid of the actual news that they can't bear to think about it—should they really continue to hold the positions of power, authority, and national influence that they do hold? Should Robert Silvers continue to edit The New York Review of Books if he's so afraid of the single most important truth in domestic political affairs to have occurred within the past seven years, or maybe the past hundred-and-fifty, that he can't bear to think about it?
..........Should Bill Keller continue to edit The New York Times if he's so afraid of the single most important truth in domestic political affairs to have occurred within the past seven years, or maybe the past hundred-and-fifty, that he can't bear to think about it?
..........Should Amy Goodman continue to host Democracy Now! if she's so afraid of the single most important truth in domestic political affairs to have occurred within the past seven years, or maybe the past hundred-and-fifty, that she can't bear to think about it?
..........Should David Corn continue to be Washington Editor of The Nation if he's so afraid of the single most important truth in domestic political affairs to have occurred within the past seven years, or maybe the past hundred-and-fifty, that he can't bear to think about it?
..........Should Alexander Cockburn continue to edit CounterPunch if he's so afraid of the single most important truth in domestic political affairs to have occurred within the past seven years, or maybe the past hundred-and-fifty, that he can't bear to think about it?
..........We could go on, asking this very same question, over and over, of a very, very great number of people. But, everybody is likely to agree, it would quickly become tiresome.
..........So let's try another approach, one that can lead us to a slightly different question and that can also begin gathering up the threads of our discussion as it draws toward its close—for the time being, that is.
·
..........To try this new approach, let's return to the point where we identified traits, motives, qualities, and capabilities that would be either useful or needed to allow or cause people to enter into the type of denial we're talking about. Those qualities, in case you've forgotten, were cowardice, deceitfulness, ignorance, vanity, and irresponsibility, specifically to others...........Back at that point we agreed that if these qualities were rolled up into a single person, the result would be a consumer.
..........But since that point, there's been change. Since that point, we've covered certain fresh ground, observed new things, and have arrived at certain very important new conclusions. One result of all this is that we're no longer talking about the same thing we were talking about then. Then, we were talking, really, just about plain regular people, about the great American masses, the somebodies and the anybodies everywhere whom we've identified as being in 9/11 denial and therefore as making up the Bush administration's "base."
..........Now, though, we're talking about a different group entirely. Now, we're talking not about a mass, but about an elite, and an educated one. The group we're talking about are the members of the elite professional class in America who make up, support, operate, maintain, fund, shape, direct, and control the power of the mass media and the press, the institution that we'll call here the "media journalism" of today.
..........Unarguably, there are vast, enormous, obvious differences between the whole of mass America on the one hand and, on the other, the small, distinct, and extremely powerful media elite on the other. And yet, even so, our primary concern with each of these groups remains absolutely identical. Just as with the millions who make up what you could call the Consumers of America, so, too, with the relatively tiny media elite, we're concerned with the same and identical question we were concerned with before: Namely, whether the powerful elite, just like the amorphous many, also possess those traits, qualities, motives, or capabilities that are either needed or useful for going into a state of denial—not a denial of things minor and sundry, but a denial of matters earthshaking and great. To wit: The loss of the republic of the United States, beginning with the treason-trigger and inside job of 9/11, going on to the subsequent and carefully planned transforming of the nation into a fascist state, the replacing of its system of law with a system of force, and the undertaking of the complete annihilation of the United States of America as the republican Constitutional democracy that it has been—until now—since 1776.
..........And now in just exactly what way does our question change after the recognition with clarity such as this that those who make up our small, privileged, educated, and above all powerful American media elite also have the same denial-enabling qualities, motives, capabilities and traits as the hapless and helpless masses of plebeians do—after recognizing that the elite, too, are vain, deceitful, uncourageous, irresponsible, and ignorant in ways that lead or allow them into ruinous and ongoing denial—just exactly now, after such recognitions, does our question change?
