FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Number 10, Part 5
Number 10, Part 5
(NEW SERIES—2007)
(Read, Print, or Download in >PDF>> Format)
(Read, Print, or Download in >PDF>> Format)
..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
A LETTER OF LAMENTATION
TO
AMERICA:
THE UNITED STATES
IS NO LONGER
A SERIOUS PLACE
Part Five
A LETTER OF LAMENTATION
TO
AMERICA:
THE UNITED STATES
IS NO LONGER
A SERIOUS PLACE
Part Five
..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
................................................................................
................................................................................[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
................................................................................Our nation is dying. Our nation is being murdered before our very eyes. And yet,
................................................................................over so long a 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.
.......................................................................................... —Eric Larsen, "A Letter of Lamentation to America," Part 2
................................................................................
................................................................................There is only one way to erode Bush's hard core base, and that is by attacking
................................................................................the 9/11 myth. Destroy the 9/11 myth, and the September criminals may be called to
................................................................................account. Destroy the 9/11 myth, and Bush will be neutralized. Peace-loving gov-
................................................................................ernments and institutions around the world must address this task, with a campaign
................................................................................of denunciation, exposure, and political education on the truth about 9/11 and the
................................................................................nature of terrorism. One vehicle for this would be an Independent International Truth
................................................................................Commission on 9/11, modeled on the Russell-Sartre Tribunal for Vietnam. The con-
................................................................................vocation of such a truth commission for 9/11 is more urgent than ever, and should
................................................................................be top priority for anti-war forces well before the Congressional elections a
................................................................................year from now.
..........................................................................................—Webster G. Tarpley, 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA (2005)
..........
..........Readers who have stuck with me here for a good sweep of time will remember Food for Thought 9.6.1.2007, "The Traitors in Our House, Continued," posted last May 20. In that piece, I synopsized the contents of my long-time friend Richard Collier's "Letter from Canada," which you can read again, if you like, by clicking here. The letter, addressed to Randall Tillotson (who subsequently wrote his own response to Collier), made four essential points about important differences between Canada and the U.S. that were followed by one essential point—about me.
..........What I aimed to do in "The Traitors in Our House, Continued" was take up and discuss those five points one by one. The sly and careful reader, however, will doubtless by now have caught on to my private little secret: namely, that I never got farther than the first point, and that I myself—just as slyly—never so much as mentioned that failure.
..........So it's time to remedy it. I propose to do that by once again citing Collier's five points, and then by focusing closely on the last of them—the really interesting one, the one that has to do with me, with whether I'm crazy or not.
..........After all, I ask, how could that not be the most interesting one?
..........Collier's first point was that we in the U.S., unlike people in Canada, have an "abject rage and fear" toward and of things like "implanted chips, cameras on street corners, and a massive shift to fascist thought-control."
..........I think he's right. And I also think we've got good reason for these feelings (and that Canadians will, too, if and when the North American Union kicks in).
2)
..........Collier's second observation was that "Canada has had a much longer, richer, and bolder tradition of leftwing politics than the US" has had, "or at least it has been more visible and prominent." While in the U.S., he said, "socialist and communist movements have always been underground movements and deeply hidden from public perception" ("not to mention roundly vilified," he added), there's much greater leftist visibility in Canada and a much greater spread across the political spectrum than there is in the pasteurized and homogenized U.S. "left."
..........Again, he's right. In the U.S., politics has, in every genuinely important way, effectively degenerated into a single-party system made of clone-like and interchangeable Republicrats and Democans. Both together are under severe attack by a fascist splinter group to the radical far right made up of and operated by the neocons and certain major but hidden "elements" of "government." (The best of numerous good books on this subject is Webster G. Tarpley's 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA.) But neither the Republicrats nor the Democans are capable of understanding what's really being done to them in this extraordinary attack, with the result that they both simply roll over like friendly dogs looking for tummy-rubs as thrown lances pierce deeply right into their bellies. Either that or they're part of the criminal and treasonous radical right-wing fascist "government" themselves and are just pretending not to be. The more I look at it, the more I suspect that the latter is the case.
3)
..........Collier's third "difference" between Canada and the U.S. derives straight from the second. He argues that the U.S. has a "whole tradition. . . of a narrow—very narrow—range of permissible political writing and thinking" that results in fighting and quarreling among and between those who ought to be allies—like the fighting between me, for example, and Amy Goodman. This situation results also, says Collier, in "querulous attacks" that "sound nasty, bullying, lacking in empathy" and that are "ultimately pointless." Worse, these things "betray what Americans have always been guilty of: bad manners."
..........Here, I think that Collier misses. Maybe Amy Goodman and I "should" be allies, except except that she's one of those denizens of the "left" who substitutes feeling for thinking (a phenomenon discussed in depth guess where—yup! in A Nation Gone Blind), and that Goodman furthermore is a "left gatekeeper," sitting on and suppressing 9/11 truth, something that causes her to be complicit in crimes against humanity and that makes her also a traitor to the United States and to its Constitution.
..........But—uh, oh—maybe I'm being impolite.
4)
..........Collier suggests fourthly that attacking members of a group that's really (in this case supposedly) one's own political group—especially if the attacks entail hair-splitting—will do only harm, not good. It will lead, he argues (we're drawing closer to the am-I-crazy part) to one's becoming a "Puritan,"
..............................someone who knows he/she is one of the Select and that most others are not. It
..............................behooves the Select to ensure that his/her group is never ever contaminated by one
..............................of the Fallen or Corrupt—and that means most other people: few are worthy, few
..............................are chosen. So the Select find that much of what they do is to administer tests to
..............................others (who may or may not be applicants to join the Selects' group) to determine
..............................their worthiness: tests of fire and water; tests of what is said and written; tests
..............................of behaviour and action. So much time is spent testing others in order to determine
..............................worthiness that the original goal of revolution or a New Jerusalem or whatever re-
..............................cedes beyond the horizon.
The result, he goes on, is that
..............................such rites of purification. . . drive away potential adherents and eventually isolate
..............................the individual or what is left of the original group. This of course is the history of
..............................Protestant religion after the Reformation, right? And I've seen this repeated in left-
..............................wing politics: the US Communist Party has fragmented and shivered into warring
..............................splinters over and over, each splinter thinking it possesses "the word," but having
..............................gotten so refined and diminished that no one takes it seriously at all. And what's
..............................the point of being right, if no one listens to you?
..........I think that here Collier is describing perfectly the fierce and pernicious infighting that was so much a part of leftist organizing and thought throughout the 1920s and 1930s. (Two excellent works on the subject are Stephen Koch's literary-historic analyses, Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals and his The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, And the Murder of Jose Robles.) But as to whether the same paradigm applies to our own situation now—when the left doesn't exist—I'm far, far less certain. As for the matter of what point there is in "being right" while "no one listens to you"—well, at the very least, I'm mightily familiar with the experience and feeling of having no one listen. As to the point, though, of going on talking nevertheless, even to an empty room, and whether that means you're crazy—well, we'll get to that.
5)
..........Here's a passage from Collier's letter that gets directly at his concluding, and fifth, assertion—or fear—about what can happen as a result of the way a person (like me) might respond or react to the situation in the U.S., the one so evidently different from the situation ( for now) in Canada:
..............................And where does [all of] this lead? A solitary cell of paranoid suspicion, perhaps. No
..............................one can pass all the tests; no one can be righteous enough; no one can be trusted. I
..............................think I would rather make mistakes in my trust and correct them when my errors have
..............................been made clear to me than worry constantly that my friends, neighbours, associates,
..............................and colleagues may all be unreliable, may in fact be stooges or, even worse, counter-
..............................intelligence agents recruited by the fascists. My comments on EL's FFT essays are in-
..............................tended as an antidote to that frightening drift into solipsism.
..........And here's my response, the concluding paragraphs of the first section of FFT9.7.1, "The Traitors in Our House, Continued."
..............................So ends the letter from Canada, built with craft and care such that its most withering
..............................suggestion is also its final one—that I, in the view of my long and dear friend Richard
..............................Collier, by taking the approach that I've lately been taking and by setting my bearings
..............................in the way I've lately set them, may in fact be heading straight toward the solitude of
..............................inconsequentiality, the wasteland of paranoia, and the silent madhouse of solipsism.
..............................Needless to say, I don't have the least desire to go to any of those three dread states
..............................or places, all of them perfectly real, highly dangerous, and absolutely destructive. Like
..............................anybody else, I hope to elude them through any effort I can muster. And yet at the same
..............................time I see no way that I can lower the risk of falling prey to them merely by changing
..............................the subject I've chosen to write about or by changing the method of my approach to it.
..............................And the reason is that if I made those changes I wouldn't achieve any of the good ends
..............................that Richard Collier describes, and I wouldn't help bring about any of the salutary con-
..............................ditions that, by the sound of it, he's himself fortunate enough to enjoy. Who ever knew
..............................just how far apart—worlds apart—Canada and the U.S. really were? No, here in the
..............................21st Century U.S., if I were to make those changes in subject and manner, it wouldn't
..............................mean I'd thereby be better able to help—and help to cohere—a benevolent political,
..............................social, or cultural movement of a kind that I'm now supposedly just helping to splinter.
..............................It wouldn't mean that I could join in a fruitful debate whose effect over time would be,
..............................however gradually, to bring about the good and isolate the bad.
..............................Changing my subject or method would bring about neither of those good things nor
..............................any imaginable similar good things. No, it would not. And as for the meaning of such
..............................change, it would be purely and only this: That I had given up, had thrown in the towel,
..............................and had decided to go over to the enemy; that I had decided to join the liars and the
..............................corporations; that I had decided to put my own oar in the water in order to pull together,
..............................with all of them, fraudulent to the end, in helping speed the demise of the republic and
..............................in erecting the Orwellian state that A Nation Gone Blind tried and tried and tried,
..............................most probably in vain, to find ways to avoid.
..............................It would, in short, be the worst possible thing I could do.
