FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Number 9, Part 8.1
Number 9, Part 8.1
(NEW SERIES—2007)
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TREASON, IGNORANCE,
PARADE OF LIES
TREASON, IGNORANCE,
PARADE OF LIES
..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
BIG MONEY NOW BEING
HARVESTED IN RETURN
FOR TRAITOROUS CRIMES
HARVESTED IN RETURN
FOR TRAITOROUS CRIMES
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SMART INVESTMENT FLOWS
TOWARD THE FASCISTS
SMART INVESTMENT FLOWS
TOWARD THE FASCISTS
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JUSTICE AND TRANSPARENCY
URGENTLY NEEDED
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"FREEDOM TOWER" A
FASCISTIC, TRAITOROUS TRAVESTY
..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
BUT JUST AND DURABLE 9/11 MEMORIAL IS
PROPOSED!!
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POOLS OF LIQUEFIED HOGSHIT
TO PROVIDE JUSTICE FOR CRIMINALS
AND FOR AIDERS, ABETTORS, COVERERS-UP!!!
JUSTICE AND TRANSPARENCY
URGENTLY NEEDED
..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
"FREEDOM TOWER" A
FASCISTIC, TRAITOROUS TRAVESTY
..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
BUT JUST AND DURABLE 9/11 MEMORIAL IS
PROPOSED!!
..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
POOLS OF LIQUEFIED HOGSHIT
TO PROVIDE JUSTICE FOR CRIMINALS
AND FOR AIDERS, ABETTORS, COVERERS-UP!!!
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................................................................................. . . [The] candidates spoke enthusiastically in favor of torture and against the rule
................................................................................of law. Rudy Giuliani endorsed waterboarding. Mitt Romney declared that he wants
................................................................................accused terrorists at Guantánamo, "where they don't get the access to lawyers
................................................................................they get when they're on our soil. . . My view is, we ought to double Guantánamo."
................................................................................His remarks were greeted with wild applause.
..........................................................................................—Paul Krugman, "Don't Blame Bush," New York Times, May 18,2007
................................................................................Here's the way it ought to be: When Rudy Giuliani says that Iran, which had nothing
................................................................................to do with 9/11, is part of a "movement" that "has already displayed more aggressive
................................................................................tendencies by coming here and killing us," he should be treated as a lunatic.
..........................................................................................—Paul Krugman, "Trust and Betrayal," New York Times, May 28,2007
................................................................................As we said there in the magazine and again on our website, we at Tikkun not
................................................................................only don't agree with their [i.e. 9/11 conspiracy theorists'] analysis, but we also
................................................................................don't think that, even if it were true, it would be a wise thing to spend time en-
................................................................................gaged in that inquiry.
..........................................................................................—Editor of Tikkun, May/June 2007, after having published David Ray Griffin's
.......................................................................................... "The American Empire and 9/11" in Tikkun magazine of March/April 2007
................................................................................Sept 11 was an attack on America, and America should care for its victims.
..........................................................................................—Editorial, The New York Times, May 26, 2007
..........Imagine my happiness around six a.m. or so today, Thursday, May 24. Like any other patriotic, red-blooded American, I leapt in joy on reading in the Times that "Insurers Agree to Pay Billions at Ground Zero." And that was only the start. "All Claims Are Resolved," declared subhead the first, followed by the best part: "Officials Say Deal Allows Work on Trade Center to Move Ahead."
..........Glory, thought I. May bells peal, streamers fly, banners unfurl. News like this is worth celebrating. What it means, after all, is that there's still big money in big crime. Very big crime.
..........Written by Charles V. Bagli, the story opened this way: "The Spitzer administration announced the settlement of all insurance claims at ground zero yesterday, ensuring that $4.55 billion will be available for rebuilding the World Trade Center site." The second paragraph pointed out that "The agreement, which the insurers described as the largest single insurance settlement ever undertaken by the industry, ended a protracted legal battle with insurers over payouts related to the terrorist attack."
..........Then the best part:
..............................New York State and Port Authority officials said yesterday that the deal removed
....................any uncertainty over how much money would be available for rebuilding and would en-
....................able them to obtain private financing for the $9 billion project.
..........Well, well. No wonder the politically ambitious Spitzer, the same Spitzer who was a boy wonder against corporate crime and malfeasance in his days as NY State Attorney General, did what he did back in October of 2004. By that time, the perjuring and criminally toothless Kean Commission report had appeared. Because the Kean report was both toothless and criminal, some 200 "Americans of Conscience" drew up a petition of their own demanding a new 9/11 investigation and delivered it one famous day to NY State Attorney General Spitzer for his action.
..........And, of course, the politically ambitious Spitzer knew perfectly well where the money was going to be and he was therefore smart enough to use the people's conscience-driven 9/11 petition as seat cushion and fart-absorber from October of 2004 to the pupil age of this present twelve o'clock at midnight—or, parting from Prince Hal, to this recent Thursday morning, May 24, 2007. Not the morning six years earlier, that late great money-maker of a morning when human beings fell to their deaths or were ground to mincemeat or better in the greatest Giuliani-Cheney-Halliburton moment in all of history. Not that morning, but this one: The morning when so huge a portion of that shrewd 9/11 investment finally matured and paid off. May 24, 2007, the day of money, yes, sweet money, that, unlike the heavy bodies thudding to the ruined streets, will not die in crushed and broken death but will pile up and up, huge and sweet and high and deep.
..........If you want to lose your lunch—breakfast, dinner, snack: you pick it—just take a look at the photo on page B6 of that 5/24/07 Times. There you are, and isn't it delicious? Is your gorge rising yet? Caption: "Announcing the deal were, from left, Albert M. Rosenblatt, a retired judge; Gov. and hypocrite-liar and abettor of murder Eliot Spitzer; Anthony E. Shorris, Port Authority executive director; and Larry A. Silverstein, criminal, billionaire, opportunist, abettor of crimes against humanity, traitor."
..........Oh, I'm sorry. How do you suppose those misquotes crept in there?
..........I look again and find that in accordance with the Times's laudable and ancient policy of printing only the news that's fit to print, the paper's photo-caption reads differently than I thought it had. I see now that it says merely "Gov. Eliot Spitzer" in reference to the governor, and nothing more than "Larry A. Silverstein, the developer," in reference to Silverstein. Of course, the Times, as usual, is lying through its teeth—or maybe not precisely through its teeth, since I'm not sure that lying by omission can actually be done through the teeth.
..........Either way, the news we need about Silverstein and Spitzer is not the news being given us. Yet again, the information of greatest significance and most enormous importance about these two vile and criminal players of money-roulette with the lives of Americans and with the life of America—this information is left out by the editors and writers of the Times, making them, too, complicit in the depravity of deep crime, a complicity even more visible than usual thanks to this particular and Mammon-giddy occasion. Those who care to, in fact, might go back to the Mammon-is-great photo and have a look at the faces on, from left to right, red-tie-guy one and red-tie-guy three.
..........Anyone, by the way, who'd like to see more Times-style-lying in action should be sure to see Kevin Barrett's clear-headed—and hilarious—analysis of the incredible, infant-level fraudulence of the famous Khalid Sheikh Mohammed "confession," a "confession" that was in all deadpan seriousness and gravity run by the degraded and traitor-driven Times as its lead news story for Thursday, March 15, 2007.
..........But enough. I suspect I can bear no more without a pause to calm my battering heart and to search for a pocket of air free of putrescent depravity and the stink of fraud—if any remains to be found—that I can draw into my lungs and thence into my ignominious, tainted, diseased, vile, dying American blood.
..........In case you don't happen to know, Robert Shetterly has not only written and illustrated what appears to be a most wonderful book with the title Americans Who Tell the Truth, but he has also written a truth-telling piece that the New York Times wouldn't touch with a thousand-foot pole, a piece called "The Moral Obligation to Lose The War," by which he means, of course, the war in Iraq.
..........Dated 05/12/07, Shetterly's piece has a brevity and elegance that could invite comparisons with Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, although you'll find no such comparisons here. Of the Iraq war, he writes what he grants to be the obvious, that
....................The immense immorality of the choice to attack Iraq, and base that choice in lies, propaganda,
....................and fear is hardly news now. But the fact that, above all else, it was a moral choice means
....................that another moral choice is possible. And only one choice would atone for the original.
..........Of the depraved villainy and the putrescent cowardice of the congressional Democrats and their "strategy," he does the same, declaring the obvious:
....................This war will not end until the funding is cut off. Anyone who would continue the funding
....................to "support the troops," should also tell you that once you make a moral mistake, keep
....................making it, and that those who pay with their blood for your mistake are grateful for the
....................support. The logic of this position would also maintain that policy is made by soldiers and
....................officers, not by the people, the Congress and the President.
.......... Murderers making specious apologies for murderers are complicit in murder. No bad act can be made a good act. No immoral act can be rendered undamaging or harmless—although it can be atoned for by a moral act morally undertaken and of a seriousness equivalent to that of the original immoral act. Shetterly:
....................None of the offered plans now before us to de-escalate the war disavow what we all
....................know to be its original goals—control of Iraq's oil and the building of large, permanent
....................US military bases in Iraq. Nor do any of these bills address the central issue of account-
....................ability, the fact that this war is a war crime, a crime against our democracy, our Con-
....................stitution, the Iraqi people, international law, and our own soldiers. Without accountability,
....................our democracy is meaningless. Without moral action, our claim to integrity and respect
....................are [sic] meaningless.