..........It seems to me that it changes in this way. No longer can that question be the simple one of whether Frank Rich, David Corn, Matthew Rothschild, Ariana Huffington, Rodrigue Tremblay, Mark Steyn, Richard Posner, Thomas de Zengotita, Katie Couric, Noam Chomsky, Adolph Giuliani, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Nicholas Lemann, the Rabbi Michael Lerner, Barack Obama, Larry Silverstein, Richard Posner, Bill Keller, Andrew Rosenthal, Robert Silvers, Leon Wieseltier, Keith Olbermann—whether people of these kinds should continue to hold the jobs that they now hold, to perform the "tasks" that they now perform, or exert the dictates that they now exert.
..........No, the question no longer has the least thing to do with whether or not they "should" continue doing the "work" they now do.
..........It has become a "why" question. It has, in fact, become an urgent, pressing, and vitally important "why" question. Here it is, a question that the welfare of the nation and very probably the welfare of the world depend on:
..........Why is it that the following people, themselves only examples of many, many others like them, who should also be considered a part of the following list, have not been prosecuted under the law for suppressing evidence of mass murder, treason, and the destruction of a crime scene in a treasonable act; for aiding and abetting each of these crimes through the deliberate suppressing and withholding of evidence indicating that each such crime has in fact taken place; and for complicity in criminal acts through the lie and criminality of remaining silent while observing, and in some cases actually participating in, crimes of war, crimes against humanity, and treasonous crimes taking the specific form of the deliberate, knowing, and purposeful destruction of the Constitution of the United States.
..........To wit, these and numerous others: Frank Rich, David Corn, Robert Silvers, Richard Posner, Matthew Rothschild, Ariana Huffington, Rodrigue Tremblay, Mark Steyn, Thomas de Zengotita, Katie Couric, Noam Chomsky, Adolph Giuliani, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Nicholas Lemann, the Rabbi Michael Lerner, Barack Obama, Larry Silverstein, Jacob Weisberg, Richard Posner, Bill Keller, Andrew Rosenthal, Leon Wieseltier, Eliot Spitzer, Keith Olbermann, Amy Goodman, etc.
4
FRAUD-AMERICA
FRAUD-AMERICA
..........
1
..........Said in all seriousness? Yes, absolutely. Put too strongly? No, absolutely not. In any way likely to be of a practical application, use, or importance? Well, I wish so.
..........But before going further, another glance at Dante's Inferno for some clarification of my reasoning in asking—yes, it's what I really am asking—for the prosecution of those on my list. What the list-people have in common, of course, is that they're all journalists, commentators, editors, columnists, writers, or bloggers of one kind or another—with the exception of a few who have made their way onto the list for special reasons of one sort or another, like Adolph Giuliani, for example, or Eliot Spitzer. But, for the most part, the list is made up of the names of people who are serious journalists and, often, are well known or famous.
..........Those who are lucky enough to have read the Inferno already, or to have studied it in, say, college with a decent instructor in a decent course, will know the things I'm about to say. So those people can skip if they like.
..........Thanks in good part to Homer's first examples of it, the genre of the epic is huge—not just long, but a poetic form distinguished by its attempt to take in everything, the whole world, all of existence and all of its aspects. Dante is the important late-medieval or early-Renaissance literary figure that he is partly because when he set out to write his own epic, the so-called Divine Comedy, he had aims every bit as high and all-inclusive as Homer's had been, or, more recently, Virgil's.
..........In 1953, Archibald T. MacAllister put it this way:
..............................In the Divine Comedy we must remember that Dante had for his subject the whole world,
..............................the entire universe, all of man's history, his learning, his beliefs, plus his [Dante's] own
..............................particular messages.¹
..........Now, if Dante wanted to include all humanity, he needed to include all kinds of humanity—the good, the medium, and the irredeemably bad—with the result that he created Heaven—for the good; Purgatory—for the medium, aka redeemable; and Hell—for the irredeemably bad as the three (in his own 13th Century view) logical places to be filled with each of the three kinds of humans.