..........In other words, it looks as though I was saying that even if it were true that I'd be driven crazy by writing these "Food for Thought" pieces—or that I'd be revealed as being crazy—I still wouldn't stop writing them and wouldn't be able to justify not writing them. It looks as though I was saying that even if writing the pieces really were to head me "straight toward the solitude of inconsequentiality, the wasteland of paranoia, and the silent madhouse of solipsism," I'd still keep on writing them.
..........Well. What does it sound like to you? Here's what it sounds like to me, and I wonder if it's the same for you: It sounds to me, on the one hand, like something that could accurately and truly be said by someone who already was crazy, who already had slipped into the madness of solipsism or monomania; and then, on the other hand, it sounds like something that could accurately and truly be said by someone who in point of fact really was right.
..........Which is it? Am I mad, nuts, monomaniacal, unable to see reality? Or, on the other hand, am I right?
..........Well, let's analyze and try to find out.
..........The email that came gave me a jolt.
..............................Date: Fri, 13 April, 2007
..............................From: D.-- T.--
..............................Subject: Re: POISONED NATION, POISONED TRUTH
..............................To: ericlarsen@ericlarsen.net
..............................Eric, I'm going to bow out. Call me a potted plant, but the hysteria and the belligerent
..............................certainties of the conspiracy theorists is all too reminiscent of the Bushies when they
..............................got us into this war. The stink of Jonestown hangs over both sides. I'll stick with
..............................Frank Rich.
..............................But still, all the best to you and A in retirement.
..................................................D
..........What was I to make of it? Here were hints of all the liveliness and intellectual vitality I was used to in my old friend: The "potted plant" drollery with its allusion to a letter I'd sent out ("So progress is being made of a kind that makes it clearer all the time that, unless people are living the lives of potted plants, they can hardly any longer be unaware of the truth about 9/11"), "the stink of Jonestown" memory-flying all the way back to November 18, 1978, and and the perverted grotesquerie of the kool-aid killings, even the quick feint about Frank Rich seeming to ask for a hint of the risible amid the writer's obsidian decisiveness.
..........I dropped him from the list, of course, had the best intention of sending off a long letter to him, never quite got around to it, and went on working away at the next in the series of my "Food for Thought" pieces.
..........Who's right, me or him? I'm convinced it's me, and I'm sorry. Sorry not because I'm right, but because my dearly-valued old friend is—well, because something is wrong not just with his position on the subject, but with him.
..........Dammit, I know I'm no one to judge another like this, whether I know and love him or not. And yet—well, and yet I am one to judge another like this. I'm distraught to see my old pal using a phrase like "the conspiracy theorists," since it's a phrase that by rights should go permanently and immediately to the garbage dump to join all other of its wretched siblings, all other propaganda words and phrases, all other political lies and ruinously deceitful renderings in words of the kinds that George Orwell wrote about all the way back in 1946.
..........My old friend knows better. I know he does. But something's the matter with him. Something's the matter with our times. Something's the matter that makes people be crazy. A Nation Gone Blind put its finger on a lot of the things that are the matter with our time that make Americans dumb, stupid, crazy, and blind.
..........But could it—could it conceivably, could it possibly—could the things the book put its finger on include even my old friend, sharp, independent, perceptive, discriminating, reasonable, delightful, witty, intelligent?
..........Impossible. And yet I fear it.
..........Either way, the question isn't answered yet. "Who's crazy, him or me?"
ii
..........On April 4, 2007, I wrote this, the third-from-last paragraph of FFT9.2 ("Amy Goodman, a Mind Prostituted"):
..............................To read such as Amy Goodman wrote, to be cheated so, to be manipulated by such
..............................puerile banality as this from a person of considerable "progressive" influence, to see
..............................revealed by the quality of the writing what the shallow and traitorous quality of the
..............................thought behind it really is—this is an experience incompatible with any hope what-
..............................soever that such leadership or guidance as Amy Goodman—or NPR—represents can
..............................conceivably help hold out any hope whatsoever for the survival of the United States
..............................of America as a free republic.
..........I posted the piece on April 5. Next day, fast as a speeding bullet, came this email, carrying no subject line and not ending with a question mark:
..............................How can anyone believe a word you write when you don't even know that Amy
..............................Goodman is not an NPR broadcaster.
..........The writer was—is—a person of a high and greatly estimable visibility in radio broadcasting on political and cultural matters—and literary—and he was certainly no person whom anyone with a new book out would ever choose to be on the bad side of. The mistake, I grant, was a dumb one, and I and I alone was responsible for it. Still, it was regrettable, foolish, but hardly tragic. Another reader had already pointed it out to me and I'd already changed "NPR" to "Pacifica Radio" by the time the speeding-bullet email reached me. Here's what I emailed back:
..............................Yes, an unfortunate error, now corrected. But how can a single error—a one-word
..............................error, a two-word correction—be reasonable cause to judge as worthless many,
..............................many thousands of other-error-free-words?
..............................Seems like the truth is earning me more enemies than friends. Would 'twere not so.
..............................My best,
........................................Eric
..............................P.S. Did you ever [meaning "did you ever actually"] read "A Nation
..............................Gone Blind"? Serious question.
..........Within minutes the bullet returned, traveling as fast as before:
..............................If you can't get simple facts like that straight, then how can I take anything
..............................that follows seriously?
..........And there the matter ended. The person, clearly, had been lying in wait, hiding in the bushes ready to spring out and gobble me up whole at the first slip-up he caught, however large or small. The second bullet-letter revealed that he had not the least interest in using reason, behaving reasonably, or even in being fair. Does one factual error spoil the entirety of an ambitious series of essays on 9/11 truth and its cover-up? After all, the piece in question had been preceded by eight or so others just since the first of the year—but bullet-person showed no interest in my query about the relative weight or merit of that writing as opposed to the relative weight or demerit of the one- or two-word error he'd so exultingly pounced on.
..........This eminent cultural commentator wasn't interested in anything whatsoever except in his own devout wish and powerful desire that I be wrong through and through. He wasn't interested in discussion, analysis, evidence, argument, reason, or logic.
..........His mind was frozen, boxed in, rigidified, adamant, and closed to any truth other than that 9/11 was not an inside job.
..........What does it mean when such blind compulsion and passionate denial as these define a well-known public figure of no mean influence and power in a major branch of the nation's cultural media?
..........He won't look at evidence. I will. He will judge the whole by one tiny part. I won't. He's an absolutist on the subject of 9/11. I'm not.
..........So who's crazier, him or me?
iii
..........From among a number of other personal stories, I'll pick just two more. Who knows? Maybe after looking at them, we'll have found out who's crazy and who's not.
..........I taught for thirty-five years at a single college, and one of my colleagues there was a scholar in history, my own age, a man of a stern seriousness but also a quick sense of humor and an ever-alert eye for all things shabby, fraudulent, or cheap—things in academics, I mean. He and I, beginning back in 1973 or 1974 or so, were frequent fellow members of college committees, especially on the subject of curriculum, he being the representative from History and I from English. On those committees we became almost a sub-committee of two, a sort of minority whip, doing all we could to oppose the scurrilous, the fallacious, the mediocre, and the vanity-driven whenever it popped up, which was, in fact, pretty much all the time, from the mid-seventies on through my departure from the place in 2006.
..........My friend had himself gotten—and had worked hard for—an incontrovertibly solid education, was a fastidious researcher, had published at least three unequivocally worthwhile volumes in history, was a dedicated instructor and a staunch but completely humane opponent of crumbling standards. And from time to time, even in the later years, he remained a lunch companion.
..........You can imagine my surprise, then, on receiving this email:
..............................Date: Mon, 21 May
..............................From: F— E—
..............................Subject: Re: Rudolph Giuliani, criminal: "Why Aren't You in JAIL, Mr. Mayor?"
..............................To: Eric Larsen ericlarsen@ericlarsen.net
..............................Please remove me from your e-mailing list.
........................................F- E-
..........After thirty-five years of friendship and collegiality, it was an abrupt farewell. It's true, the letter my friend was responding to did end with the sentence "To be removed from my passionately well-intended mailings, reply to this email with 'Remove' (or synonym) in the subject line," and he'd done exactly as I'd suggested. But still.
..........Here's what I wrote back to my old colleague:
..............................Date: Mon, 21 May 2007
..............................To: F— E —
..............................From: Eric Larsen
..............................Subject: Off the list
..............................Hello, F-,
..............................Well, you're off, though deleting doesn't en-happy me but does the opposite.
..............................Do you feel like giving me an idea of why you decided? I mean, beyond your just
..............................not wanting email you didn't ask for—a torture by conscience for me every time I
..............................put someone on the list. I used to write and say that I'd read such and such of a
..............................person's work and was writing this and such myself, and would you be interested
..............................in being on my list, etc. Nine times out of ten I got no responses, and then when I
..............................put the name on the list, got no regrets from recipient.
..............................In any case, this is stuff I couldn't NOT get involved in after publishing A Nation
..............................Gone Blind—in the book, I'd soft-pedaled the 9/11 stuff because I was sure it
..............................would doom the book as far as getting any reviews was concerned, and what
..............................I really wanted was to have the book become an entree to broader discussion.
..............................Well, I should have followed someone else's advice over my own, since the book
..............................has been black listed anyway, I believe just for its hinting at my 9/11 position in
..............................two or maybe three very delicate allusions in the text AND perhaps less delicately
..............................and perhaps even more passionately on the dedication page.
..............................Maybe you despise me for what I'm doing, but if you do I'd certainly like to know
..............................more about it. The piece on Amy Goodman caused a number of drop-requests. Now
..............................[the] Giuliani [piece] is getting them. Is it that you consider me to be telling lies myself?
..............................I mean, about him? Or. . . ? Seems to me clear that we're in a national and/or con-
..............................stitutional crisis/emergency like none other except, what, the revolution itself and the
..............................war between the states.