..........And there you are: "Without moral action, our claim[s] to integrity and respect are meaningless." Shetterly's case here is precisely identical to the case that, in my view, must be made in regard to 9/11 truth. A moral action—in the 9/11 case, honest exposure followed by full accountability—must be taken against the criminality, the complicity in and the aiding and abetting of treason, murder, and other high crimes that are of an exponentially even great significance than they are in and of themselves by merit of their having served as the trigger that released the even greater and near-countless crimes against humanity that followed as a consequence. In the absence of any such moral action, of any insistence upon accountability for those initial crimes and for the crimes made possible by them—clearly, pending the absence of any such moral action, any current claim "to integrity and respect" in or for "leadership" of or by the likes of Spitzer, Giuliani, or Silverstein will and must be one thing and one thing only: "meaningless."
..........Before going on with the need for accountability or "moral action," though, let's stick with the New York Times for a minute. The paper's hypocrisy, not to put too fine a point on it, is contemptible and, in the present situation, virulently dangerous.
..........Let's take plain old contemptibility first—by turning to the case of Marilee Jones. Who she? Well, she was the one at MIT who, back in April, after twenty-eight years at that school, suddenly up and quit her position as a much-valued dean of admissions. Why did she quit? Ah ha! Fake degrees!
..........And how does the New York Times respond to that? Well, it responds with all the crushing power of moral outrage, or so it might seem from this searing headline: "M.I.T.'s Admissions Dean Resigns; Ends 28-Year Lie About Degrees."
..........A lie twenty-eight years long, no less! And even worse, if worse were possible, it was a lie about degrees! We swoon, do we not, immediately upon reading of such horror, falling straight into the deep bosom of the righteous New York Times, pressing ourselves into the reassuring great mother who knows so well right from wrong, who names each for what it is, and who thereby helps keep us on the high moral path that, however good our intentions, we all need reminders of and nudges toward from time to time.
..........Shame on Marilee Jones! Shame, on top of it, not just for deceit, but for a quarter-century of it! Shame, Marilee Jones, and shame moreover on any who dare offend, abrade, or compromise the soundness and dignity of our highest institutions!
..........Disgusting, isn't it.
..........The hypocrisy is such that when it comes to a little dinky winky six-and-a-half-year lie about little teensy-weensy peccadilloes like—well, like mass murder, or treason, or breach of oath of office, or destruction of evidence, or sabotage of the Constitution of the United States, or war crimes, or breach of international law, or crimes against humanity—well, hey, shucks, fellas, not only is six years just a little twinkle of the eye but these "peccadilloes" are nothing more than the sort of things that happen when guys will be guys, nothing to any of it that they didn't learn back in frat house days, nothing that a hearty clap on the back between good buddies on the golf course, say-or a big firm shake of the investment-creature paw like the one being offered to the reptilian Silverstein by the groveling mud-snake (either that or else a man so ignorant he doesn't know he's breathing) Anthony E. Shorris, Port Authority executive director—I refer again to the photo in the Times, a photo that, in my own copy of that day's paper, is still covered with dried vomit back from when I first looked at it over breakfast.
..........Now, Marilee Jones, don't you see: You get what you deserve, by god and by country and by all that's holy and right! In matters like these, there's no melioration in "MIT Chancellor Phillip L Clay [saying that a] degree was probably not required for her entry-level job in 1979, when she was hired to recruit more women to MIT." No matter, wrong is wrong, and she still gets what she deserves, by god and by all that's right! But what about Eliot and Adolph—sorry, Eliot and Rudolph—and Larry? What punishment do they get? Well, look at that: They don't get any, but instead they get fulsome praise. Hey, fellas, great work! Hey, way to go! Onward and upward! Patriotism! Investment lifts up all of America!
.......... Lies, lies, all lies.
..........I'm sure it's clear enough by now—and I hope Shetterly will pardon me for it—that what I want to do is make an argument parallel to Shetterly's but with a different target. In a sense, I want to amplify Shetterly's argument. After all, I agree with him completely that without there being accountability for criminal actions, none of us can have, and in all likelihood can't ever have, any "claim to integrity and respect." But I don't want to duplicate Shetterly by merely concurring that one way of achieving that claim would be to "lose" the Iraq war (even though I think he's right). What I want to do instead, working in parallel with him, is to argue that we can achieve our "claim to integrity and respect" only if we can succeed in doing two things. The first thing we've got to do is "lose" not the war but "lose" our criminal leaders—that is, "lose" all of the thousands of Eliots, Adolphs, and Larrys whose slick tyrannies we now groan under. And the second thing we've got to do is "lose" not the war but "lose" the entirety of the United States of America as it's now constituted.
..........Who, after all, ever thought that America would turn fascist so thoroughly and so fast? Eliot and Adolph and Larry are certainly okay with the speed of the collapse—or, in their view, the consolidation—that's occurred since 9/11. But then they've got the right "skills" to bring such things along quickly—skills absorbed equally from drinking their mothers' milk, from rubbing up against the endowers of their chosen schools, and from sucking at the corporate trough under the ever-vigilant and knowing eyes of shallow, villainous, and tutoring masters. With the collapse of education in America, the pace of "learning" among "bright" students like these, and the quick application of that "learning," has grown ever faster, being no longer slowed or held back by any such laborious matters as the actual need to learn. And what is it that they do learn? What they do learn—and how quickly they do it! how simple it is!—are these two things: First, to corrupt; second, to conquer.
..........And there you have our "businessmen" of today. There you have our leaders, our Eliots, Adolphs, and Larrys, of today. There you have our corporate "figures" of today. There you have our "CEOs" of today. There you have our Cheneys and Halliburtonians and Wolfowitzes and Feiths and Kristols of today.
..........And there, it should come as little surprise, you have our fascism of today. It may not look like what most people think fascism ought to look like, but, as this excerpt from A Nation Gone Blind suggests, that's got nothing to do with nothing. Call it "fascism American style," if you will, but whatever its moniker, we've got it here and now, today. Fascism in the New York Times. Fascism in New York State. Fascism in the fully-controlled media. Fascism in the assembled houses of congress. Fascism in the White House—and fascism in all of the assembled arms, tentacles, organs, and agents of the White House, among all of its corporate planners, consultants, and policy makers, in all of its military extensions, and, not least, in all of the American academic institutions that it has corrupted totally, those once-hallowed institutions packed now with all their crawling little Eichmanns drinking from the Pentagon faucet and bustling about happily to help bring each and every one of us—us, not them— step by step closer to the day when most will die and—yes—the masters live.
..........Fantasy? Paranoia? Madness?
..........Don't I wish. But sadly for us all, it's not craziness but just simple, empirically-based realism, and the result also of a certain amount of reading of a sort that's available to all but done by few. There's a line in A Nation Gone Blind asserting that Americans since World War II have actually become what I call "simplified," have "become far, far more intellectually single-dimensional and far more passive than ever before." And that line is followed by this one: "The evidence of it is everywhere, while the results of it are everywhere denied."
..........And that's the way it is now with fascism, American style. We'll all be goners and dead guys together if we don't get kicking and quit the denial—at least from three years ago yesterday—and if we don't pull the damn plug on 9/11, the linchpin of it all, and nail the bastards who pulled that great crime and after them the bastards—the many bastards and bastardettes—who've committed or who've been aiders and abettors of the ugly chain of crimes that's been released by 9/11, with many more such crimes—worse ones—waiting to follow if we don't do something about it fast.
..........And so here we come to an end of what I've chosen this time to call "First Things," with the idea that next time we'll go on to "Next Things." Among them will be some of the evidence that's everywhere around us yet everywhere denied—or, since America has gone blind—that's everywhere unseen. And among the next things, too, is the great question raised by Robert Shetterly—the question of how to regain "our claim to integrity and respect" both as individuals, first, and then as a nation. That question, obviously, is enormous. But a person could also argue that it's the only question, since it means that we either find a way to resist and defeat the fascists (who themselves neither have nor create any integrity or respect) or we give up in despair, accept fascism permanently, and begin gradually dying both spiritual and literal deaths.
..........If, in Shetterly's terms, what it'll take is losing the Iraq war, the question is still the same as mine. Shetterley's question is, Precisely how do we go about losing the Iraq war? My question is, Precisely how do we go about losing our fascist "leaders," first, and then losing—ridding ourselves—of the United States as it's now constituted?
..........Answers do exist—they're the "next things." They're not easy. But they exist. And they're next.
..........I'm sure you remember, though, before we turned "back. . . to Robert Shetterly and the refreshing dose of sanity he brings," that I promised something else. I promised that we'd "take a look at just how good the happy fascist trio's [you know, Eliot, Adolph, and Larry's] work actually is in the eyes of the traitors, liars, and criminals who operate, edit, write for, and produce the New York Times."
..........So let's do that now. We may even find that it gives us a start on those really, really hard questions of mine and Shetterly's.
..........The gist? Initially this sentiment: That for many years "Ground zero was a sad place made even sadder by a lack of progress."
..........Breakfast came up in two heaves this time, one at the pitifully inadequate if not outright absurd "sad," and one at the purely ghoulish "progress." Let it go. I wiped up and read on.
..........Paragraph two was about Larry's insurance troubles—that is, Larry's trouble getting his paws on the money—while paragraph three held the kernel:
..............................This week, most of those insurers finally agreed to what may be the largest insurance
....................payout in history—$4.55 billion. The agreement means that Mr. Silverstein and the Port Authority
....................of New York and New Jersey, the two main developers of the site, can now proceed to get
....................additional financing to build the entire $9 billion complex.
..........I'll refrain from comment—for the moment—except for dropping in a brief quote, one that you might remember, just here: "Ah, leadership! foresight! integrity! honesty! Ah, America! Ah, Silverstein!"
..........With that much out of my system, I can manage, I think, to type in two more paragraphs of "Ensuring Progress at Ground Zero":
..............................The insurance agreement does not completely clear the way for the complicated recon-
....................struction work that needs to be done at ground zero. Plans for building and leasing the Freedom
....................Tower, the tallest skyscraper on the site, are still shaky. The old Deutsche Bank building, which
....................was set to be demolished three years ago to make way for one of the towers, is still there, its
....................deconstruction proving more costly and difficult by the day.