..........As I mentioned once earlier, Hell is the place that we (in our own 21st Century view) tend to be most interested in.
..........And a deftly and fascinatingly designed place it is. Since there are essentially three kinds of sins—of carnality, of violence, and of fraud or malice—Dante provides his Hell with an appropriate place for each. And he does something else, most ingeniously: He ranks the sins in such a way that, as a visitor goes down into Hell through its first third, then through its middle third, and finally to the very bottom of it, that visitor will also move from the least bad type of sin (the carnal) through the more bad type (the violent) to the most bad of all (the fraudulent).
..........Any of the three kinds will get you into Hell for eternity, but that doesn't really matter: they still comprise the least bad, the worse, and the worst. Dante's reasoning as he ranks them this way is fascinating. Of carnality, we can observe that it's the least bad because it has to do with natural things—feelings, emotions, and physical delights, things that become sinful only when they get out of control. For example, eating isn't a sin, yet gluttony is. When a person loses control of a natural function—desire for food or sex—the desire then controls the person instead of vice versa. And the person becomes a sinner.
..........Descending to the sins of violence, we find that these are indeed worse but not the worst. There are two reasons for this middle designation. As with the sins of incontinence, the body is once again—or is still—involved in the sins of violence. What's been added is will. In our own psychology—our "modern" psychology—we're likely to blame will in one way or another for all sorts of behavior—if someone is a failure, they must have wanted failure, or ditto if they're a drunk, or obese, or bad at "relationships." Even for Dante, the distinction between sinning through incontinence and sinning through will isn't always an absolutely clear one. The gluttons and the lustful, for example, are up there among the incontinent, while the sodomites are placed down among the violent—as if lust is something that must or can be contained lest it turn into sin while sodomy is something that must or can be willed in order for it to manifest as a sin.
..........But let it go. The really interesting distinction is now about to come—the really interesting one, that is, in light of our project here of discussing journalists who do "see" 9/11 as opposed to those who don't.
..........And so, as we find our way to the third and worst of the three great classes of sin, down in the very bottom of Hell and at the very center of the Earth, the great question again arises: What exactly is it that makes these, the sins of fraud and malice, not only worse than the sins of incontinence but worse even than those of violence?
..........A second question comes up as well: Why, exactly, does Dante see fit to divide the sins of fraud into two types, "simple" and "compound," with the latter thus becoming, down in the central pit of Hell, the very worst of the very worst?
..........And we mustn't forget to ask, "What does all this have to do with Amy Goodman? With Frank Rich?"
..........
2
..........The first question first. If you're one who enjoys hair-splitting—significant hair-splitting, of course—in your aesthetics or in your thinking life, Dante may be your man. Examples by the barge-load are available in The Inferno, but let's be practical and focus on just this one: Why are the sins of Fraud and Malice worse than those either of Incontinence or of Violence? Why are graft or hypocrisy or the giving of evil counsel, for the sake of heaven, worse than, say, murder?
..........Well, let's start by thinking about animals for a moment. Of course, we know that animals can't sin at all—not really—since they don't have souls. But let that go. Let's also leave aside the quibble as to whether animals do or don't have volition, as opposed simply to instinct. Instead, let's look just at the comparison between human and animal behavior, leaving altogether aside, for the moment, the whole question of sin.
..........So. Dante names as sins of incontinence lust, gluttony, wastefulness, hoarding, wrath, and sullenness. We ask, then, can animals eat? Have sex? Can they be wrathful? The answers are, of course, yes, yes, and yes. Much less clear, however, is whether they can be gluttonous, or whether they can be lustful. Dogs growl and snarl and bite, but whether they're wrathful is in doubt. And it's obvious that squirrels do hoard, but no one really blames them for it.
..........Our conclusion? Animals can't really qualify for any of Dante's sins of incontinence. But people who commit those sins are like animals because they're committing sins that in the main and in their essence are animalistic sins.