..............................Nevertheless. Unless I'm poison to you, I'd love to hear. We could have a bite near
..............................the plant—maybe even the Italian spot of last time. Besides, especially if you're re-
..............................tiring, I owe you a lunch like you gave me.
..............................Very best,
.............................. Eric
..............................Date: Mon, 21 May 2007
..............................From: F— E—
..............................Subject: Re: Off the list
..............................To: Eric Larsen
..............................Dear Eric,
..............................I certainly do not hate you, do not regard you as poison, etc., and would love
..............................to have lunch with you. If you would still like to after what I write in answer to
..............................your question about why I have asked to be deleted from your list, then please
..............................let me know, and I will suggest some dates in earliest June. The rest of May
..............................is pretty much shot.
..............................Eric, I have found many of your communications to be what I can only describe
..............................as extreme. Alarmingly so. Your latest is a case in point. To describe Giuliani as
.............................."foremost a traitor and mass murderer" is mind boggling to me. To then go on by
..............................assailing Pelosi, Giuliani, the New York Times as lying, and to assail other insti-
..............................tutions for defending treason, mass murdering criminal "bosses"—well, it is just
..............................too much for me. One can disagree with just about every political "leader" around
..............................and with many of our major institutions, but to describe them as you have is to
..............................move from thoughtful criticism into the realm of unreality. Eric, what has hap-
..............................pened, or what is happening, to your mind?!!? I worry about you on that level, and
..............................I bring this to your attention with the best of intentions, i.e. as a friend and col-
..............................league from our days together at the college, someone (you) who asked me to
..............................read his manuscripts, which is the highest flattery from you I can think of. But
..............................the extremeness of your recent communications disturbs me so much that I
..............................have therefore asked you to delete me from your e-list. I hope and pray you
..............................will strive for balance, that you will take yourself in hand and draw back from
..............................the brink of extremeness.
..............................If after the above you would still like to meet to break bread: I would love to
..............................do so.
..............................Your friend,
..................................................F—
..........And there you are, precisely and exactly at the very root of it all: My old friend and scholarly colleague thinks that I have gone mad. He thinks—can't help but think—that I'm crazy, extreme, out of balance, not in touch with (if I may stoop to the word) reality.
..........How terribly simple it is, this enormous problem, this almost absolute impasse between—well, between what's true, on the one hand, and what a great number of people, even highly educated ones, are able to believe, accept, or even consider as truth.
..........Giuliani is a criminal and traitor who aided and abetted other criminals and traitors on 9/11, and the simple truth is that he, along with the others, should be tried for his crimes and, if found guilty of them, punished accordingly.
..........But the trouble is that my old friend, in the first place, will not and cannot entertain, incorporate, or believe that Giuliani even is a criminal. Whether he's willing to read any of the excellent and fastidiously researched scholarly books on this and closely related subjects, I don't know. I tend awfully much to doubt it. Those books, though, if he were to read them, would identify for him the exact type and nature of Giuliani's crimes—among them perjury and the purposeful destruction of evidence at a crime scene—although it's still possible, even then, that my friend wouldn't accept the fact of Giuliani as a traitor and criminal.
..........And why not? Well, there's the question of all questions. It is, you might say, the reality question. It's the question that A Nation Gone Blind takes up at great length—the question that may in fact be identified as that book's true central subject.
..........And therefore, this isn't the place to return to it. But this is the place to witness the fruits of the blindness that A Nation Gone Blind so carefully analyzes and describes. And those fruits—well, they're not good. They're poison. They make people ill. In fact, they make people crazy.
..........Crazy how? With what symptoms and with what manifestations?
..........I've offered some examples. There was my trusted friend and fellow writer of years back—sharp, independent, perceptive, discriminating, reasonable, delightful, witty, intelligent—who now chooses to throw up his hands on the grounds that both sides in the 9/11 "debate" are equal in their corrupt putrefaction. There was the quite-famous media-person who lurked in the shadows, waiting to spring out and denounce as invalid the entirety of my series of essays on the basis of a single and inconsequential error—he with a mind frozen, boxed in, rigidified, adamant, closed to any truth other than that 9/11 was pulled off by nineteen playboy pseudo-Muslims with box-cutters, and by them alone. There was my friend and scholar-colleague of thirty-five years who resides intellectually behind some kind of protective or buffering wall of euphemism, custom, and propriety that makes him incapable of and unwilling to accept, entertain—or, for god's sake investigate—the simple and known and self-evident assertion that Adolph Giuliani is a criminal, traitor, and conspirator-and who, instead of looking at the matter for himself, is able only to attacks the messenger rather than the message—"Eric, what has happened, or what is happening, to your mind?!!? I worry about you on that level, and I. . . hope and pray you will strive for balance, that you will take yourself in hand and draw back from the brink of extremeness."
..........And there was Richard Collier himself, who, though far, far to the left of my scholar-friend, was, even so, seemingly less concerned that the content of my essays might constitute the most immediately important and ruthlessly pressing matter at hand than that my continuing to write those essays in a world inclined not to listen to them constituted the grave personal danger to an impercipient me of setting my compass straight at "a frightening drift into solipsism."
..........I feel as though we're back among the witches of Salem. I'm one of the witches, and the dark-robed elders and the staid councilmen of the town—who, if anything, are certain that they know madness from insanity—are hurling their stones at mad me, confident of their rightness and their righteousness, since both come to them through nothing less than their never-yet-disproven faith in the conventional, the familiar, and the customary.
..........And that's exactly the problem: What's stirring, what's going on, and what's being perpetrated among us now is not conventional, it is not familiar, and it is not customary.
..........It is, however, monstrous, unprecedented, enormous in scale, criminal, murderous, cold-blooded, traitorous, and well beyond the moral or the historical imagination of most Americans, even highly educated ones.
..........The enemy is "them," and, in the domestic aspect of their phony "War on Terror," the focus of their desire for control and elimination is—us. Abroad, the focus is on other people and others things, but inside the U.S., the focus is on us. 9/11 itself was an attack by "them" on us, and its eminently successful purpose was to scare us enough so that we would be compliant—and complicitous—in the stripping away of our Constitutional rights and freedoms with the idea in mind that one day not too far away we would all be entirely under "their" control, for them to do with us as they may choose.
..........As Paul Craig Roberts put it (in "Attacking Iran: What's In It For Bush?"), "If the Regime overcomes its defeat in Iraq with a 'victory' in Iran, 'you are with us or against us' will take on new life, and we will find out who are those intended for the Halliburton-built detention camps constructed in the US at great cost with our tax dollars."
.........."They" may fail, and I of course pray that they will and yet constantly fear that they won't. Meanwhile, the signs of their ongoing efforts and preparations to intimidate and disempower us continue unabated and, in fact, have recently intensified, becoming even more visible than usual.
..........Since 9/11, it's been commonplace, their attempt to scare us to death—or at the very, very least, warn us to death. Either way, the summertime signs now are ominous, ugly, unscrupulous, and plentiful—and, above all, as we know perfectly well, they're coming to us from the same group of wonderful and benevolent killers, liars, traitors, and murderers who were gracious enough to bring us the first 9/11 and to construct the oppressive fasco-imperialist world debacle that by means, and solely by means, of 9/11 was made possible.
..........What "they" want is military-and-oil hegemony worldwide and a police state in the U.S. that will keep its people going compliantly go along with the plan—whether by force, by injection, by RDIF tags, or by elimination.
..........The stupidest, most disastyrous, and most shamefully idiotic thing the people of the United States have done for the last—well, I'd say ever—is fail to blow the whistle on the truth of 9/11, since the clear and obvious truth of its having been an inside job is—and has been— the only means open to us by which to blast the fascisto-imperialistico Bush-Rove-Cheney- rogue government runaway freight train off the tracks.
..........As all know, most American are non-readers, and most Americans dwell therefore in portable cocoons of almost total ignorance. As for those who do read, most of them, ever since 9/11 itself, have either lied or denied as if their very next breath depended on it. And so, thanks to those who won't see, along with those who can't see, plus all those most beloved and familiar friendlies who now do, and have all along done, nothing but lie and lie and lie about the truth of 9/11—well, thanks to them, collaborators all, it may now be too late.
..........Let's start with a recent whopper from a figure who may well be among the 5000³ most powerful 9/11 liars in the world, our own Nancy Pelosi. The sharp-minded and indefatigable Bev Conover, editor and publisher of the invaluable Online Journal, recently treated her readers to a piece called "The Chicken Little Chorus's sickening farce." In it, she writes about the absurd "measures" being taken by the US Transportation Safety Authority (TSA) to "test" things like airport "security," all of this according to a TSA "intelligence" bulletin that, says Conover, may or may not have been intended for public display. She adds that
..............................The whole thing would be funny—nay, a farce—except it's messing with people's
..............................heads. Of course, that's the intention because Homeland (In)security's Chicken
..............................Little has a "gut" feeling that the "terrorists" are going to pull off something big "this
..............................summer" in the USA.
..........Plenty of ink as been spilled about Lon Chertoff's transparent and vile scare-you-to-death remark that he's got a "gut feeling" about another 9/11 this summer. Conover, though, points out the craven and debased fact that members of congress, like the little slave-automatons they are, did exactly as "told" after the "gut feeling" remark and began imitating it themselves. We no longer have elected representatives in congress, but we have unelected curs whose greatest talent is that they're all perfect and obedient liars on cue.
..........Conover writes that
..............................Chicken Little Chertoff's "gut" feeling apparently has sucked the Democrats
..............................into joining the Chicken Little Chorus. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, using the
..............................Democrats' weekly radio address, touted her party's success Friday in pass-
..............................ing major recommendations of the 9/11 (Whitewash) Commission, the day
..............................after the Senate did likewise.
.............................. Said Pelosi, "The threat of terrorist violence against the United States is grow-
..............................ing. Al-Qaeda is gaining strength, and Osama bin Laden continues to elude
..............................capture. There is not a moment to spare to take the steps necessary to keep
..............................the American people safe."