..............................The unraveling of the insurance mess, however, has provided new hope. Instead of a
....................grim silence around ground zero, the noise of rebuilding sounds the revival of Lower Manhattan.
..........The simple truth is all that one asks. The simple truth, that is, about 9/11. The particular simple truth that, one can't help but believe, lies waiting as a tonic that could, by recreating and asserting accountability, put back together a lost, broken, and betrayed nation, repair a destroyed constitution, restore human dignity, bring an end to the Arthur Koestlerean nightmare-world of state torture, and bring to a close a long, long string of flagrant, degrading, unconscionable crimes against nation, people, and humanity. That simple truth.
..........But here, now, reading the New York Times over breakfast—and spilling breakfast over the New York Times—one is in a land where simple truth of almost any kind is no longer a valid public currency. One, instead—no matter whether it looks that way or not—is in a land of Stalin, of Goebbels, of CheneyBush, of Orwell, where events are twisted, where propaganda replaces fact, where history is rewritten, or, if neither replacement nor rewriting quite works out, where history is, quite summarily, thrown down the memory hole.
..........In "Ensuring Progress at Ground Zero," the very worst example of this kind of lying-rewriting-twisting comes at the very end. All the emphasis is mine. "Sept 11 was an attack on America," wrote the Times, "and America should care for its victims."
..........Rabelais. Voltaire. Swift. Lenny Bruce. Alexander Pope. Samuel Beckett. Aristophanes. George Orwell.
..........Language. As all of us know or should know, language is a dangerous thing and a powerful one. It can be used—and commonly is so used, as by the New York Times—as an enormously effective tool for lying, deceiving, distorting, and prevaricating, as well as for disguising truth, deflecting attention from it, altering it, or rendering it patently unrecognizable.
..........These uses of language are the uses of the propagandist; the uses of those who seek to bury thought rather than to liberate it; to obscure truth rather than to express it; to manipulate and imprison minds rather than to awaken and free them.
..........As readers of A Nation Gone Blind well know, these uses of language—and of myriad non-verbal parallels to them—are also the uses that have been made of language for at least the past six decades by the mass media, and that continue every day so to be made. The significance of this simple fact can not be over stated, and in an essay that everyone should read and that I hope we'll all get to next time, Kevin Flaherty writes that "The ACS [the American Corporate State] wields the most powerful weapon of political control the world has ever seen: the mass media."
..........All of this having been said, let's turn to the subject of satire.
..........Best example? Well, back in Food for Thought 11.4.E of 2006, we actually had a contest about one of them, the story of Gulliver's bowel movements when he was in the land of the Lilliputians. It's still a "best" example of Swift's satire, and for readers who'd like a short version of it, I'll put a file here that holds only the two brief sections of that old Food for Thought that pertain to Gulliver's bowel movements in Lilliputia.
..........In Waiting for Godot, near the end of Act II, Beckett gives the famous line to Vladimir, "But habit is a great deadener."
..........And so it is, as the preacher, the fascist, the propagandist, the tyrant, the CheneyBushist, knows very well. If it's said often enough that Al Qaeda was the "thing" that "attacked America" on 9/11—if it's said often enough, then in good time, and in the understood absence of anything else (namely, the truth) being said, then that lie, its very phrasing, its very words, will become habit.
..........And habit is a great liar. When you do things—anything—by habit, you do them without thinking.
..........Virginia Woolf, one of the three greatest geniuses in the novel during the twentieth century, also knew these things well—that habit is a great deadener and that habit is a great liar. In the long first section of To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay snatches a moment alone when at last her younger children have been taken off for their supper. And what does Mrs. Ramsay do, now that she's finally alone and has the chance to do it? Well, unlike most of today's Americans, who'd most likely plug something into their ears, or turn on the television—doing either one of these things, or both of them, precisely in order not to do the thing that Mrs. Ramsay does —which is, as any know who've read the book, is think.
..........And what does Mrs. Ramsay think about? Well, she thinks about family, about children (she has eight), about the nature of the individual self, about beauty (she has it)—and then she thinks about life, about death, and about nothingness.
..........Now, while a typical made-in-America-moron is likely to be watching Jerry Springer with his eyeballs and, with his ear drums, listening to, or hearing, "I Fucked the Hound Dog and Married My Mama's Crippled Sister Blues" as performed by The Two-by-Fours and a Handful of Cum—while he's doing that, Mrs. Ramsay is thinking about being and nothingness.
..........Just as with the late Victorians who were her progenitors, Mrs. Ramsay's one-time habits of "belief" in matters having to do with conventional religion or faith in an afterlife have been not just well shaken but, in essence, made non-existent by the publication of Origins of Species in 1859, by the rise of the "new" geological sciences that showed that Earth was impermanent, and by the "higher criticism" that studied not only Biblical texts but also the lives of early Christians—including that of Jesus himself—and that showed them to be purely secular phenomena, not divine.
..........It was the very same mid-nineteenth century overturning of established habits of thought that led Matthew Arnold to conclude in "Dover Beach" (1867) that the world isn;t any longer the source of comfort and certainty it so recently seemed. Now, says Arnold, the world
..................................................Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
..................................................Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
..................................................And we are here as on a darkling plain
..................................................Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
..................................................Where ignorant armies clash by night.
..........Elitist, right? Condescending, right? Snobby, right? Classist, right?
..........Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. After all, if two hundred million made-in-America-morons don't start waking up and snapping to attention pretty swear-word soon, they're going to take the whole ship down, and, by god, that means swear-word swear-word well that they're going to take me down too. They're not going to slap themselves around, are they, or wake themselves up? And I know for swear-word sure that Amy Goodman isn't going to slap them around. The New York Times editorial board isn't going to do it—aside from the fact that they're pretty swear-word clearly made-in-America-morons themselves. Matthew Rothschild isn't going to do it, and neither are Frank Rich, Nicholas Lemann, Ariana Huffington, or, god knows, Alexander Cockburn. Nobody at The Nation is going to do it, Christopher Hitchens isn't going to do it, and nobody at The New Yorker, and nobody—for swear-word swear-word swear-word sure—at Popular Mechanics is going to do it, and body at The New Republic, or at Commonweal, or Commentary, or at (are you listening, Rabbi Lerner?) Tikkun, or at the Columbia Journalism Review—are you listening, Nicholas Lemann?—and nobody at NPR, or at Pacifica Radio, or at CBS, or NBC, or ABC, or PBS, or not even anybody at swear-word swear-word swear-word ABCKWXYX.
..........Socrates would have done it, if he were still around—would have gadded about like a horsefly and bitten 'em all on the asses, and then bitten 'em again and again and again until they finally woke up. And I know another one who would have done it, too, if she were still around, and that's Mrs. Ramsay. She didn't go easy even on herself.
..........She's sitting there, unlike any made-in-America-moron ever heard of, thinking. Thinking about life, and thinking about death, and thinking about life, and then thinking about death, and then about the nothingness that comes after you die. Back and forth, back and forth, she goes, getting more and more panicked, until—well, let's follow:
....................Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her
....................hands until she became the thing she looked at—that light, for example. And it would
....................lift up on it some little phrase or other which had been lying in her mind like that—"Child-
....................ren don't forget, children don't forget"—which she would repeat and begin adding to
....................it, It will end, it will end, she said. It will come, it will come, when suddenly she added,
....................We are in the hands of the Lord.
..........Ah, ha! Look at that! Hey, all you made-in-America-morons, look what happened to Mrs. Ramsay! It ought to make you feel a little bit better, right? Because misery always loves a little bit of company, yes? And Mrs. Ramsay did something just like you guys always do—that is, she stopped thinking; she fell back into habit; she did the equivalent of sticking a couple of those swear-word pluggy things into her ears, or of turning on the swear-word swear-word television set, for crap's sake.
..........BUT THEN SOMETHING DIFFERENT HAPPENS. Unlike the two or three hundred million made-in-America-morons who do that same sort of thing all the time and never, ever, ever, ever snap out of it, Mrs. Ramsay immediately catches herself; she immediately realizes what's she done; she immediately pulls the swear-word pluggy things out of her ears; she immediately throws a brick through the swear-word television screen; which is to say that she not only immediately re-establishes her own free agency as a thinking human being, but she also begins examining herself, examining her failure, and analyzing what kind of terrible force it could have been that had made something so awful happen to her.
..........Watch.
..............................But instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that. Who had
....................said it? Not she; she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean.
....................She looked up over her knitting and met the third stroke [of the lighthouse beam]
....................and it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as
....................she alone cold search into her mind and her heart, purifying out of existence
....................that lie, any lie.
..........It's a lie, then, that "we are in the hands of the Lord," and Mrs. Ramsey doesn't lie. She's a thinking, intelligent, self-possessed free agent—a citizen, not a consumer. She's angry with herself for falling into the empty, false, outmoded "lie" that "god" will take care of human beings. So why did she do it?
..........She doesn't find out. She doesn't tell us, either. A person could look at her in a forgiving and understandingly tolerant sort of way, concluding that one of the big things she's frightened about is the well-being of her eight children and so it's only logical that she might lapse back into a "wish"—a "lie"—that there really were a "Lord" to keep them safe.
..........But she doesn't believe that for a minute. Something else made her say it; "she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean."
..........So, what was it? Well, maybe concern for her kids. But we've said that. So here's the big thing that "trapped" her: It was the blind and unthinking force of HABIT.
..........And so back to the nauseating New York Times editorial. Where on the poor blazing surfaces of all the continents and all the seas did they get this "Freedom Tower" bullshit? I know the syndrome began long ago—and so A Nation Gone Blind says, too—whereby made-in-America-morons would accept just about anything, but has it really come to this, that they'll accept even unprecedentedly gargantuan lies in the form of the most ugly, empty, tasteless, shallow, Howard Johnsonian, Disney-fascisti vacuity as this one, the Great Lie of tacking onto on a not-yet building at Zero Ground a dopey, dumb, disgusting moniker like "The Freedom Tower"?