..........Questions about violence, clearly enough, will produce some more "yes" answers, since animals, like people, can obviously kill, claw, attack, rip, tear, and so on and so forth. That Dante includes suicide—can animals commit suicide? is that what the lemmings do?—as well as blasphemy, sodomy, and usury as sins of "violence" doesn't need detain us here, even though we know full well that animals can't commit a single one of them. And that fact, as we turn to the sins of fraud and malice, is about to reveal itself as bearing on our real point and helping answer our one real question of central significance.
..........Here's Dante's list of those committing the sin of simple fraud,² and it's comically evident and patently clear that no animal could ever manage to be one of these types of sinner:
................................................................................Seducers and panderers
................................................................................Flatterers
................................................................................Simoniacs
................................................................................Fortune tells and diviners
................................................................................Grafters
................................................................................Hypocrites
................................................................................Thieves
................................................................................Evil counselors
................................................................................Sowers of discord
................................................................................Counterfeiters and alchemists
..........Nor could any animal manage to commit any of Dante's sins of compound fraud:
................................................................................Treachery against kin
................................................................................Treachery against country
................................................................................Treachery against guests and hosts
................................................................................Treachery against lords and benefactors
..........And so now at last we can conclude. We can at last answer our question. The reason that the sins of fraud and malice are the worst kinds of sins is not just because they're the furthest removed from the sinners' animal nature; and they're not the worst sins just because only human beings can commit them; but they're the worst also because they can't even come into existence, let alone be committed, without the sinners' reliance upon the application and use of the human mind.
..........The highest gift given to mankind by the creator is the gift of mind, the one gift alone, the one tool, that wholly and unarguably distinguishes human beings from the animal world. And for Dante, man of faith but also early Renaissance humanist, to pervert that high gift, to use the human mind for the creating or bringing about not of good but of evil instead is the worst, the most despicable, the most loathsome, the most repulsive, the most degraded, the most repugnant, the most thankless and irreverent, the most wretched, the most corrupting, the most vile, and the most unforgivable thing that any human being can ever or ever have done.
..........
3
..........I can only hope and trust that readers by now (have you stuck with me all this way? Send email if you're still here!) are beginning to sense the coming together of things as we approach the end of this section of "A Letter of Lamentation to America." The overall point is the same now as it was all the way back at the beginning of Part 1—that "the United States is no longer a serious place." How can it be a serious place? Between the year 2000 and now, among some of the things it has lost or allowed to be tossed out or torn away are its three-part government, its balance of powers, its Bill of Rights, one entire and historic major American city, the guarantee of habeas corpus, the protections of a world court, protections against and treaties governing biological warfare, and the respect of very nearly all the peoples and nations of the world—to the point where just about the only country left with people who would rather rush up and tousle Bush's hair than send him back to Texas air mail special delivery are the people of Albania, for god's sake.
..........If the United States were still a serious place, with serious people dominant in it, how could so ruinous an extent of loss and depredation have been allowed to come about in so extraordinarily short a time as it has?
..........And, if the United States were still a serious place, how could it conceivably be the case that the situation now remains as it does remain: a nation that's inert, a nation that's empty, a nation that's in "denial," a nation that's unaware of and unresponsive to the true cancers that are eating it alive, a nation that shows no significant evidence of any functioning ability to save itself and restore its own health?
..........That's not what I call a serious place. It's what I call a pitiable, absurd, near-ruined, very possibly tragic place.