..........Although Pelosi's lies flow out in a garish and absolutely shameless mouth-bouquet, they follow in lock step those same big fat planted whoppers we saw in the New York Times of April 2, 2007 ("New Generation of Qaeda Chiefs Is Seen on Rise") and that we analyzed in "Poisoned Nation, Poisoned Truth." As usual, like all such valu-packs of lies, these pre-recorded and pre-implanted deceits and frauds are triple-edged. That is, they could be interpreted as constituting a genuinely concerned advance notice or a humanely inspired warning of horrors-to-come, the impulse behind them being Nancy's great love of the people and her earnest desire that they not be harmed (and, naturally, that's exactly the load of crap that most Americans, being non-readers, fall for). On the other hand, her vomited-out string of Satan's verbal jewels could be nothing more than the usual empty scare-you-to-death threats—the kind that used to come in candy-color-coded packages)—just to keep the population ever afraid, ever pliant, ever unthinking, and ever willing to stand by idly as the police state is hammered together around their ears. Ah, but then there's still the third hand. On the third hand, the Pelosian projectile vomiting—although it's utterly devoid of any truth whatsoever about Al Qaeda or about Osama (the U.S. asset who never eluded anything but instead was ever coddled by the U.S., ever useful, and ever allowed to "escape"), it could be an "announcement," like Chertoff's gut-talk, of something that's really on its way, the second 9/11 that'll clinch the deal at last by allowing ("requiring") the setting up of the police state and the bunker-busting of Iran, since, after all, the pagan and contemptible Iranians are the ones who will be blamed for Cheney and the rogue government's taking out of another American city or two.
..........Conover leans toward the third interpretation, as do many other observers, analysts, commentators, and scholars. As, terrified, sick at heart, and approaching despair, do I.
.........."There is not a moment to spare to take the steps necessary to keep the American people safe," screams the hysterical and snake-haired Medusa-Pelosi, at which point Conover turns her attention to Chicken Little Central:
..............................If that's not sick enough, consider that Chicken Little In-Chief Bush is running to
..............................and fro, telling carefully picked Chicken Little audiences not that "the sky is falling"
..............................but that "the terrorists are coming!" Ya know, that's why "we have to fight them
..............................over there, so we don't have to fight them at home." And "if we don't fight them
..............................over there, they will follow us home." Except, they have "sleeper cells" here and
..............................more of "them" are slipping across our borders, which is why he needs more
..............................power to snoop into our personal affairs, eavesdrop on our phone calls, read
..............................our emails, freeze our assets, force us to carry and show national identity cards
..............................(drivers' licenses and passports), arrest us for disagreeing with him, render us
..............................for torture and lock us away forever in Gitmo. Shoot, why not just put radio fre-
..............................quency ID (RFID) chips in us all?
..........My spirit be with Bev Conover, let my old writer—friend, my old scholar-friend, my old Canadian friend do or go where they may and close their eyes as they wish.
..........Horrifying, withering, monstrous as it is, the truth is our only strength. The truth is our only ally, our only hope in the face of such extraordinarily massive lying as we now are seeing, in the face of such inhuman and conscienceless rape of the hearts and feelings of all decent people, such malignant infecting of all decent human minds, so crushing and so ravenous a taste for conquest, murder, plunder, torture, malice, profit—that is, "victory."
..........Such a "victory" as Lon Cheney and Adolph Giuliani and all the rest of the traitors and criminals are absolutely set upon achieving, we, all of us, can only hope and wish and pray and strive never to see. "[M]ost of Congress and the American public cannot imagine the degree of insanity that lies behind the Bush administration," remarks Paul Craig Roberts, perhaps suggesting how it can possibly be that we have actually failed to stop the monsters before now. People can't believe how murderous they are, how insane they are. And Paul Levy reminds us that even the insane are most fully capable of hyper-rational planning, manipulation, and conniving. "[T]he Bush regime," he writes, "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."
..........The time for politeness is over. The time for being shy of vulgarity is over. The time for being held in the thrall of custom is over. The time for placing hope on precedent is over, the time for clinging onto the false and putrid reed of hope arguing that "it has never happened before" is proof that "it won't happen now."
..........It has happened now. It's up to us to reverse it, to destroy it before worse happens and goes on happening. And there's no one—no one—to help us do those things except only us alone, ourselves. There may still be time. Or perhaps there isn't. Perhaps we've slept, lazed, been polite, lived on hope, been stupid, been ignorant, been blind too long.
..........Asks Conover,
..............................How did we ever did we make it 225 years without Big Brother watching us and
..............................breathing down our necks? Well, nearly 225 years because Congress, the White
..............................House and the courts have been chipping away at our rights, especially in Justice
..............................Louis Brandeis' words "the right most valued by all civilized men—the right to be
..............................let alone." Yup, everything changed on 9/11. We lost what was left of our shrink-
..............................ing rights and freedoms, so what's the big deal about losing the rest?
..............................Obviously, something bigger than an acorn bonked Chicken Little George on the
..............................head. But some of us knew that before the Felonious Five on the Supreme Court
..............................handed him and archfiend Dick Cheney the Oval Office.
..............................If this pair of Chicken Littles aren't impeached and removed from office, there will
..............................be worse to come. If keeping the people in a constant state of fear isn't enough,
..............................how about another 9/11 to pave the way for an attack on Iran? Then they can
..............................truly say, "The sky is falling," because you can bank on the "terrorists" striking
..............................us wherever they find us—at home or abroad.
..........I suggest that you go ahead and click on Conover's "worse to come," read what's there, and then judge honestly what hope you still hold out, how much time you really think we have left.
..........I pray—and pray—that it's enough.
..........And yet I don't know. I do know that if you click here, you'll find a piece of writing likely to seem an overwhelming deterrent to optimism—but that at the same time, at least, may offer a piece of truth to stand on—truth, the only thing we have to stand on.
..........If sanity and the truth are vital colleagues, like mind and body, as I think they are, then the person is sane who sees the truth, insane the one blind to it.
..........A recent piece by Maher Osseiran, "The hijacking of a terrorism plot!" is very much worth reading, and you can do it by clicking here. But, first, let me draw your attention to a line or two from it. For example, there's this:
..............................There is a need to focus on what is easy to prove in order to prevent similar acts
..............................[similar, that is, to the collapse of WTC7 and to the making of the phony "Bin Laden
..............................Confession Tape"] that might be coming upon us very soon. Former Pennsylvania
..............................Senator Rick Santorum predicted on July 7, 2007 that a terrorism attack would take
..............................place prior to November. On July 10, Department of Homeland Security Secretary
..............................Chertoff informed us that he had a "gut feeling" that such an attack will take place
..............................this summer. Will their wishes come true or is it that the Terrorism Fairy would be
..............................allowed to strike again?
..........Osseiran is arguing— much like Webster Tarpley does—that the exposure of 9/11 truth can and ought to be accomplished through focusing on those aspects of the "attacks" that can most easily be proven as having been faked, like the Osama tape and the "pulling" of WTC7. And he concludes his piece this way:
..............................Again, it is left to the average person who is looking for sanity to prevail to focus
..............................on what is easy to prove, the Terrorism Fairy cannot be allowed to strike again,
..............................there is no time to waste.
.........."The average person who is looking for sanity" and "there is no time to waste"—phrases, coming from the lips of an honest citizen as opposed to the likes of Nancy Pelosi, that have ballast and ring and weight. May things turn out as Osseiran wishes—and as I do as well.
..........A note about my scholarly colleague and friend. He'd said about lunch together that he would "suggest some dates in earliest June. The rest of May is pretty much shot." I wrote back to him
.............................."absolutely. I'd love to get together for lunch one day in June. Much to talk about,
..............................I'd love to catch up—and to hear what's to be heard from the plant and environs
..............................(though I'm only assuming, haven't checked the schedule or the like, that you . . .
..............................[haven't yet retired and have] been teaching all along. . .
..........I sent the email on May 22nd. It's now getting close to the end of August. I've heard nothing. Not a word. Summer is pushing to a close.
....................................................................................................—Eric Larsen
....................................................................................................—August 19, 2007
¹.... "The Waste Land" (1922), T. S. Eliot.
²...."I reject the naive or sociological explanation of terrorism, the assumption that misery, oppressd, and desperation give rise to terrorist organizations which spontaneously express these underlying moods. But we live in an era in which political and social reality are incessantly manipulated by huge and pervasive intelligence agencies-CIA, FBI, MI-6, FSB (KGB), Mossad, BND, SDECE, SISMI and the like-whose cumulative effect it to over-determine or sur-determine observed reality.
.... "I therefore contend that the more reliable conceptual model for understanding terrorism is one that situates the secret intelligence agency, or factions thereof, in the center of the process, recruiting prospective terrorists from the immiserated masses and forming them into clandestine organizations which are henceforth subject to guidance from outside, behind, and above. High-profile international terrorism is not spontaneous: it is artificial and synthetic. It requires expert terrorist controllers. Because of this, the starting point for realistic appraisal of 9/11 is not primarily the sociology of the Middle East, but rather the historical record of NATO and CIA state-sponsored terrorism in western Europe and elsewhere in the post-World War II period. For it is here, and surely not in some distant cave of the Hindu Kush, that we can find the methods and personnel which produced 9/11. If the term grotesque originally meant something that came out of a cave, we can justifiably dismiss the official explanation of 9/11-Bin Laden with his laptop in an Afghan cave-as the grotesque theory of terrorism." Webster G. Tarpley, 9/11 Synthetic Terror, pp. xi-xii.
³....To some, that number may seem high. Remember, though, that it includes the entire memberships of The Trilateral Group, The Bilderberger Group, The Council on Foreign Relations, the editorial staffs of all major papers, magazines, television networks, publishing houses, etc., etc., etc. Many of these people are far more powerful than Nancy Pelosi, who, although granted certain powers by her office, speaks here—in the passage about to be quoted—as a puppet under threat from her superiors. Still, she's lying.