..........And not even New Yorkers object? What's happened to our country? There was an America once upon a time with a separate and highly gifted nation inside it that was called "New York," and in that nation no mincing, fake, corporatized, wan, pale, homogenized name like "The Freedom Tower" would ever have been tolerated for the time it takes to walk across the gangway of the Staten Island ferry, but would have been laughed out of town so fast it'd make your head spin.
..........But—alas, alas, alas—not even in New York any longer is there a population large enough of non made-in-American-morons to set up a resistance, to insist on something honest, solid, rooted, and, above all, something drawn from what's real, something true.
..........Good god, everyone in the nation should know—and I'm told that a hundred million of them do know, a figure I hope is true—that that idiotic building shouldn't even be built in the first place (more on that in a minute), but in the second place if it is built (god forbid), and if it's going to be named anything, it better not to be named "The Freedom Tower," for the sake of all that's holy, but "The Tyranny Tower," or "The Cold-Blooded Murder Tower," or "The Cowardly Sons of a Bitches Tower," or "The Neocon War and Fascism Tower," or "The Just Watch Us Crush 3,000 Human Beings and Not Give a Flying Fuck Tower," or maybe "The Watch Us Make Steel Girders Turn to Dust!! Make Millions of Cubic Yards of Concrete Disappear!!! And Grind 3,000 Human Beings into Tinier Pieces than You'll Ever Believe-and Still Not Give a Flying Fuck Tower"—but for the sake of truth, and for the sake of simple dignity, and for the sake of little babies and children, and for the sake of all that's living and all that's blessed and kind, and all that's good and true and vital and honest and dignified and worth living and all that's human in life everywhere on the big blue marble—DON'T CALL IT THE FUCKING, LYING, HYPOCRITICAL "FREEDOM TOWER"!!!!
..........One more thing—that inane, idiotic, stupendously absurd, tacky, Fasco-Disney, exponentially more stupid than any other part of this already immeasurably stupid building: Namely, that idiotic spire that's supposed to bring the already brain-dead monstrosity—in accordance with an idea worthy at best of maybe a six-year-old member of the Cheney-Jugend—to the perfect Fasco-Disney height of 1776 feet!
..........Whatever happens, at least tank that part of this already more than totally nutz plan! After all, if the stupid building somehow does end up getting built, there's only one conceivably good, honest, fair, appropriate, and just use it can possibly be put to, and that's to stick it up Dick Cheney's ass. And that spire, well, it's not going to help a bit. It's just going to stick like a narwhal's horn right up from of the top of his forehead to a height of 1776 feet. Not out of any consideration for Cheney, you can be swear-word swear-word sure, but, still, whoever you are, if nothing else than out of a last, tiny, flickering sense of honesty and appropriateness and dignity and style, take my advice and ditch the spire.
..........Since I myself have been practicing gorge-control lately, I was able to control my own reflexes, but my heart goes out to the thousands of others for whom fate can't have made it possible they should be so lucky as I.
..........The Times piece is short, written by Glenn Collins, with a headline reading "Memorial Unit At Ground Zero Lists Donors."
..........Now, just to save time, let me explain what the article is really about before we go further. It's about an event here that's parallel to a period when German families of a certain wealth got the idea, back in, say, 1936 and after, that their bread was buttered on one side rather than the other. In other words, it looked to them that their interests would better be served not by the communists or by various tatters of Weimar Germany, but by Hitler, his plan being the best one for success, stability, profits, and accumulation of growth on capital. Now, today, in the U.S., regarding 9/11 and its relationship to money, no political parties are named, but they don't need to be. A person either gives to the place or organization where he or she thinks big growth in money is going to take place—or he or she doesn't. Well, after the May 24th news about the big insurance payouts, and after talk of a project worth nine billion overall—well, same as carrion attracts vultures, big money attracts big money.
..........The Collins article, in short, is about people deciding to give money to the cause of organized liars, traitors, fascists, neocon calumniators, destroyers of the Constitution, murderers, and criminals against humanity—for the very good reason that rich people think they'll make out a lot better by associating with these superbly organized and tightly knit criminals, fascists, and Nazis rather than with—well, you or me. In other words, every donor to the "Memorial Unit at Ground Zero" is also a traitor.
..........Let's read a little bit. The story goes like this:
..............................The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation announced a partial list of its major
....................donors yesterday, showing a wide range of contributions from well-known figures and
....................companies.
..............................Leading the roster, with a $25 million gift, was the Starr Foundation, and closely
....................behind at $15 million were Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who took over as chairman of
....................the fund-raising effort last year; Deutsche Bank, the memorial's neighbor in Lower Man-
....................hattan; and David Rockefeller.
..............................Gov. Jon S. Corzine of New Jersey gave $2 million.
..............................The lowest announced donation tier, the level of $10,000 to $99,000, included
....................gifts from former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and his wife, Judith, and former Gov.
....................George E. Pataki of New York.
..........Ha! When you've got the New York Times, who needs Jon Stewart? Look at it—it's a race to see who can get his snout into the fascist trough the first and deepest! Look at those phrases! "Leading the roster" for the Starr Foundation and then "closely behind"—Go, Bloomie, Go!—for the mayor who's not about to be left far back when fascism starts getting going good.
..........And, oh, poor busted up, speeding, seat-beltless, great-model-for-all-citizens Corzine, limping along with a puny two million. Kinda makes you think of Barbaro.
..........But the best—the absolute best!—is that stingy damned tightwad, Adolph! Look at that! Chipping in with chump change—but then, of course, he may know something about this lunatic "memorial"—like he knew something about 9/11 itself—that we don't know. We are talking about horse racing, after all, and nobody who's got the straight dope is going to put big bets on a drugged nag, or a crooked jockey, or a fixed race—that is, unless it's fixed their way.
..........On a lighter note, who out there wants to put money down on whether or not there'll be elections in November of 2008? We could start a pool (more about pools in a minute). But, either way, here's a tip from me: Adolph is the guy to follow. Do what he does and keep your money close to your chest. One more thing on the subject of whether there'll be elections—or whether, instead, we'll be stuck with Dong Cheney and his trained monkey for the indeterminate future. Be absolutely sure to read this article.
..........Here are some numbers. Five million a year is only about 14,000 visitors a day. Tush! My plan will draw easily twice that number, so we'll be talking in the vicinity of 28,000 a day—in fact let's round up to 30,000, since even that's a conservative number. We'll set the entrance fee at something truly modest—five bucks, say, far less than the twenty-seven or twenty-eight dollars people are paying right now to see the "Bodies" exhibition down at the South Street Seaport. Thirty-thousand a day at five dollars a head comes out to a hundred-fifty thousand a day, and for the year something just short of $55 million—money that could go to any number of worthwhile causes—increased local growing of food, say, lowering the infant mortality rate, helping schools become schools instead of either prisons or indoctrination centers, as they now are, or even, god knows, lobbying so that corporations would actually begin paying income tax!
..........Anybody who's been through a decent introductory literature class in college—"western" literature or "world," I don't care, so long as it's really literature—may well remember the first third of Dante's great epic poem, The Divine Comedy. Most people don't get around to reading the whole thing—all three parts, The Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—but a standard chunk in sophomore college classrooms is the first and also the most alluring, readable, riveting, and fascinating of the three, Inferno, or that section of the poem describing the long, hard journey Dante makes (guided by Virgil) into hell, down through the nine major circles of same (with their numerous subdivisions, or "ditches"), and, exactly thirty-four cantos of terza rima later, back up onto the surface of the earth—at the opposite pole he started from—on the eve of Good Friday, 1300 (Dante died in 1321), looking up at the stars.
..........I don't know where, or if, you went to college, but I do hope that you were able to make the Inferno journey and that the trip happened to be offered by a decent and lively instructor. If it wasn't, or if you didn't—you know, if the instructor it wasn't decent, or if you didn't go to college or didn't read the Inferno—let me offer a tip, which is that you can do it yourself. There are plenty of translations into English to choose from, of every tone, manner, and sort, but I'd recommend the one by the late John Ciardi. It's not always the most elegant translation—but then Dante wasn't always the most elegant poet, as Ciardi will bluntly and entertainingly point out to you. Overall, though, I still think Ciardi's is the most honest, approachable, durable, unimpeachable, and above all un-fancified translation a person could hope for. There's little doubt but that, for Ciardi, the translating was a labor of love—and there's little doubt but that the book's apparatus—the headnotes, footnotes, and introduction (get the introduction by MacAllister if you possibly can)—are the clearest, best presented, and most helpful you're likely to find.
..........A famous example is that of the adulterous lovers, Paolo and Francesca—who in hell are swept around and around in a great wind, just as they were swept away by passion in life. Heresy for Dante was a sin narrowly defined—all you had to do was deny the immortality of the soul and—presto!—you were a heretic. One such was the great general and warrior, Farinata degli Uberti, a towering figure of dignity and authority whom Dante revered deeply. This reverence came about because, after a battle in which Farinata had soundly defeated the defenders of Dante's beloved home town of Florence, every one of the great military leader's general staff advocated that he burn the city to the ground. But Farinata alone resisted, and the glorious city was saved.
..........Even so, no matter how much Dante loved and admired and respected and revered him, Farinata was also a heretic—and so, since he'd denied the immortality of the soul, his punishment was to lie for all eternity in a red-hot iron tomb. A last example is that of the grafters—specially interesting because graft was the sin falsely charged against Dante himself when, on pain of death should he return, he was exiled from Florence. One of the hundreds and hundreds of wonderful small details in the poem is Virgil's warning to Dante that he'd "best not be seen / by these Fiends," meaning the demons with grappling hooks who torment the grafters—since the demons might detect the "scent" of graft, albeit it a false one, on Dante.