·
..........And the blame for such failure, such loss, such disease, such corruption, all resulting in such clear potential for unremitting and incomprehensible levels and degrees of military and economic catastrophe worldwide, this blame falls heavily—not solely, by any means, but without any doubt heavily—on America's writers...........Among these—if we can take a moment for what may seem a digression—I include America's academic writers, and I include also what we wrongly call America's literary writers—the novel-writers, for one example, for whom 9/11 has been a source of facile plot-trickery and sweet-theme-pudding allowing for long, winsome, bitter-sweet tales, or a way of letting a couple break up (each allowing the other to believe him or her dead in the towers), or that impels a gray dean of American letters to reveal for us all, in fiction, just precisely and exactly how it is that a "home-grown" "terrorist" can come into existence here in the land of the free, a young person Islamic in religion and Arabic in ethnicity who is angry at the U.S. and simultaneously standard-issue-envious and standard-issue-resentful of it.
..........Factoid stereotyping, content-free fluff, in other words, the sort of thing every editor—mainly big-house but little, too— knows, loves, and encourages: The politically safe, empty, inert, unserious "literature" that's not really literature at all—it's escapism—but a form of production that comes from deep, deep ignorance—from people who have no knowledge whatsoever of 9/11, its origins or its real nature or its implications or its dangers, and no curiosity whatsoever to find out—and that serves ever so perfectly as propaganda, in this case propaganda suited particularly well to helping maintain the status quo. To help keep us all dumb.
..........In a condemnation of this kind—it's not a "criticism," it's a condemnation—the question of complete unawareness, of complete ignorance, must and will arise. This question essentially asks, "If someone has no idea of what they're doing, can they be blamed for the result of it?"
..........And the answer is yes. Don't forget that the subtitle of this long essay is "The United States Is No Longer a Serious Place." And one of the most commonplace signs of its being no longer a serious nation is the widespread—and widely encouraged—assumption that ignorance is harmless, that not knowing things doesn't really matter, that in fact people in a free country like ours have a "right" to be ignorant or uninformed, and, finally, that ignorance doesn't matter because it's without consequence.
..........I beg of you, I implore you, to read this brilliant, reasoned, and indispensable piece by Scott Ritter, even though its title, "Repudiation, Not Impeachment," may make it sound as though it's not about the dreadful weight and import and results of ignorance. But it is.
..........Ignorance, except in children, is not and cannot be blameless. The trouble is, of course, that in the United States too many people remain—and are encouraged to remain—children for their entire lives.
..........But back to our "novelists" and "editors." If in real life an author or editor of the kind we've been alluding to didn't have even the faintest or foggiest notion or idea of what damage they were doing or perpetuating through the writing, pandering, and peddling of such stuff as the fake-lit I've described—or even the foggiest idea of what they were failing to do in the doing of it—well, in that case we'd have to conclude that such an author or such an editor was either empty, inert, in denial, utterly incurious intellectually, powerfully ignorant, and grotesquely unserious—or all of the above at one and the same time.
..........The only remaining possible case is the truly blood-curdling one. That's the case when the author or editor—or columnist, commentator, or interviewer, since it's time to bring back into the discussion all writers and all of media-journalism—when the writer or journalist knows the truth but lies about it anyway, whether the lying is done by dodging, twisting, smearing, gloating, denouncing, or just plain ignoring.
..........This is the situation where I place figures like Robert Silvers and Frank Rich and Bill Keller and Amy Goodman. How can this not be the place for them? And, it hardly need be said, this place, of all possible places, is the bottom. Like Cocytus, it is the worst of the worst.
..........Understanding exactly what this place or situation is will require returning to Dante, from whom we can learn the difference between "simple fraud" and the very worst of the very worst, "compound fraud."
..........
4
..........And it's very clear, really. Malice and fraud are "simple" when either of them is committed by one human being against another human being. But malice and fraud instantly become "compound"—they become "treachery"—when either is committed by one human being not against just any other human being, but against another human being "TO WHOM THEY WERE BOUND BY SPECIAL TIES."
..........And there you are. The four types of compound fraud identified by Dante are the exercising of treachery against—that is, the betraying of—first, kin; then country; then guests or hosts; and, finally, benefactors, lords, or masters.