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................................................................................[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
................................................................................Our nation is dying. Our nation is being murdered before our very eyes. And yet,
................................................................................over so long a 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.
.......................................................................................... —Eric Larsen, "A Letter of Lamentation to America," Part 2
................................................................................
................................................................................There is only one way to erode Bush's hard core base, and that is by attacking
................................................................................the 9/11 myth. Destroy the 9/11 myth, and the September criminals may be called to
................................................................................account. Destroy the 9/11 myth, and Bush will be neutralized. Peace-loving gov-
................................................................................ernments and institutions around the world must address this task, with a campaign
................................................................................of denunciation, exposure, and political education on the truth about 9/11 and the
................................................................................nature of terrorism. One vehicle for this would be an Independent International Truth
................................................................................Commission on 9/11, modeled on the Russell-Sartre Tribunal for Vietnam. The con-
................................................................................vocation of such a truth commission for 9/11 is more urgent than ever, and should
................................................................................be top priority for anti-war forces well before the Congressional elections a
................................................................................year from now.
..........................................................................................—Webster G. Tarpley, 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA (2005)
..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
8
FROM THE UNITED STATES:
TALES OF WEAKNESS, TALES OF WOE
FROM THE UNITED STATES:
TALES OF WEAKNESS, TALES OF WOE
..........
1
My "Madness"
and Me
My "Madness"
and Me
..........Readers who have stuck with me here for a good sweep of time will remember Food for Thought 9.6.1.2007, "The Traitors in Our House, Continued," posted last May 20. In that piece, I synopsized the contents of my long-time friend Richard Collier's "Letter from Canada," which you can read again, if you like, by clicking here. The letter, addressed to Randall Tillotson (who subsequently wrote his own response to Collier), made four essential points about important differences between Canada and the U.S. that were followed by one essential point—about me.
..........What I aimed to do in "The Traitors in Our House, Continued" was take up and discuss those five points one by one. The sly and careful reader, however, will doubtless by now have caught on to my private little secret: namely, that I never got farther than the first point, and that I myself—just as slyly—never so much as mentioned that failure.
..........So it's time to remedy it. I propose to do that by once again citing Collier's five points, and then by focusing closely on the last of them—the really interesting one, the one that has to do with me, with whether I'm crazy or not.
..........After all, I ask, how could that not be the most interesting one?
·
1)
..........Collier's first point was that we in the U.S., unlike people in Canada, have an "abject rage and fear" toward and of things like "implanted chips, cameras on street corners, and a massive shift to fascist thought-control."
..........I think he's right. And I also think we've got good reason for these feelings (and that Canadians will, too, if and when the North American Union kicks in).
2)
..........Collier's second observation was that "Canada has had a much longer, richer, and bolder tradition of leftwing politics than the US" has had, "or at least it has been more visible and prominent." While in the U.S., he said, "socialist and communist movements have always been underground movements and deeply hidden from public perception" ("not to mention roundly vilified," he added), there's much greater leftist visibility in Canada and a much greater spread across the political spectrum than there is in the pasteurized and homogenized U.S. "left."
..........Again, he's right. In the U.S., politics has, in every genuinely important way, effectively degenerated into a single-party system made of clone-like and interchangeable Republicrats and Democans. Both together are under severe attack by a fascist splinter group to the radical far right made up of and operated by the neocons and certain major but hidden "elements" of "government." (The best of numerous good books on this subject is Webster G. Tarpley's 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA.) But neither the Republicrats nor the Democans are capable of understanding what's really being done to them in this extraordinary attack, with the result that they both simply roll over like friendly dogs looking for tummy-rubs as thrown lances pierce deeply right into their bellies. Either that or they're part of the criminal and treasonous radical right-wing fascist "government" themselves and are just pretending not to be. The more I look at it, the more I suspect that the latter is the case.
3)
..........Collier's third "difference" between Canada and the U.S. derives straight from the second. He argues that the U.S. has a "whole tradition. . . of a narrow—very narrow—range of permissible political writing and thinking" that results in fighting and quarreling among and between those who ought to be allies—like the fighting between me, for example, and Amy Goodman. This situation results also, says Collier, in "querulous attacks" that "sound nasty, bullying, lacking in empathy" and that are "ultimately pointless." Worse, these things "betray what Americans have always been guilty of: bad manners."
..........Here, I think that Collier misses. Maybe Amy Goodman and I "should" be allies, except except that she's one of those denizens of the "left" who substitutes feeling for thinking (a phenomenon discussed in depth guess where—yup! in A Nation Gone Blind), and that Goodman furthermore is a "left gatekeeper," sitting on and suppressing 9/11 truth, something that causes her to be complicit in crimes against humanity and that makes her also a traitor to the United States and to its Constitution.
..........But—uh, oh—maybe I'm being impolite.
4)
..........Collier suggests fourthly that attacking members of a group that's really (in this case supposedly) one's own political group—especially if the attacks entail hair-splitting—will do only harm, not good. It will lead, he argues (we're drawing closer to the am-I-crazy part) to one's becoming a "Puritan,"
..............................someone who knows he/she is one of the Select and that most others are not. It
..............................behooves the Select to ensure that his/her group is never ever contaminated by one
..............................of the Fallen or Corrupt—and that means most other people: few are worthy, few
..............................are chosen. So the Select find that much of what they do is to administer tests to
..............................others (who may or may not be applicants to join the Selects' group) to determine
..............................their worthiness: tests of fire and water; tests of what is said and written; tests
..............................of behaviour and action. So much time is spent testing others in order to determine
..............................worthiness that the original goal of revolution or a New Jerusalem or whatever re-
..............................cedes beyond the horizon.
The result, he goes on, is that
..............................such rites of purification. . . drive away potential adherents and eventually isolate
..............................the individual or what is left of the original group. This of course is the history of
..............................Protestant religion after the Reformation, right? And I've seen this repeated in left-
..............................wing politics: the US Communist Party has fragmented and shivered into warring
..............................splinters over and over, each splinter thinking it possesses "the word," but having
..............................gotten so refined and diminished that no one takes it seriously at all. And what's
..............................the point of being right, if no one listens to you?
..........I think that here Collier is describing perfectly the fierce and pernicious infighting that was so much a part of leftist organizing and thought throughout the 1920s and 1930s. (Two excellent works on the subject are Stephen Koch's literary-historic analyses, Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals and his The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, And the Murder of Jose Robles.) But as to whether the same paradigm applies to our own situation now—when the left doesn't exist—I'm far, far less certain. As for the matter of what point there is in "being right" while "no one listens to you"—well, at the very least, I'm mightily familiar with the experience and feeling of having no one listen. As to the point, though, of going on talking nevertheless, even to an empty room, and whether that means you're crazy—well, we'll get to that.
5)
..........Here's a passage from Collier's letter that gets directly at his concluding, and fifth, assertion—or fear—about what can happen as a result of the way a person (like me) might respond or react to the situation in the U.S., the one so evidently different from the situation ( for now) in Canada:
..............................And where does [all of] this lead? A solitary cell of paranoid suspicion, perhaps. No
..............................one can pass all the tests; no one can be righteous enough; no one can be trusted. I
..............................think I would rather make mistakes in my trust and correct them when my errors have
..............................been made clear to me than worry constantly that my friends, neighbours, associates,
..............................and colleagues may all be unreliable, may in fact be stooges or, even worse, counter-
..............................intelligence agents recruited by the fascists. My comments on EL's FFT essays are in-
..............................tended as an antidote to that frightening drift into solipsism.
..........And here's my response, the concluding paragraphs of the first section of FFT9.7.1, "The Traitors in Our House, Continued."
..............................So ends the letter from Canada, built with craft and care such that its most withering
..............................suggestion is also its final one—that I, in the view of my long and dear friend Richard
..............................Collier, by taking the approach that I've lately been taking and by setting my bearings
..............................in the way I've lately set them, may in fact be heading straight toward the solitude of
..............................inconsequentiality, the wasteland of paranoia, and the silent madhouse of solipsism.
..............................Needless to say, I don't have the least desire to go to any of those three dread states
..............................or places, all of them perfectly real, highly dangerous, and absolutely destructive. Like
..............................anybody else, I hope to elude them through any effort I can muster. And yet at the same
..............................time I see no way that I can lower the risk of falling prey to them merely by changing
..............................the subject I've chosen to write about or by changing the method of my approach to it.
..............................And the reason is that if I made those changes I wouldn't achieve any of the good ends
..............................that Richard Collier describes, and I wouldn't help bring about any of the salutary con-
..............................ditions that, by the sound of it, he's himself fortunate enough to enjoy. Who ever knew
..............................just how far apart—worlds apart—Canada and the U.S. really were? No, here in the
..............................21st Century U.S., if I were to make those changes in subject and manner, it wouldn't
..............................mean I'd thereby be better able to help—and help to cohere—a benevolent political,
..............................social, or cultural movement of a kind that I'm now supposedly just helping to splinter.
..............................It wouldn't mean that I could join in a fruitful debate whose effect over time would be,
..............................however gradually, to bring about the good and isolate the bad.
..............................Changing my subject or method would bring about neither of those good things nor
..............................any imaginable similar good things. No, it would not. And as for the meaning of such
..............................change, it would be purely and only this: That I had given up, had thrown in the towel,
..............................and had decided to go over to the enemy; that I had decided to join the liars and the
..............................corporations; that I had decided to put my own oar in the water in order to pull together,
..............................with all of them, fraudulent to the end, in helping speed the demise of the republic and
..............................in erecting the Orwellian state that A Nation Gone Blind tried and tried and tried,
..............................most probably in vain, to find ways to avoid.
..............................It would, in short, be the worst possible thing I could do.
·
..........In other words, it looks as though I was saying that even if it were true that I'd be driven crazy by writing these "Food for Thought" pieces—or that I'd be revealed as being crazy—I still wouldn't stop writing them and wouldn't be able to justify not writing them. It looks as though I was saying that even if writing the pieces really were to head me "straight toward the solitude of inconsequentiality, the wasteland of paranoia, and the silent madhouse of solipsism," I'd still keep on writing them.