..........The grafters, in any case, spend eternity in a river of boiling hot pitch—tar. Whenever one might surface—so much as a single buttock appearing above the surface of the pitch—the demons tear away at the flesh with their hooks. Ciardi explains the symbolic retribution:
..............................The sticky pitch is symbolic of the sticky fingers of the Grafters. It serves
....................also to hide them from sight, as their sinful dealings on earth were hidden from men's
....................eyes. The demons, too, suggest symbolic possibilities, for they are armed with grap-
....................pling hooks and are forever ready to rend and tear all they can get their hands on.
......................................................................(The Inferno, New American Library, p.182)
..........And now, after this little introduction, we're ready to return again from the early 14th Century to the early 21st Century. With Dante as guide, we can now, at last, propose a "Ground Zero" memorial that's genuinely and truly an appropriate one.
..........And, we do dare say, despicable they were. The hideous, ugly, vile, putrescent, malignant, purulent, gloating, monstrous so-called human beings who planned, organized, arranged, and finally put into action these monstrous and despicable crimes—men with commonplace-sounding names like Frasca, Myers, Cheney, Giuliani, and Hauer, organized, planned, prepared for, and pulled off these hideous mass murders—and, worse, they did it for the sole reason of paving the way for more hideous mass murders, and for more committing of crime upon crime on human beings and on the people of the United States of America.
..........Think how disgusting, how monstrous, how despicable: To have known that the buildings were going to be brought down and not to have cleared them of people beforehand. To have known that the towers were going to be transposed from steel and concrete into nano-particles of dust—to have known that and even then not having told the people inside the buildings to get out, or not having given them time to get out before initiating the ten-second-long destruction of each building and of everything and everyone inside them—except, that is, for lots and lots of office papers that for some reason never got hot enough to burn, and ditto for Mohammed Atta's passport.
..........And the firemen and the cops. People above the impact lines were one thing—and a thing hideous enough, since even they could mostly have been saved if 1) the doors to the rooftop hadn't been locked, and 2) if the rescues had been done, by helicopter, etc., before the detonation-buttons were pushed. But, oh, no, criminals like our guys, criminals like Dick and Fred and George and Adolph and David and Larry—with guys like these, the buildings come down with all the firemen, and with all the cops, and with everyone else who's still below the impact lines, guys like John P. O'Neill—all of them still inside.
..........Does anyone understand? Does anyone understand how a person like Adolph can actually be campaigning for President? Does anyone understand why every fireman in the entire country isn't in open rebellion, insisting on avenging their murdered comrades, insisting upon accountability, truth, and justice? Does anyone understand why every cop in the entire country isn't in open rebellion, insisting on avenging their murdered comrades, insisting upon accountability, truth, and justice? Does anyone understand why every plain person like all those plain people who were murdered, who were turned into fingernail-slivers and bone-fragments and dust-particles—why every plain person isn't in open rebellion, insisting on avenging their murdered fellow citizens, insisting upon accountability, truth, and justice?
..........Are all of us nothing any better than made-in America-morons?
..........Just have a look at the way Adolph behaves in this video clip, and then just think for a minute or two about how on god's green earth it can conceivably be that he's not only out and walking around I but that he's actually running for the swear-word, swear-word, swear-word presidency of the United States!
..........Well, I'll tell you what I'm voting for. I'm voting for a 9/11 memorial that would satisfy Dante and would seem just and fair and true to his high old fourteenth-century sense of morality, integrity, truthfulness, dignity, accountability, and trust—even if it doesn't even register on the dead brainpan of two or three hundred million made-in-America morons.
..........My spirit be with the old poets.
..........I'll do it alone if I have to.
..........But I'd sure like some help. There've got to be some non made-in-America-morons left around somewhere.
..........We rent a bulldozer, go on down to the site, and we set about dozing out a good-to-generous pit, a little smaller than Olympic size, maybe, say, a hundred-twenty by a hundred feet. Fifteen feet deep would do all right, though I'd aim for twenty if it were up to me. And then-this would be simple; we could truck it in at first, and then later pipe it up in a continuous stream from some of the big commercial hog farms down south—we'd pump liquefied hog shit into the pit until it was full, up to just about half a foot from the top.
..........You see where this is going, I'm sure. The punishment is a symbolic representation of the sin, just as in Dante, making it unquestionably just, fair, and appropriate.
..........As they showed no mercy to those whom they slew, harmed, and destroyed, so now no mercy will be shown to them; as they denied others the properties, rights, and dignities of justice, so the properties, rights, and dignities of justice will be denied to them; as they deprived others of life, so they—albeit it not in ten seconds—will be deprived of life; and, above all, as their sins against other human beings were the most vile and repugnant known to humankind, so they will be immersed in the most vile and repugnant of substances known to humankind.
..........For as long as they live, these prisoners—prisoners taken, tried, and convicted by citizens, officers, and figures of the law, justly—will live isolated in individual Guantanamo-style cells, held without right of appeal to any agency of humanity whatsoever, held further without right of appeal to any legal agency whatsoever. Twice each day, these criminals—some you'll know readily by name, Dick and Fred and George, for example, Adolph and David and Ralph and Larry, then also the other George, and then the other-other George, and of course Bill and Condi, Paul, David and Melvin and Richard and Douglas, while many others are quite certain to be unfamiliar—will be brought en masse from their cells and, naked, be required to stand side by side along pit's edge. At a given signal, all will dive into the liquefied hogshit. Any who prove recalcitrant or who hesitate to jump will be encouraged by the pushing of hands, the poking of night sticks, or—if need be— by application of taser.
..........The regulations will be such that all prisoners will swim laps in the hogshit until reaching a point of exhaustion such that they sink from sight, whereupon one of the twenty hydraulic arms stationed around the pit will at once be extended to the point where the prisoner disappeared, a claw-like device with net attached will be submerged and then rapidly brought back to the surface with the body of the exhausted prisoner, who will be lifted to the side of the pool and deposited there. If necessary, CPR will be administered before return to his or her cell. Additionally, should a prisoner be discovered to have been faking exhaustion—malingering—in order to be plucked the sooner out of the hogshit, that prisoner will be summarily thrown back into the hogshit and given three permanent demerit marks, designating him or her an uncooperative prisoner. (See below, under additional point number two.) It should be added that the requirement of disappearing beneath the surface of the hogshit before being plucked to safety from it (the plucking out is of course a clear suggestion of the mercy of the new, re-established state) is in keeping symbolically with the effort made by the 9/11 criminals to keep their participation in the crimes hidden from view. As the guilty criminals hoped to remain unseen then, they now must become unseen beneath the surface of the pool of hogshit.
..........Three additional points require mentioning before we close. One of these has to do with the safety and well-being of the estimated ten- to eleven-million annual visitors to the hogshit pits (there will actually be, as you'll be shown in a moment, two pits). Simple, safe, inexpensive bleachers will be constructed along one length of each pit for onlookers' seating, and each visiting onlooker, not only because of the tremendous stench but also because of the very real possibility of airborne irritants, pollutants, or diseases, will be required at all times when within less than thirty yards of the pits to wear "Adolph" brand respirators with certified and government inspected HEPA filters. No exceptions or waivers will be allowed. All respirators will be disinfected between uses.
..........Second, a specific aspect of the regulations governing the prisoners should be mentioned. Obviously, a great temptation is offered by the lip of the pool or pit, and prisoners might often be inclined to swim along the very edge in hope of stealing temporary rest or support by curling their fingers over the lip and supporting their weight in that manner. Whenever guards (a great percentage of them retired firemen and policemen) observe this behavior, regulations require, first, that the prisoner be shoved back into the hogshit, and, second, that said prisoner, before being returned to his or her cell, be required to sink into and be retrieved from the pit not just once, but twice. This regulation, strictly observed, carries the quaint designation of "waterboarding."
..........Finally, as is universally known, the crimes of 9/11 fall into two general categories, the first being commission of the original crimes, the second being the aiding, abetting, or the covering up of those first and heinous crimes. For this reason, the memorial site will actually consist not only of a single pit filled with liquefied hogshit, but of two pits. The second will be much, much longer and wider than the first, but at the same time much more shallow, having a uniform depth of exactly two feet. The reasons for these differences are, first, that for every one actual committer of the 9/11 crimes, there exist as many as three or even four hundred abettors, aiders, or coverers up—and therefore a very great deal more physical area will be needed for them. The shallowness of the second pit, too, and obviously enough, symbolizes the ethical, emotional, and psychological shallowness of the aiders, abettors, and coverers up. An overwhelmingly great percentage of these sinners, after all, will be either journalists or corporate executives, both of these categories of sinners being irredeemably corrupt and ethically vile creatures whose shallowness is well known and broadly self-evident.
..........The punishment of these sinners will differ as well from that of the actual committers. That all of these sinners are cowards goes without saying, and this is the reason why nakedness is required of all of them all the time. When cowards do evil, they hide behind their cowardice. Here, then, they are to be deprived of anything to hide behind. The aiders, abettors, and coverers-up will be required for a period of one full hour each day (in round-the-clock shifts, there being such multitudes of the shallower sinners) to wade through the shallower pit of liquefied hogshit and splash and spray and throw as much of it and as energetically as they possibly can at one another. As in their post- 9/11 careers they regularly and routinely and cynically and criminally threw vileness, malignancy, fraud, falsehood, and deceit at their readers and at all normal citizens—who believed they could trust the journalists and other coverers up—so, now, they must be required to throw the equivalent at one another and to have it thrown in turn at themselves.
..........Finally, at the end of each hour of wading and throwing, each sinner, before being permitted out of the liquefied hogshit pool, must lie down under the surface of it, disappearing from sight for a clocked period of no less than sixty seconds. As they hid the truth from others, now they must suffer by themselves being hidden.