..........The traitors here, frozen eternally in deep, deep ice, lie "in Cocytus, / the bottom of all guilt." ¹¹
..........Our now long-ago question ("Why is it that the following people. . . have not been prosecuted under the law for suppressing evidence of mass murder, treason, and the destruction of a crime scene in a treasonable act; for aiding and abetting. . . ") still remains. It also still remains unanswered. Why have they not? It's possible that it will never be answered. But on the other hand, at the very least, we certainly know a whole lot more now than we did earlier about, first, the appropriateness of the question itself, and, second, about why it must be asked.
..........We're in deadly, awful shape. Our political party-system is inert, as so is our constitutional system of checks and balances, in good part thanks to the diabolic— and fraudulent—invention of "the unitary executive" and the many power-grabbing crimes that have been committed brazenly under the extraordinarily treacherous and devious cover that it provides. With the inertness in the political-cultural life of the nation, there automatically also comes emptiness. After all, without opposition in a political system—or a cultural one—that system cannot be generative. That is, ideas cannot be generated, and, even if generated "technically," cannot be acted upon toward practical or applied or productive fruition of any kind.
..........And so what happens when there's an inert and therefore an empty system that cannot be generative? Precisely: The system becomes imperative. Or, to put it another way, the system having reach this condition cannot be anything other than imperative.
..........That's why the United States is no longer a republic but an empire. And that's also why George W. Bush is no longer a president. Inside this inert, empty system, he's a command-giver. Emperor, it's known as.
..........And just exactly how is it that all of this has been allowed to happen? The answer is very simple. For a very long time before 9/11, large numbers of traitors lived among us, preparing the way for the great "trigger" that eventually took the form of the phony "attack" of 9/11 itself. The three best books known to me that include the history preceding 9/11 are probably those by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Michel Chossudovsky, and Webster G. Tarpley. These are among the large number of scholarly, revelatory, truth-telling books that we're actually expected to believe have not been read by Bill Keller, Robert Silvers, Amy Goodman, Frank Rich, and great numbers of others in positions of high journalistic and cultural responsibility such as theirs.
..........If they haven't read them, these people are fraudulent, derelict in their professional claims and responsibilities, akin to a person with a practice in throat surgery who in fact has never studied or been educated in the anatomy of the throat.
..........Where in Dante's Hell would you put them if this were the case, and why? Email me, why don't you. Let me know. It's not a good place.
..........On the other hand, if they have read the books—as they must have! How could they not have read at least some of them and still be sentient, living and breathing public intellectuals?—if they have read the books—or even if they haven't read them but have just absorbed enough information (after all, they are supposedly news people) to have joined or even simply to have become aware of the existence of the thirty-six percent of Americans who "know" that 9/11 "was an inside job"—if they have advanced to any such or any equivalent degree of consciousness of the truth about 9/11 and have continued nevertheless to deny it, or to falsify it, or to misrepresent, twist, smear, ignore, demean, dodge, malign, or in any other way to behave fraudulently in regard to it—well, then they are, all of them, clearly guilty of compound fraud; they are, all of them, clearly guilty of treachery against "those to whom they were bound by special ties"; and they would, all of them, if Dante Alighieri were in charge of such matters instead of the likes of Dick Cheney, or the likes of they themselves, they would all be destined for Cocytus, for the ice, for "the bottom of all guilt."
..........And to whom are these traitors and criminals "specially bound"? First, they are specially bound to us, the citizen-readers of the United States, specially bound, as journalists, to provide us with the truth or provide us with nothing, absolutely analogous to a physician's being specially bound to his or her patient, bound to provide truth in diagnosis and best effort in cure—and, to do no harm. (For a note on the purity and extent of hypocrisy that underlies the compound fraud we're looking at, click here and then do a page search for "Hippocratic." What you'll find there isn't good.)
..........And what further "special bond" is it the traitors are being faithless to? I'll provide you with John Ciardi's version of Dante's list of the bonds. Then you do the choosing. Email me, why don't you. I think everyone will be in agreement.