..........Well. What does it sound like to you? Here's what it sounds like to me, and I wonder if it's the same for you: It sounds to me, on the one hand, like something that could accurately and truly be said by someone who already was crazy, who already had slipped into the madness of solipsism or monomania; and then, on the other hand, it sounds like something that could accurately and truly be said by someone who in point of fact really was right.
..........Which is it? Am I mad, nuts, monomaniacal, unable to see reality? Or, on the other hand, am I right?
..........Well, let's analyze and try to find out.
2
My Colleagues, Me,
and My "Madness"
i
..........In the spring of 2007 an email arrived from a person who's been a friend since 1965—it could be longer; memory doesn't serve—a published fellow writer whose long effort to get a novel into print never quite paid off, a Vietnam veteran, a wide and eclectic reader, a powerful intellect, an extraordinary letter writer, a shrewdly insightful thinker, and the absolute best of company, especially over a drink.My Colleagues, Me,
and My "Madness"
i
..........The email that came gave me a jolt.
..............................Date: Fri, 13 April, 2007
..............................From: D.-- T.--
..............................Subject: Re: POISONED NATION, POISONED TRUTH
..............................To: ericlarsen@ericlarsen.net
..............................Eric, I'm going to bow out. Call me a potted plant, but the hysteria and the belligerent
..............................certainties of the conspiracy theorists is all too reminiscent of the Bushies when they
..............................got us into this war. The stink of Jonestown hangs over both sides. I'll stick with
..............................Frank Rich.
..............................But still, all the best to you and A in retirement.
..................................................D
..........What was I to make of it? Here were hints of all the liveliness and intellectual vitality I was used to in my old friend: The "potted plant" drollery with its allusion to a letter I'd sent out ("So progress is being made of a kind that makes it clearer all the time that, unless people are living the lives of potted plants, they can hardly any longer be unaware of the truth about 9/11"), "the stink of Jonestown" memory-flying all the way back to November 18, 1978, and and the perverted grotesquerie of the kool-aid killings, even the quick feint about Frank Rich seeming to ask for a hint of the risible amid the writer's obsidian decisiveness.
..........I dropped him from the list, of course, had the best intention of sending off a long letter to him, never quite got around to it, and went on working away at the next in the series of my "Food for Thought" pieces.
..........Who's right, me or him? I'm convinced it's me, and I'm sorry. Sorry not because I'm right, but because my dearly-valued old friend is—well, because something is wrong not just with his position on the subject, but with him.
..........Dammit, I know I'm no one to judge another like this, whether I know and love him or not. And yet—well, and yet I am one to judge another like this. I'm distraught to see my old pal using a phrase like "the conspiracy theorists," since it's a phrase that by rights should go permanently and immediately to the garbage dump to join all other of its wretched siblings, all other propaganda words and phrases, all other political lies and ruinously deceitful renderings in words of the kinds that George Orwell wrote about all the way back in 1946.
..........My old friend knows better. I know he does. But something's the matter with him. Something's the matter with our times. Something's the matter that makes people be crazy. A Nation Gone Blind put its finger on a lot of the things that are the matter with our time that make Americans dumb, stupid, crazy, and blind.
..........But could it—could it conceivably, could it possibly—could the things the book put its finger on include even my old friend, sharp, independent, perceptive, discriminating, reasonable, delightful, witty, intelligent?
..........Impossible. And yet I fear it.
..........Either way, the question isn't answered yet. "Who's crazy, him or me?"
ii
..............................To read such as Amy Goodman wrote, to be cheated so, to be manipulated by such
..............................puerile banality as this from a person of considerable "progressive" influence, to see
..............................revealed by the quality of the writing what the shallow and traitorous quality of the
..............................thought behind it really is—this is an experience incompatible with any hope what-
..............................soever that such leadership or guidance as Amy Goodman—or NPR—represents can
..............................conceivably help hold out any hope whatsoever for the survival of the United States
..............................of America as a free republic.
..........I posted the piece on April 5. Next day, fast as a speeding bullet, came this email, carrying no subject line and not ending with a question mark:
..............................How can anyone believe a word you write when you don't even know that Amy
..............................Goodman is not an NPR broadcaster.
..........The writer was—is—a person of a high and greatly estimable visibility in radio broadcasting on political and cultural matters—and literary—and he was certainly no person whom anyone with a new book out would ever choose to be on the bad side of. The mistake, I grant, was a dumb one, and I and I alone was responsible for it. Still, it was regrettable, foolish, but hardly tragic. Another reader had already pointed it out to me and I'd already changed "NPR" to "Pacifica Radio" by the time the speeding-bullet email reached me. Here's what I emailed back:
..............................Yes, an unfortunate error, now corrected. But how can a single error—a one-word
..............................error, a two-word correction—be reasonable cause to judge as worthless many,
..............................many thousands of other-error-free-words?
..............................Seems like the truth is earning me more enemies than friends. Would 'twere not so.
..............................My best,
........................................Eric
..............................P.S. Did you ever [meaning "did you ever actually"] read "A Nation
..............................Gone Blind"? Serious question.
..........Within minutes the bullet returned, traveling as fast as before:
..............................If you can't get simple facts like that straight, then how can I take anything
..............................that follows seriously?
..........And there the matter ended. The person, clearly, had been lying in wait, hiding in the bushes ready to spring out and gobble me up whole at the first slip-up he caught, however large or small. The second bullet-letter revealed that he had not the least interest in using reason, behaving reasonably, or even in being fair. Does one factual error spoil the entirety of an ambitious series of essays on 9/11 truth and its cover-up? After all, the piece in question had been preceded by eight or so others just since the first of the year—but bullet-person showed no interest in my query about the relative weight or merit of that writing as opposed to the relative weight or demerit of the one- or two-word error he'd so exultingly pounced on.
..........This eminent cultural commentator wasn't interested in anything whatsoever except in his own devout wish and powerful desire that I be wrong through and through. He wasn't interested in discussion, analysis, evidence, argument, reason, or logic.
..........His mind was frozen, boxed in, rigidified, adamant, and closed to any truth other than that 9/11 was not an inside job.
..........What does it mean when such blind compulsion and passionate denial as these define a well-known public figure of no mean influence and power in a major branch of the nation's cultural media?
..........He won't look at evidence. I will. He will judge the whole by one tiny part. I won't. He's an absolutist on the subject of 9/11. I'm not.
..........So who's crazier, him or me?
iii
..........I taught for thirty-five years at a single college, and one of my colleagues there was a scholar in history, my own age, a man of a stern seriousness but also a quick sense of humor and an ever-alert eye for all things shabby, fraudulent, or cheap—things in academics, I mean. He and I, beginning back in 1973 or 1974 or so, were frequent fellow members of college committees, especially on the subject of curriculum, he being the representative from History and I from English. On those committees we became almost a sub-committee of two, a sort of minority whip, doing all we could to oppose the scurrilous, the fallacious, the mediocre, and the vanity-driven whenever it popped up, which was, in fact, pretty much all the time, from the mid-seventies on through my departure from the place in 2006.
..........My friend had himself gotten—and had worked hard for—an incontrovertibly solid education, was a fastidious researcher, had published at least three unequivocally worthwhile volumes in history, was a dedicated instructor and a staunch but completely humane opponent of crumbling standards. And from time to time, even in the later years, he remained a lunch companion.
..........You can imagine my surprise, then, on receiving this email:
..............................Date: Mon, 21 May
..............................From: F— E—
..............................Subject: Re: Rudolph Giuliani, criminal: "Why Aren't You in JAIL, Mr. Mayor?"
..............................To: Eric Larsen ericlarsen@ericlarsen.net
..............................Please remove me from your e-mailing list.
........................................F- E-
..........After thirty-five years of friendship and collegiality, it was an abrupt farewell. It's true, the letter my friend was responding to did end with the sentence "To be removed from my passionately well-intended mailings, reply to this email with 'Remove' (or synonym) in the subject line," and he'd done exactly as I'd suggested. But still.
..........Here's what I wrote back to my old colleague:
..............................Date: Mon, 21 May 2007
..............................To: F— E —
..............................From: Eric Larsen
..............................Subject: Off the list
..............................Hello, F-,
..............................Well, you're off, though deleting doesn't en-happy me but does the opposite.
..............................Do you feel like giving me an idea of why you decided? I mean, beyond your just
..............................not wanting email you didn't ask for—a torture by conscience for me every time I
..............................put someone on the list. I used to write and say that I'd read such and such of a
..............................person's work and was writing this and such myself, and would you be interested
..............................in being on my list, etc. Nine times out of ten I got no responses, and then when I
..............................put the name on the list, got no regrets from recipient.
..............................In any case, this is stuff I couldn't NOT get involved in after publishing A Nation
..............................Gone Blind—in the book, I'd soft-pedaled the 9/11 stuff because I was sure it
..............................would doom the book as far as getting any reviews was concerned, and what
..............................I really wanted was to have the book become an entree to broader discussion.
..............................Well, I should have followed someone else's advice over my own, since the book
..............................has been black listed anyway, I believe just for its hinting at my 9/11 position in
..............................two or maybe three very delicate allusions in the text AND perhaps less delicately
..............................and perhaps even more passionately on the dedication page.
..............................Maybe you despise me for what I'm doing, but if you do I'd certainly like to know
..............................more about it. The piece on Amy Goodman caused a number of drop-requests. Now
..............................[the] Giuliani [piece] is getting them. Is it that you consider me to be telling lies myself?
..............................I mean, about him? Or. . . ? Seems to me clear that we're in a national and/or con-
..............................stitutional crisis/emergency like none other except, what, the revolution itself and the
..............................war between the states.
..............................Nevertheless. Unless I'm poison to you, I'd love to hear. We could have a bite near
..............................the plant—maybe even the Italian spot of last time. Besides, especially if you're re-
..............................tiring, I owe you a lunch like you gave me.