..........The names of many of these sinners will be extremely familiar, as in the cases of many of the journalists and many of the candidates for political office. In the shallow liquefied hogshit pool will be Frank and Matthew and Alexander, Amy and Ariana and Maureen, Nicholas and Michael and Thomas and David, and of course Jacob and Herbert and even Paul, and there'll be the other Nicholas, and Gene, and Ted, and countless, countless more. As for the corporate executives and corporate policy makers, and as for the myriad editors and publishers, let their names be memorialized by hollowness, vacuity, and emptiness, just as their entire careers were memorialized by the same. Of other hollow names, however, great numbers will be familiar, like Sam, Jim, and Adolph, Chris, Hillary, Mike and the other Mike, Mitt, John, and George, Dennis, Bill, Barack, and the other John, and then, of course, Tommy, Fred, and Joe. In addition-though some will have been mentioned already-all four-hundred-thirty-five members of the House of Representatives will be seen in the shallow pool, where attempts to recognize them will constitute a great deal of spectator interest, ditto for all one-hundred members, aside from those already mentioned, of the United States Senate.
..........And so we end. I ask only that you consider the wisdom, justice, appropriateness, leniency, cost-effectiveness, and potential for social improvement through financial growth of my plan for the 9/11 memorial at the location so inanely, erroneously, and opportunistically named "Ground Zero" by the very same criminals who attacked it.
..........I ask you, that is, to choose between my plan and the absurd and criminal plan of Elliot, Adolph, and Larry. Let me recommend, as you work toward making your decision, the following dozen books, every one of which pertains directly to the decision you're being asked to make. After you've read these books, I'm absolutely certain that you'll see the excellent and true superiority of my own memorial plan over Elliot's, Adolph's, and Larry's, or over any others similar to theirs, and that you will both willingly and happily join me in the implementation of it, and, before that, in the festivities of the ground-breaking ceremonies, time and date soon to be announced.
..........
..................................................................................................................................—Eric Larsen
..................................................................................................................................—June 4, 2007
THE BOOKS:
1)
Ahmed, Nafeez Mosaddeq. The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked September 11, 2001. (2002)
2)
Ahmed, Nafeez Mosaddeq. The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism. (2005)
3)
Barrett, Kevin. Truth Jihad: My Epic Struggle Against the 9/11 Big Lie. (2007)
4)
Barrett, Kevin, John Cobb, and Sandra Lubarsky, 9/11 and American Empire: Christians, Jews, and Muslims Speak Out (2007)
5)
Chossudovsky, Michel. America's "War On Terrorism." (2005)
6)
Griffin, David Ray, and Peter Dale Scott. 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out. (2006)
7)
Griffin, David Ray. Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action. ( 2006)
8)
Griffin, David Ray. The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions. (2005)
9)
Griffin, David Ray. The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11. (2004)
10)
Hicks, Sander. The Big Wedding. (2005)
11)
Larsen, Eric. A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit. (2006)
12)
Marrs, Jim. The Terror Conspiracy: Deception, 9/11, and the Loss of Liberty. (2006)
13)
Morgan, Rowland, and Ian Henshall. 9/11 Revealed. (2005)
14)
Ruppert, Michael C. Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. (2004)
15)
Tarpley, Webster Griffin. 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA. (2006)
16)
Zwicker, Barry. Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-Up of 9/11. (2006)
>READ, PRINT, OR DOWNLOAD IN PDF FORMAT>>
>EMAIL ERIC LARSEN>>
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................................................................................of law. Rudy Giuliani endorsed waterboarding. Mitt Romney declared that he wants
................................................................................accused terrorists at Guantánamo, "where they don't get the access to lawyers
................................................................................they get when they're on our soil. . . My view is, we ought to double Guantánamo."
................................................................................His remarks were greeted with wild applause.
..........................................................................................—Paul Krugman, "Don't Blame Bush," New York Times, May 18,2007
................................................................................Here's the way it ought to be: When Rudy Giuliani says that Iran, which had nothing
................................................................................to do with 9/11, is part of a "movement" that "has already displayed more aggressive
................................................................................tendencies by coming here and killing us," he should be treated as a lunatic.
..........................................................................................—Paul Krugman, "Trust and Betrayal," New York Times, May 28,2007
................................................................................As we said there in the magazine and again on our website, we at Tikkun not
................................................................................only don't agree with their [i.e. 9/11 conspiracy theorists'] analysis, but we also
................................................................................don't think that, even if it were true, it would be a wise thing to spend time en-
................................................................................gaged in that inquiry.
..........................................................................................—Editor of Tikkun, May/June 2007, after having published David Ray Griffin's
.......................................................................................... "The American Empire and 9/11" in Tikkun magazine of March/April 2007
................................................................................Sept 11 was an attack on America, and America should care for its victims.
..........................................................................................—Editorial, The New York Times, May 26, 2007
..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
THE TRAITORS IN OUR HOUSE
(COMPLETED)
FIRST THINGS
(COMPLETED)
FIRST THINGS
..........Imagine my happiness around six a.m. or so today, Thursday, May 24. Like any other patriotic, red-blooded American, I leapt in joy on reading in the Times that "Insurers Agree to Pay Billions at Ground Zero." And that was only the start. "All Claims Are Resolved," declared subhead the first, followed by the best part: "Officials Say Deal Allows Work on Trade Center to Move Ahead."
..........Glory, thought I. May bells peal, streamers fly, banners unfurl. News like this is worth celebrating. What it means, after all, is that there's still big money in big crime. Very big crime.
..........Written by Charles V. Bagli, the story opened this way: "The Spitzer administration announced the settlement of all insurance claims at ground zero yesterday, ensuring that $4.55 billion will be available for rebuilding the World Trade Center site." The second paragraph pointed out that "The agreement, which the insurers described as the largest single insurance settlement ever undertaken by the industry, ended a protracted legal battle with insurers over payouts related to the terrorist attack."
..........Then the best part:
..............................New York State and Port Authority officials said yesterday that the deal removed
....................any uncertainty over how much money would be available for rebuilding and would en-
....................able them to obtain private financing for the $9 billion project.
..........Well, well. No wonder the politically ambitious Spitzer, the same Spitzer who was a boy wonder against corporate crime and malfeasance in his days as NY State Attorney General, did what he did back in October of 2004. By that time, the perjuring and criminally toothless Kean Commission report had appeared. Because the Kean report was both toothless and criminal, some 200 "Americans of Conscience" drew up a petition of their own demanding a new 9/11 investigation and delivered it one famous day to NY State Attorney General Spitzer for his action.
..........And, of course, the politically ambitious Spitzer knew perfectly well where the money was going to be and he was therefore smart enough to use the people's conscience-driven 9/11 petition as seat cushion and fart-absorber from October of 2004 to the pupil age of this present twelve o'clock at midnight—or, parting from Prince Hal, to this recent Thursday morning, May 24, 2007. Not the morning six years earlier, that late great money-maker of a morning when human beings fell to their deaths or were ground to mincemeat or better in the greatest Giuliani-Cheney-Halliburton moment in all of history. Not that morning, but this one: The morning when so huge a portion of that shrewd 9/11 investment finally matured and paid off. May 24, 2007, the day of money, yes, sweet money, that, unlike the heavy bodies thudding to the ruined streets, will not die in crushed and broken death but will pile up and up, huge and sweet and high and deep.
·
..........Ah, leadership! foresight! integrity! honesty! Ah, America! Ah, Silverstein!..........If you want to lose your lunch—breakfast, dinner, snack: you pick it—just take a look at the photo on page B6 of that 5/24/07 Times. There you are, and isn't it delicious? Is your gorge rising yet? Caption: "Announcing the deal were, from left, Albert M. Rosenblatt, a retired judge; Gov. and hypocrite-liar and abettor of murder Eliot Spitzer; Anthony E. Shorris, Port Authority executive director; and Larry A. Silverstein, criminal, billionaire, opportunist, abettor of crimes against humanity, traitor."
..........Oh, I'm sorry. How do you suppose those misquotes crept in there?
..........I look again and find that in accordance with the Times's laudable and ancient policy of printing only the news that's fit to print, the paper's photo-caption reads differently than I thought it had. I see now that it says merely "Gov. Eliot Spitzer" in reference to the governor, and nothing more than "Larry A. Silverstein, the developer," in reference to Silverstein. Of course, the Times, as usual, is lying through its teeth—or maybe not precisely through its teeth, since I'm not sure that lying by omission can actually be done through the teeth.
..........Either way, the news we need about Silverstein and Spitzer is not the news being given us. Yet again, the information of greatest significance and most enormous importance about these two vile and criminal players of money-roulette with the lives of Americans and with the life of America—this information is left out by the editors and writers of the Times, making them, too, complicit in the depravity of deep crime, a complicity even more visible than usual thanks to this particular and Mammon-giddy occasion. Those who care to, in fact, might go back to the Mammon-is-great photo and have a look at the faces on, from left to right, red-tie-guy one and red-tie-guy three.
..........Anyone, by the way, who'd like to see more Times-style-lying in action should be sure to see Kevin Barrett's clear-headed—and hilarious—analysis of the incredible, infant-level fraudulence of the famous Khalid Sheikh Mohammed "confession," a "confession" that was in all deadpan seriousness and gravity run by the degraded and traitor-driven Times as its lead news story for Thursday, March 15, 2007.
..........But enough. I suspect I can bear no more without a pause to calm my battering heart and to search for a pocket of air free of putrescent depravity and the stink of fraud—if any remains to be found—that I can draw into my lungs and thence into my ignominious, tainted, diseased, vile, dying American blood.