......................................................................1) kin
......................................................................2) country
......................................................................3) guests or hosts
......................................................................4) benefactors, lords, or masters.
·
..........Our nation is dying. Our nation is being murdered before our very eyes. And yet, over so long time and in so many ways has this same nation been degraded by its own internal enemies that it is not only a nation gone blind, acquiescent in its own death, but it is also a nation in which criminality has evolved into custom...........This is part, but only part, of the reason why traitors and criminals ranging from the very topmost Dick Cheney and Nancy Pelosi and Scooter Libby down through the middle regions of Bill Keller and Frank Rich to the foul pits of a hundred-thousand Bill O'Reillys—why these traitors and criminals routinely, consistently, and conventionally go unpunished.
..........Such a nation cannot any longer be called a serious nation. It can be called a criminal, monstrous, unleashed, military, or violent nation; it can be called a thuggish, brute, or greed-driven nation; it can be called an unscrupulous, murderous, rapacious, and conscienceless nation; but it cannot any longer or in any way be accurately or truly called a serious nation.
..........And yet I keep writing these "Food for Thought" pieces and sending them around because I can't yet, and I won't yet, give up hope entirely.
..........Next time, the subject will be the "seriousness" itself that has now left the nation, the seriousness that once gave America not only great life and the potential for great life but also the ability to give the gift of life to others. That seriousness has now been murdered. That seriousness has now been smothered, scorned, abused, driven away, pushed into exile—and all but forgotten. Without its return, if we can't somehow reawaken it or retrieve it or re-create it—then we are doomed, with an absoluteness and certainty that cannot be eschewed.²²
..........I'm going to end, for now, with a longish quotation from an immeasurably important essay by Michel Chossudovsky. First, though, two things.
..........One. With the serious exposure of the truth about 9/11—exposure by, from, and through those very traitors and other criminals and failures who now do all in their power to avoid such exposure—with such serious exposure, the other seriousness I'm talking about could be brought back into the country, could be brought back to life, and could help save us from political, spiritual, and—with particular certainty—cultural destruction. Without such exposure, never.
..........Two. A reference to "The Oxen"; a reference to "Church Going"; and, like last time, a prayer:
..........O, non-god, protect us all! O, non-god, protect us all!
..........
..................................................................................................................................—Eric Larsen
..................................................................................................................................—July 14, 2007
THE CHOSSUDOVSKY EXCERPT
COMPLETE TITLE:
"Bush Directive for a 'Catastrophic Emergency' in America:
Building a Justification for Waging War on Iran?"
By Prof. Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, June 24, 2007
COMPLETE TITLE:
"Bush Directive for a 'Catastrophic Emergency' in America:
Building a Justification for Waging War on Iran?"
By Prof. Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, June 24, 2007
...................................................................................................."Another [9/11 type terrorist] attack could create
....................................................................................................both a justification and an opportunity that is lacking
....................................................................................................today to retaliate against some known targets"
....................................................................................................(Statement by Pentagon official, leaked to the
....................................................................................................Washington Post, 23 April 2006)
Concluding Remarks
..........9/11 and the threat of a second major attack on America are ostensibly part of the building block of the US National Security doctrine. While, the threat of an impending 9/11 type attack by "Islamic terrorists" is a fabrication, extensive media propaganda, supported by covert intelligence operations, has ensured that the "Global War on Terrorism" or GWOT is widely accepted both by the supporters and opponents of the Bush administration.
..........Visibly based on an outright lie, GWOT has nonetheless gained in legitimacy among America's European partners and allies, which have adopted their own ("copy and paste") anti-terrorist emergency procedures.
..........Despite mountains of evidence, the 9/11 attacks continue to be upheld by the US and its NATO allies as a bona fide act of war by a foreign power. Since 911, the GWOT is supported by the governments of more than 90 countries. (President George W. Bush, CENTCOM Coalition Conference, May 1, 2007)
..........Ironically, the Global War on Terrorism is also endorsed by several prominent and authoritative "progressive" intellectuals, who condemn US foreign policy and the Middle East war, while upholding the legitimacy of America's campaign against "Islamic terrorism."