..............................Very best,
.............................. Eric
·
..........The remainder of the story is quick to tell—in just three simple steps. First is the email that came in response from F— E—:..............................Date: Mon, 21 May 2007
..............................From: F— E—
..............................Subject: Re: Off the list
..............................To: Eric Larsen
..............................Dear Eric,
..............................I certainly do not hate you, do not regard you as poison, etc., and would love
..............................to have lunch with you. If you would still like to after what I write in answer to
..............................your question about why I have asked to be deleted from your list, then please
..............................let me know, and I will suggest some dates in earliest June. The rest of May
..............................is pretty much shot.
..............................Eric, I have found many of your communications to be what I can only describe
..............................as extreme. Alarmingly so. Your latest is a case in point. To describe Giuliani as
.............................."foremost a traitor and mass murderer" is mind boggling to me. To then go on by
..............................assailing Pelosi, Giuliani, the New York Times as lying, and to assail other insti-
..............................tutions for defending treason, mass murdering criminal "bosses"—well, it is just
..............................too much for me. One can disagree with just about every political "leader" around
..............................and with many of our major institutions, but to describe them as you have is to
..............................move from thoughtful criticism into the realm of unreality. Eric, what has hap-
..............................pened, or what is happening, to your mind?!!? I worry about you on that level, and
..............................I bring this to your attention with the best of intentions, i.e. as a friend and col-
..............................league from our days together at the college, someone (you) who asked me to
..............................read his manuscripts, which is the highest flattery from you I can think of. But
..............................the extremeness of your recent communications disturbs me so much that I
..............................have therefore asked you to delete me from your e-list. I hope and pray you
..............................will strive for balance, that you will take yourself in hand and draw back from
..............................the brink of extremeness.
..............................If after the above you would still like to meet to break bread: I would love to
..............................do so.
..............................Your friend,
..................................................F—
..........And there you are, precisely and exactly at the very root of it all: My old friend and scholarly colleague thinks that I have gone mad. He thinks—can't help but think—that I'm crazy, extreme, out of balance, not in touch with (if I may stoop to the word) reality.
..........How terribly simple it is, this enormous problem, this almost absolute impasse between—well, between what's true, on the one hand, and what a great number of people, even highly educated ones, are able to believe, accept, or even consider as truth.
..........Giuliani is a criminal and traitor who aided and abetted other criminals and traitors on 9/11, and the simple truth is that he, along with the others, should be tried for his crimes and, if found guilty of them, punished accordingly.
..........But the trouble is that my old friend, in the first place, will not and cannot entertain, incorporate, or believe that Giuliani even is a criminal. Whether he's willing to read any of the excellent and fastidiously researched scholarly books on this and closely related subjects, I don't know. I tend awfully much to doubt it. Those books, though, if he were to read them, would identify for him the exact type and nature of Giuliani's crimes—among them perjury and the purposeful destruction of evidence at a crime scene—although it's still possible, even then, that my friend wouldn't accept the fact of Giuliani as a traitor and criminal.
..........And why not? Well, there's the question of all questions. It is, you might say, the reality question. It's the question that A Nation Gone Blind takes up at great length—the question that may in fact be identified as that book's true central subject.
..........And therefore, this isn't the place to return to it. But this is the place to witness the fruits of the blindness that A Nation Gone Blind so carefully analyzes and describes. And those fruits—well, they're not good. They're poison. They make people ill. In fact, they make people crazy.
·
..........Crazy how? With what symptoms and with what manifestations?
..........I've offered some examples. There was my trusted friend and fellow writer of years back—sharp, independent, perceptive, discriminating, reasonable, delightful, witty, intelligent—who now chooses to throw up his hands on the grounds that both sides in the 9/11 "debate" are equal in their corrupt putrefaction. There was the quite-famous media-person who lurked in the shadows, waiting to spring out and denounce as invalid the entirety of my series of essays on the basis of a single and inconsequential error—he with a mind frozen, boxed in, rigidified, adamant, closed to any truth other than that 9/11 was pulled off by nineteen playboy pseudo-Muslims with box-cutters, and by them alone. There was my friend and scholar-colleague of thirty-five years who resides intellectually behind some kind of protective or buffering wall of euphemism, custom, and propriety that makes him incapable of and unwilling to accept, entertain—or, for god's sake investigate—the simple and known and self-evident assertion that Adolph Giuliani is a criminal, traitor, and conspirator-and who, instead of looking at the matter for himself, is able only to attacks the messenger rather than the message—"Eric, what has happened, or what is happening, to your mind?!!? I worry about you on that level, and I. . . hope and pray you will strive for balance, that you will take yourself in hand and draw back from the brink of extremeness."
..........And there was Richard Collier himself, who, though far, far to the left of my scholar-friend, was, even so, seemingly less concerned that the content of my essays might constitute the most immediately important and ruthlessly pressing matter at hand than that my continuing to write those essays in a world inclined not to listen to them constituted the grave personal danger to an impercipient me of setting my compass straight at "a frightening drift into solipsism."
..........I feel as though we're back among the witches of Salem. I'm one of the witches, and the dark-robed elders and the staid councilmen of the town—who, if anything, are certain that they know madness from insanity—are hurling their stones at mad me, confident of their rightness and their righteousness, since both come to them through nothing less than their never-yet-disproven faith in the conventional, the familiar, and the customary.
3
Hurry Up, Please, It's Time
Hurry Up, Please, It's Time
..........And that's exactly the problem: What's stirring, what's going on, and what's being perpetrated among us now is not conventional, it is not familiar, and it is not customary.
..........It is, however, monstrous, unprecedented, enormous in scale, criminal, murderous, cold-blooded, traitorous, and well beyond the moral or the historical imagination of most Americans, even highly educated ones.
..........The enemy is "them," and, in the domestic aspect of their phony "War on Terror," the focus of their desire for control and elimination is—us. Abroad, the focus is on other people and others things, but inside the U.S., the focus is on us. 9/11 itself was an attack by "them" on us, and its eminently successful purpose was to scare us enough so that we would be compliant—and complicitous—in the stripping away of our Constitutional rights and freedoms with the idea in mind that one day not too far away we would all be entirely under "their" control, for them to do with us as they may choose.
..........As Paul Craig Roberts put it (in "Attacking Iran: What's In It For Bush?"), "If the Regime overcomes its defeat in Iraq with a 'victory' in Iran, 'you are with us or against us' will take on new life, and we will find out who are those intended for the Halliburton-built detention camps constructed in the US at great cost with our tax dollars."
.........."They" may fail, and I of course pray that they will and yet constantly fear that they won't. Meanwhile, the signs of their ongoing efforts and preparations to intimidate and disempower us continue unabated and, in fact, have recently intensified, becoming even more visible than usual.
..........Since 9/11, it's been commonplace, their attempt to scare us to death—or at the very, very least, warn us to death. Either way, the summertime signs now are ominous, ugly, unscrupulous, and plentiful—and, above all, as we know perfectly well, they're coming to us from the same group of wonderful and benevolent killers, liars, traitors, and murderers who were gracious enough to bring us the first 9/11 and to construct the oppressive fasco-imperialist world debacle that by means, and solely by means, of 9/11 was made possible.
..........What "they" want is military-and-oil hegemony worldwide and a police state in the U.S. that will keep its people going compliantly go along with the plan—whether by force, by injection, by RDIF tags, or by elimination.
..........The stupidest, most disastyrous, and most shamefully idiotic thing the people of the United States have done for the last—well, I'd say ever—is fail to blow the whistle on the truth of 9/11, since the clear and obvious truth of its having been an inside job is—and has been— the only means open to us by which to blast the fascisto-imperialistico Bush-Rove-Cheney- rogue government runaway freight train off the tracks.
..........As all know, most American are non-readers, and most Americans dwell therefore in portable cocoons of almost total ignorance. As for those who do read, most of them, ever since 9/11 itself, have either lied or denied as if their very next breath depended on it. And so, thanks to those who won't see, along with those who can't see, plus all those most beloved and familiar friendlies who now do, and have all along done, nothing but lie and lie and lie about the truth of 9/11—well, thanks to them, collaborators all, it may now be too late.
..........Let's start with a recent whopper from a figure who may well be among the 5000³ most powerful 9/11 liars in the world, our own Nancy Pelosi. The sharp-minded and indefatigable Bev Conover, editor and publisher of the invaluable Online Journal, recently treated her readers to a piece called "The Chicken Little Chorus's sickening farce." In it, she writes about the absurd "measures" being taken by the US Transportation Safety Authority (TSA) to "test" things like airport "security," all of this according to a TSA "intelligence" bulletin that, says Conover, may or may not have been intended for public display. She adds that
..............................The whole thing would be funny—nay, a farce—except it's messing with people's
..............................heads. Of course, that's the intention because Homeland (In)security's Chicken
..............................Little has a "gut" feeling that the "terrorists" are going to pull off something big "this
..............................summer" in the USA.
..........Plenty of ink as been spilled about Lon Chertoff's transparent and vile scare-you-to-death remark that he's got a "gut feeling" about another 9/11 this summer. Conover, though, points out the craven and debased fact that members of congress, like the little slave-automatons they are, did exactly as "told" after the "gut feeling" remark and began imitating it themselves. We no longer have elected representatives in congress, but we have unelected curs whose greatest talent is that they're all perfect and obedient liars on cue.
..........Conover writes that
..............................Chicken Little Chertoff's "gut" feeling apparently has sucked the Democrats
..............................into joining the Chicken Little Chorus. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, using the
..............................Democrats' weekly radio address, touted her party's success Friday in pass-
..............................ing major recommendations of the 9/11 (Whitewash) Commission, the day
..............................after the Senate did likewise.
.............................. Said Pelosi, "The threat of terrorist violence against the United States is grow-
..............................ing. Al-Qaeda is gaining strength, and Osama bin Laden continues to elude
..............................capture. There is not a moment to spare to take the steps necessary to keep
..............................the American people safe."