·
.........."My ghost be with the old philosophers!" declares Dr. Faustus in act I, scene iii, line 59 of Christopher Marlowe's great play. By "ghost" he means what we today might call "spirit" or "intellectual dedication." And therefore I, echoing Faustus, declare now, "My spirit be with Robert Shetterly."..........In case you don't happen to know, Robert Shetterly has not only written and illustrated what appears to be a most wonderful book with the title Americans Who Tell the Truth, but he has also written a truth-telling piece that the New York Times wouldn't touch with a thousand-foot pole, a piece called "The Moral Obligation to Lose The War," by which he means, of course, the war in Iraq.
..........Dated 05/12/07, Shetterly's piece has a brevity and elegance that could invite comparisons with Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, although you'll find no such comparisons here. Of the Iraq war, he writes what he grants to be the obvious, that
....................The immense immorality of the choice to attack Iraq, and base that choice in lies, propaganda,
....................and fear is hardly news now. But the fact that, above all else, it was a moral choice means
....................that another moral choice is possible. And only one choice would atone for the original.
..........Of the depraved villainy and the putrescent cowardice of the congressional Democrats and their "strategy," he does the same, declaring the obvious:
....................This war will not end until the funding is cut off. Anyone who would continue the funding
....................to "support the troops," should also tell you that once you make a moral mistake, keep
....................making it, and that those who pay with their blood for your mistake are grateful for the
....................support. The logic of this position would also maintain that policy is made by soldiers and
....................officers, not by the people, the Congress and the President.
.......... Murderers making specious apologies for murderers are complicit in murder. No bad act can be made a good act. No immoral act can be rendered undamaging or harmless—although it can be atoned for by a moral act morally undertaken and of a seriousness equivalent to that of the original immoral act. Shetterly:
....................None of the offered plans now before us to de-escalate the war disavow what we all
....................know to be its original goals—control of Iraq's oil and the building of large, permanent
....................US military bases in Iraq. Nor do any of these bills address the central issue of account-
....................ability, the fact that this war is a war crime, a crime against our democracy, our Con-
....................stitution, the Iraqi people, international law, and our own soldiers. Without accountability,
....................our democracy is meaningless. Without moral action, our claim to integrity and respect
....................are [sic] meaningless.
..........And there you are: "Without moral action, our claim[s] to integrity and respect are meaningless." Shetterly's case here is precisely identical to the case that, in my view, must be made in regard to 9/11 truth. A moral action—in the 9/11 case, honest exposure followed by full accountability—must be taken against the criminality, the complicity in and the aiding and abetting of treason, murder, and other high crimes that are of an exponentially even great significance than they are in and of themselves by merit of their having served as the trigger that released the even greater and near-countless crimes against humanity that followed as a consequence. In the absence of any such moral action, of any insistence upon accountability for those initial crimes and for the crimes made possible by them—clearly, pending the absence of any such moral action, any current claim "to integrity and respect" in or for "leadership" of or by the likes of Spitzer, Giuliani, or Silverstein will and must be one thing and one thing only: "meaningless."
..........Before going on with the need for accountability or "moral action," though, let's stick with the New York Times for a minute. The paper's hypocrisy, not to put too fine a point on it, is contemptible and, in the present situation, virulently dangerous.
..........Let's take plain old contemptibility first—by turning to the case of Marilee Jones. Who she? Well, she was the one at MIT who, back in April, after twenty-eight years at that school, suddenly up and quit her position as a much-valued dean of admissions. Why did she quit? Ah ha! Fake degrees!
..........And how does the New York Times respond to that? Well, it responds with all the crushing power of moral outrage, or so it might seem from this searing headline: "M.I.T.'s Admissions Dean Resigns; Ends 28-Year Lie About Degrees."
..........A lie twenty-eight years long, no less! And even worse, if worse were possible, it was a lie about degrees! We swoon, do we not, immediately upon reading of such horror, falling straight into the deep bosom of the righteous New York Times, pressing ourselves into the reassuring great mother who knows so well right from wrong, who names each for what it is, and who thereby helps keep us on the high moral path that, however good our intentions, we all need reminders of and nudges toward from time to time.
..........Shame on Marilee Jones! Shame, on top of it, not just for deceit, but for a quarter-century of it! Shame, Marilee Jones, and shame moreover on any who dare offend, abrade, or compromise the soundness and dignity of our highest institutions!
..........Disgusting, isn't it.
..........The hypocrisy is such that when it comes to a little dinky winky six-and-a-half-year lie about little teensy-weensy peccadilloes like—well, like mass murder, or treason, or breach of oath of office, or destruction of evidence, or sabotage of the Constitution of the United States, or war crimes, or breach of international law, or crimes against humanity—well, hey, shucks, fellas, not only is six years just a little twinkle of the eye but these "peccadilloes" are nothing more than the sort of things that happen when guys will be guys, nothing to any of it that they didn't learn back in frat house days, nothing that a hearty clap on the back between good buddies on the golf course, say-or a big firm shake of the investment-creature paw like the one being offered to the reptilian Silverstein by the groveling mud-snake (either that or else a man so ignorant he doesn't know he's breathing) Anthony E. Shorris, Port Authority executive director—I refer again to the photo in the Times, a photo that, in my own copy of that day's paper, is still covered with dried vomit back from when I first looked at it over breakfast.
..........Now, Marilee Jones, don't you see: You get what you deserve, by god and by country and by all that's holy and right! In matters like these, there's no melioration in "MIT Chancellor Phillip L Clay [saying that a] degree was probably not required for her entry-level job in 1979, when she was hired to recruit more women to MIT." No matter, wrong is wrong, and she still gets what she deserves, by god and by all that's right! But what about Eliot and Adolph—sorry, Eliot and Rudolph—and Larry? What punishment do they get? Well, look at that: They don't get any, but instead they get fulsome praise. Hey, fellas, great work! Hey, way to go! Onward and upward! Patriotism! Investment lifts up all of America!
.......... Lies, lies, all lies.
·
..........Before we take a look at just how good the happy fascist trio's work actually is in the eyes of the traitors, liars, and criminals who operate, edit, write for, and produce the New York Times, however, let's turn back for a moment to Robert Shetterly and the refreshing dose of sanity he brings. You'll remember that Shetterly is the author and artist-illustrator of Americans Who Tell the Truth. In addition, of course, he wrote "The Moral Obligation to Lose the War," saying there that "Without accountability, our democracy is meaningless. Without moral action, our claim[s] to integrity and respect are meaningless."..........I'm sure it's clear enough by now—and I hope Shetterly will pardon me for it—that what I want to do is make an argument parallel to Shetterly's but with a different target. In a sense, I want to amplify Shetterly's argument. After all, I agree with him completely that without there being accountability for criminal actions, none of us can have, and in all likelihood can't ever have, any "claim to integrity and respect." But I don't want to duplicate Shetterly by merely concurring that one way of achieving that claim would be to "lose" the Iraq war (even though I think he's right). What I want to do instead, working in parallel with him, is to argue that we can achieve our "claim to integrity and respect" only if we can succeed in doing two things. The first thing we've got to do is "lose" not the war but "lose" our criminal leaders—that is, "lose" all of the thousands of Eliots, Adolphs, and Larrys whose slick tyrannies we now groan under. And the second thing we've got to do is "lose" not the war but "lose" the entirety of the United States of America as it's now constituted.
..........Who, after all, ever thought that America would turn fascist so thoroughly and so fast? Eliot and Adolph and Larry are certainly okay with the speed of the collapse—or, in their view, the consolidation—that's occurred since 9/11. But then they've got the right "skills" to bring such things along quickly—skills absorbed equally from drinking their mothers' milk, from rubbing up against the endowers of their chosen schools, and from sucking at the corporate trough under the ever-vigilant and knowing eyes of shallow, villainous, and tutoring masters. With the collapse of education in America, the pace of "learning" among "bright" students like these, and the quick application of that "learning," has grown ever faster, being no longer slowed or held back by any such laborious matters as the actual need to learn. And what is it that they do learn? What they do learn—and how quickly they do it! how simple it is!—are these two things: First, to corrupt; second, to conquer.
..........And there you have our "businessmen" of today. There you have our leaders, our Eliots, Adolphs, and Larrys, of today. There you have our corporate "figures" of today. There you have our "CEOs" of today. There you have our Cheneys and Halliburtonians and Wolfowitzes and Feiths and Kristols of today.
..........And there, it should come as little surprise, you have our fascism of today. It may not look like what most people think fascism ought to look like, but, as this excerpt from A Nation Gone Blind suggests, that's got nothing to do with nothing. Call it "fascism American style," if you will, but whatever its moniker, we've got it here and now, today. Fascism in the New York Times. Fascism in New York State. Fascism in the fully-controlled media. Fascism in the assembled houses of congress. Fascism in the White House—and fascism in all of the assembled arms, tentacles, organs, and agents of the White House, among all of its corporate planners, consultants, and policy makers, in all of its military extensions, and, not least, in all of the American academic institutions that it has corrupted totally, those once-hallowed institutions packed now with all their crawling little Eichmanns drinking from the Pentagon faucet and bustling about happily to help bring each and every one of us—us, not them— step by step closer to the day when most will die and—yes—the masters live.
..........Fantasy? Paranoia? Madness?
..........Don't I wish. But sadly for us all, it's not craziness but just simple, empirically-based realism, and the result also of a certain amount of reading of a sort that's available to all but done by few. There's a line in A Nation Gone Blind asserting that Americans since World War II have actually become what I call "simplified," have "become far, far more intellectually single-dimensional and far more passive than ever before." And that line is followed by this one: "The evidence of it is everywhere, while the results of it are everywhere denied."