..........An important segment of the US antiwar movement has a similar stance. While calling for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, it denies the existence of a national resistance movement to the US led occupation: "We are against the US led war in Iraq, but we support the war on terrorism." Not surprisingly, Bush's "Catastrophic Emergency" Directive (NSPD 51) does not seem to have raised much concern within the US Antiwar movement.
..........Since 9/11, numerous lead stories and Op Eds outlining the nature of the "Global War on Terrorism" have been fed profusely into the news chain. A worldwide Al Qaeda legend has emerged.
..........Repeated ad nauseam on a daily basis, the GWOT has also become part of a shaky bipartisan political consensus. Despite the blatant contradictions and the political lies, in particular in relation to 9/11 and the possibility of a second large scale terrorist attack, the GWOT is nonetheless accepted by an increasingly skeptical US public.
..........Behind this diabolical "catastrophic emergency" scenario, which ultimately hinges on the powers of media disinformation and deceit, is a profit driven war.
..........The spiraling multibillion dollar "defense" budget, which according to independent estimates has reached the trillion dollar mark (more than double the official figures), is barely acknowledged, nor is the privatization of war itself.
..........The US military industrial complex which produces the numerous "humanitarian weapons" including the mini-nukes and bunker buster bombs used to go after the terrorists, would be the direct beneficiary of a war on Iran, together with Wall Street and the Anglo-American oil giants, which vie to appropriate and privatize the region's extensive oil and gas reserves.
..........This war is not led by the military but by the civilian corporate interests which lie behind the Bush administration. The military takes orders from civilians acting on behalf of those dominant economic interests.
..........The Wall Street financial establishment, the military-industrial complex, led by Lockheed Martin, the big five weapons and aerospace defense contractors, the Texas oil giants and energy conglomerates, the construction and engineering and public utility companies not to mention the biotechnology conglomerates, are indelibly behind this militarization of America.
..........In turn, the Worldwide demonization of Islam is part of this profit driven war. Three quarters of the World's oil reserves lie in Muslim lands. (World Oil 2004, see also Michel Chossudovsky, "The Demonization of Muslims and the Battle for Oil," Global Research, January 2007).
..........Vilification of the enemies of America, portrayed as fanatic "Islamic terrorists", is part of the Battle for Oil. If the oil were in countries occupied predominantly by Buddhists or Hindus, one would expect that Bush's entire National Security agenda, including the recent "Catastrophic Emergency" Directive NSP 51 would be directed against Buddhists and Hindus.
..........How to reverse the tide?
..........The threat of a Second Al Qaeda "Attack on America" is being used profusely by the Bush administration to galvanize public opinion in support of a global military agenda.
..........Known and documented, the "Islamic terror network" is a creation of the US intelligence apparatus. The "war on terrorism" is bogus. The 911 narrative as conveyed by the 911 Commission report is fabricated.
..........The Bush administration is involved in acts of cover-up and complicity at the highest levels of government.
..........Revealing the lies behind 911 would serve to undermine the legitimacy of the "global war on terrorism" which constitutes the main justification for waging war in the Middle East.
..........Without 911, the war criminals in high office do not have a leg to stand on. Their entire National Security construct collapses like a deck of cards.
..........
¹ ..........Introduction to John Ciardi's translation of The Inferno, New American Library, 1954.
²..........Throughout, I'm using John Ciardi's terms for the sinners and their sins.
³..........Ciardi, Inferno, p. 266.
¹¹..........Inferno, XXXI, 102-103
²²..........See Geoffrey Chaucer, "The Nun's Priest's Tale," in The Canterbury Tales (line 3338). Works, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd Edition 1957. "O destynee, that mayst nat ben eschewed!" [O destiny, that can't be avoided]
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