..........Although Pelosi's lies flow out in a garish and absolutely shameless mouth-bouquet, they follow in lock step those same big fat planted whoppers we saw in the New York Times of April 2, 2007 ("New Generation of Qaeda Chiefs Is Seen on Rise") and that we analyzed in "Poisoned Nation, Poisoned Truth." As usual, like all such valu-packs of lies, these pre-recorded and pre-implanted deceits and frauds are triple-edged. That is, they could be interpreted as constituting a genuinely concerned advance notice or a humanely inspired warning of horrors-to-come, the impulse behind them being Nancy's great love of the people and her earnest desire that they not be harmed (and, naturally, that's exactly the load of crap that most Americans, being non-readers, fall for). On the other hand, her vomited-out string of Satan's verbal jewels could be nothing more than the usual empty scare-you-to-death threats—the kind that used to come in candy-color-coded packages)—just to keep the population ever afraid, ever pliant, ever unthinking, and ever willing to stand by idly as the police state is hammered together around their ears. Ah, but then there's still the third hand. On the third hand, the Pelosian projectile vomiting—although it's utterly devoid of any truth whatsoever about Al Qaeda or about Osama (the U.S. asset who never eluded anything but instead was ever coddled by the U.S., ever useful, and ever allowed to "escape"), it could be an "announcement," like Chertoff's gut-talk, of something that's really on its way, the second 9/11 that'll clinch the deal at last by allowing ("requiring") the setting up of the police state and the bunker-busting of Iran, since, after all, the pagan and contemptible Iranians are the ones who will be blamed for Cheney and the rogue government's taking out of another American city or two.
..........Conover leans toward the third interpretation, as do many other observers, analysts, commentators, and scholars. As, terrified, sick at heart, and approaching despair, do I.
.........."There is not a moment to spare to take the steps necessary to keep the American people safe," screams the hysterical and snake-haired Medusa-Pelosi, at which point Conover turns her attention to Chicken Little Central:
..............................If that's not sick enough, consider that Chicken Little In-Chief Bush is running to
..............................and fro, telling carefully picked Chicken Little audiences not that "the sky is falling"
..............................but that "the terrorists are coming!" Ya know, that's why "we have to fight them
..............................over there, so we don't have to fight them at home." And "if we don't fight them
..............................over there, they will follow us home." Except, they have "sleeper cells" here and
..............................more of "them" are slipping across our borders, which is why he needs more
..............................power to snoop into our personal affairs, eavesdrop on our phone calls, read
..............................our emails, freeze our assets, force us to carry and show national identity cards
..............................(drivers' licenses and passports), arrest us for disagreeing with him, render us
..............................for torture and lock us away forever in Gitmo. Shoot, why not just put radio fre-
..............................quency ID (RFID) chips in us all?
..........My spirit be with Bev Conover, let my old writer—friend, my old scholar-friend, my old Canadian friend do or go where they may and close their eyes as they wish.
..........Horrifying, withering, monstrous as it is, the truth is our only strength. The truth is our only ally, our only hope in the face of such extraordinarily massive lying as we now are seeing, in the face of such inhuman and conscienceless rape of the hearts and feelings of all decent people, such malignant infecting of all decent human minds, so crushing and so ravenous a taste for conquest, murder, plunder, torture, malice, profit—that is, "victory."
..........Such a "victory" as Lon Cheney and Adolph Giuliani and all the rest of the traitors and criminals are absolutely set upon achieving, we, all of us, can only hope and wish and pray and strive never to see. "[M]ost of Congress and the American public cannot imagine the degree of insanity that lies behind the Bush administration," remarks Paul Craig Roberts, perhaps suggesting how it can possibly be that we have actually failed to stop the monsters before now. People can't believe how murderous they are, how insane they are. And Paul Levy reminds us that even the insane are most fully capable of hyper-rational planning, manipulation, and conniving. "[T]he Bush regime," he writes, "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."
..........The time for politeness is over. The time for being shy of vulgarity is over. The time for being held in the thrall of custom is over. The time for placing hope on precedent is over, the time for clinging onto the false and putrid reed of hope arguing that "it has never happened before" is proof that "it won't happen now."
..........It has happened now. It's up to us to reverse it, to destroy it before worse happens and goes on happening. And there's no one—no one—to help us do those things except only us alone, ourselves. There may still be time. Or perhaps there isn't. Perhaps we've slept, lazed, been polite, lived on hope, been stupid, been ignorant, been blind too long.
..........Asks Conover,
..............................How did we ever did we make it 225 years without Big Brother watching us and
..............................breathing down our necks? Well, nearly 225 years because Congress, the White
..............................House and the courts have been chipping away at our rights, especially in Justice
..............................Louis Brandeis' words "the right most valued by all civilized men—the right to be
..............................let alone." Yup, everything changed on 9/11. We lost what was left of our shrink-
..............................ing rights and freedoms, so what's the big deal about losing the rest?
..............................Obviously, something bigger than an acorn bonked Chicken Little George on the
..............................head. But some of us knew that before the Felonious Five on the Supreme Court
..............................handed him and archfiend Dick Cheney the Oval Office.
..............................If this pair of Chicken Littles aren't impeached and removed from office, there will
..............................be worse to come. If keeping the people in a constant state of fear isn't enough,
..............................how about another 9/11 to pave the way for an attack on Iran? Then they can
..............................truly say, "The sky is falling," because you can bank on the "terrorists" striking
..............................us wherever they find us—at home or abroad.
..........I suggest that you go ahead and click on Conover's "worse to come," read what's there, and then judge honestly what hope you still hold out, how much time you really think we have left.
..........I pray—and pray—that it's enough.
..........And yet I don't know. I do know that if you click here, you'll find a piece of writing likely to seem an overwhelming deterrent to optimism—but that at the same time, at least, may offer a piece of truth to stand on—truth, the only thing we have to stand on.
..........If sanity and the truth are vital colleagues, like mind and body, as I think they are, then the person is sane who sees the truth, insane the one blind to it.
..........A recent piece by Maher Osseiran, "The hijacking of a terrorism plot!" is very much worth reading, and you can do it by clicking here. But, first, let me draw your attention to a line or two from it. For example, there's this:
..............................There is a need to focus on what is easy to prove in order to prevent similar acts
..............................[similar, that is, to the collapse of WTC7 and to the making of the phony "Bin Laden
..............................Confession Tape"] that might be coming upon us very soon. Former Pennsylvania
..............................Senator Rick Santorum predicted on July 7, 2007 that a terrorism attack would take
..............................place prior to November. On July 10, Department of Homeland Security Secretary
..............................Chertoff informed us that he had a "gut feeling" that such an attack will take place
..............................this summer. Will their wishes come true or is it that the Terrorism Fairy would be
..............................allowed to strike again?
..........Osseiran is arguing— much like Webster Tarpley does—that the exposure of 9/11 truth can and ought to be accomplished through focusing on those aspects of the "attacks" that can most easily be proven as having been faked, like the Osama tape and the "pulling" of WTC7. And he concludes his piece this way:
..............................Again, it is left to the average person who is looking for sanity to prevail to focus
..............................on what is easy to prove, the Terrorism Fairy cannot be allowed to strike again,
..............................there is no time to waste.
.........."The average person who is looking for sanity" and "there is no time to waste"—phrases, coming from the lips of an honest citizen as opposed to the likes of Nancy Pelosi, that have ballast and ring and weight. May things turn out as Osseiran wishes—and as I do as well.
..........A note about my scholarly colleague and friend. He'd said about lunch together that he would "suggest some dates in earliest June. The rest of May is pretty much shot." I wrote back to him
.............................."absolutely. I'd love to get together for lunch one day in June. Much to talk about,
..............................I'd love to catch up—and to hear what's to be heard from the plant and environs
..............................(though I'm only assuming, haven't checked the schedule or the like, that you . . .
..............................[haven't yet retired and have] been teaching all along. . .
..........I sent the email on May 22nd. It's now getting close to the end of August. I've heard nothing. Not a word. Summer is pushing to a close.
....................................................................................................—Eric Larsen
....................................................................................................—August 19, 2007
¹.... "The Waste Land" (1922), T. S. Eliot.
²...."I reject the naive or sociological explanation of terrorism, the assumption that misery, oppressd, and desperation give rise to terrorist organizations which spontaneously express these underlying moods. But we live in an era in which political and social reality are incessantly manipulated by huge and pervasive intelligence agencies-CIA, FBI, MI-6, FSB (KGB), Mossad, BND, SDECE, SISMI and the like-whose cumulative effect it to over-determine or sur-determine observed reality.
.... "I therefore contend that the more reliable conceptual model for understanding terrorism is one that situates the secret intelligence agency, or factions thereof, in the center of the process, recruiting prospective terrorists from the immiserated masses and forming them into clandestine organizations which are henceforth subject to guidance from outside, behind, and above. High-profile international terrorism is not spontaneous: it is artificial and synthetic. It requires expert terrorist controllers. Because of this, the starting point for realistic appraisal of 9/11 is not primarily the sociology of the Middle East, but rather the historical record of NATO and CIA state-sponsored terrorism in western Europe and elsewhere in the post-World War II period. For it is here, and surely not in some distant cave of the Hindu Kush, that we can find the methods and personnel which produced 9/11. If the term grotesque originally meant something that came out of a cave, we can justifiably dismiss the official explanation of 9/11-Bin Laden with his laptop in an Afghan cave-as the grotesque theory of terrorism." Webster G. Tarpley, 9/11 Synthetic Terror, pp. xi-xii.
³....To some, that number may seem high. Remember, though, that it includes the entire memberships of The Trilateral Group, The Bilderberger Group, The Council on Foreign Relations, the editorial staffs of all major papers, magazines, television networks, publishing houses, etc., etc., etc. Many of these people are far more powerful than Nancy Pelosi, who, although granted certain powers by her office, speaks here—in the passage about to be quoted—as a puppet under threat from her superiors. Still, she's lying.
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