..........And that's the way it is now with fascism, American style. We'll all be goners and dead guys together if we don't get kicking and quit the denial—at least from three years ago yesterday—and if we don't pull the damn plug on 9/11, the linchpin of it all, and nail the bastards who pulled that great crime and after them the bastards—the many bastards and bastardettes—who've committed or who've been aiders and abettors of the ugly chain of crimes that's been released by 9/11, with many more such crimes—worse ones—waiting to follow if we don't do something about it fast.
..........And so here we come to an end of what I've chosen this time to call "First Things," with the idea that next time we'll go on to "Next Things." Among them will be some of the evidence that's everywhere around us yet everywhere denied—or, since America has gone blind—that's everywhere unseen. And among the next things, too, is the great question raised by Robert Shetterly—the question of how to regain "our claim to integrity and respect" both as individuals, first, and then as a nation. That question, obviously, is enormous. But a person could also argue that it's the only question, since it means that we either find a way to resist and defeat the fascists (who themselves neither have nor create any integrity or respect) or we give up in despair, accept fascism permanently, and begin gradually dying both spiritual and literal deaths.
..........If, in Shetterly's terms, what it'll take is losing the Iraq war, the question is still the same as mine. Shetterley's question is, Precisely how do we go about losing the Iraq war? My question is, Precisely how do we go about losing our fascist "leaders," first, and then losing—ridding ourselves—of the United States as it's now constituted?
..........Answers do exist—they're the "next things." They're not easy. But they exist. And they're next.
..........I'm sure you remember, though, before we turned "back. . . to Robert Shetterly and the refreshing dose of sanity he brings," that I promised something else. I promised that we'd "take a look at just how good the happy fascist trio's [you know, Eliot, Adolph, and Larry's] work actually is in the eyes of the traitors, liars, and criminals who operate, edit, write for, and produce the New York Times."
..........So let's do that now. We may even find that it gives us a start on those really, really hard questions of mine and Shetterly's.
·
..........Exactly two days after I lost my breakfast on the upper right hand corner of page B6 of the New York Times, the guardians of that paper made the same thing happen again when they ran as May 26's lead editorial, "Ensuring Progress at Ground Zero."..........The gist? Initially this sentiment: That for many years "Ground zero was a sad place made even sadder by a lack of progress."
..........Breakfast came up in two heaves this time, one at the pitifully inadequate if not outright absurd "sad," and one at the purely ghoulish "progress." Let it go. I wiped up and read on.
..........Paragraph two was about Larry's insurance troubles—that is, Larry's trouble getting his paws on the money—while paragraph three held the kernel:
..............................This week, most of those insurers finally agreed to what may be the largest insurance
....................payout in history—$4.55 billion. The agreement means that Mr. Silverstein and the Port Authority
....................of New York and New Jersey, the two main developers of the site, can now proceed to get
....................additional financing to build the entire $9 billion complex.
..........I'll refrain from comment—for the moment—except for dropping in a brief quote, one that you might remember, just here: "Ah, leadership! foresight! integrity! honesty! Ah, America! Ah, Silverstein!"
..........With that much out of my system, I can manage, I think, to type in two more paragraphs of "Ensuring Progress at Ground Zero":
..............................The insurance agreement does not completely clear the way for the complicated recon-
....................struction work that needs to be done at ground zero. Plans for building and leasing the Freedom
....................Tower, the tallest skyscraper on the site, are still shaky. The old Deutsche Bank building, which
....................was set to be demolished three years ago to make way for one of the towers, is still there, its
....................deconstruction proving more costly and difficult by the day.
..............................The unraveling of the insurance mess, however, has provided new hope. Instead of a
....................grim silence around ground zero, the noise of rebuilding sounds the revival of Lower Manhattan.
..........The simple truth is all that one asks. The simple truth, that is, about 9/11. The particular simple truth that, one can't help but believe, lies waiting as a tonic that could, by recreating and asserting accountability, put back together a lost, broken, and betrayed nation, repair a destroyed constitution, restore human dignity, bring an end to the Arthur Koestlerean nightmare-world of state torture, and bring to a close a long, long string of flagrant, degrading, unconscionable crimes against nation, people, and humanity. That simple truth.
..........But here, now, reading the New York Times over breakfast—and spilling breakfast over the New York Times—one is in a land where simple truth of almost any kind is no longer a valid public currency. One, instead—no matter whether it looks that way or not—is in a land of Stalin, of Goebbels, of CheneyBush, of Orwell, where events are twisted, where propaganda replaces fact, where history is rewritten, or, if neither replacement nor rewriting quite works out, where history is, quite summarily, thrown down the memory hole.
..........In "Ensuring Progress at Ground Zero," the very worst example of this kind of lying-rewriting-twisting comes at the very end. All the emphasis is mine. "Sept 11 was an attack on America," wrote the Times, "and America should care for its victims."
·
..........Even after a deep breath in hope of gathering some kind of readiness, poise, and focus for attack, a person still scarcely knows where to begin. The propaganda that runs throughout every fiber of this criminal, brazen, appalling editorial, the lies it consists of-vile, repugnant, unforgivable, disgusting. And then on top of all that there's also the completely, utterly, absolutely unbelievable bowing down of the editorial "voice" in its totally unresisting acceptance of the sheerest, cheapest, tawdriest, crudest, most craven, most malignant, most shameless, most unutterably vile destruction—destruction by language—of truth, dignity, and integrity all in one fell swoop: I refer, in case you're in any doubt, to the fact that the editorial writer is actually able to allow the Disney-fascist words "Freedom Tower" to pass his or her lips, and is actually able to do so, it would appear, without the spontaneous and powerful attack of revulsion and self-disgust that would cause any normal human being to vomit so profusely as to flood immediately the offices, hallways, and stairwells of the entire New York Times building, possibly even profusely enough that the clots and acids and fluids would burst out the doors onto the sidewalks, and then the street, flooding 8th Avenue as it makes its long decline downtown, with the result that traffic, skidding first, would slow, stop, and remain for some time at a halt...........Rabelais. Voltaire. Swift. Lenny Bruce. Alexander Pope. Samuel Beckett. Aristophanes. George Orwell.
..........Language. As all of us know or should know, language is a dangerous thing and a powerful one. It can be used—and commonly is so used, as by the New York Times—as an enormously effective tool for lying, deceiving, distorting, and prevaricating, as well as for disguising truth, deflecting attention from it, altering it, or rendering it patently unrecognizable.
..........These uses of language are the uses of the propagandist; the uses of those who seek to bury thought rather than to liberate it; to obscure truth rather than to express it; to manipulate and imprison minds rather than to awaken and free them.
..........As readers of A Nation Gone Blind well know, these uses of language—and of myriad non-verbal parallels to them—are also the uses that have been made of language for at least the past six decades by the mass media, and that continue every day so to be made. The significance of this simple fact can not be over stated, and in an essay that everyone should read and that I hope we'll all get to next time, Kevin Flaherty writes that "The ACS [the American Corporate State] wields the most powerful weapon of political control the world has ever seen: the mass media."
..........All of this having been said, let's turn to the subject of satire.
·
..........Anyone who understands, say, Jonathan Swift's writing, knows that it reveals—"uncovers"—the truth about things by stripping away the customary assumptions that normally exist like veils between the things themselves and observers of them, or thinkers about them...........Best example? Well, back in Food for Thought 11.4.E of 2006, we actually had a contest about one of them, the story of Gulliver's bowel movements when he was in the land of the Lilliputians. It's still a "best" example of Swift's satire, and for readers who'd like a short version of it, I'll put a file here that holds only the two brief sections of that old Food for Thought that pertain to Gulliver's bowel movements in Lilliputia.
..........In Waiting for Godot, near the end of Act II, Beckett gives the famous line to Vladimir, "But habit is a great deadener."
..........And so it is, as the preacher, the fascist, the propagandist, the tyrant, the CheneyBushist, knows very well. If it's said often enough that Al Qaeda was the "thing" that "attacked America" on 9/11—if it's said often enough, then in good time, and in the understood absence of anything else (namely, the truth) being said, then that lie, its very phrasing, its very words, will become habit.
..........And habit is a great liar. When you do things—anything—by habit, you do them without thinking.
..........Virginia Woolf, one of the three greatest geniuses in the novel during the twentieth century, also knew these things well—that habit is a great deadener and that habit is a great liar. In the long first section of To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay snatches a moment alone when at last her younger children have been taken off for their supper. And what does Mrs. Ramsay do, now that she's finally alone and has the chance to do it? Well, unlike most of today's Americans, who'd most likely plug something into their ears, or turn on the television—doing either one of these things, or both of them, precisely in order not to do the thing that Mrs. Ramsay does —which is, as any know who've read the book, is think.
..........And what does Mrs. Ramsay think about? Well, she thinks about family, about children (she has eight), about the nature of the individual self, about beauty (she has it)—and then she thinks about life, about death, and about nothingness.
..........Now, while a typical made-in-America-moron is likely to be watching Jerry Springer with his eyeballs and, with his ear drums, listening to, or hearing, "I Fucked the Hound Dog and Married My Mama's Crippled Sister Blues" as performed by The Two-by-Fours and a Handful of Cum—while he's doing that, Mrs. Ramsay is thinking about being and nothingness.
..........Just as with the late Victorians who were her progenitors, Mrs. Ramsay's one-time habits of "belief" in matters having to do with conventional religion or faith in an afterlife have been not just well shaken but, in essence, made non-existent by the publication of Origins of Species in 1859, by the rise of the "new" geological sciences that showed that Earth was impermanent, and by the "higher criticism" that studied not only Biblical texts but also the lives of early Christians—including that of Jesus himself—and that showed them to be purely secular phenomena, not divine.
..........It was the very same mid-nineteenth century overturning of established habits of thought that led Matthew Arnold to conclude in "Dover Beach" (1867) that the world isn;t any longer the source of comfort and certainty it so recently seemed. Now, says Arnold, the world
..................................................Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
..................................................Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
..................................................And we are here as on a darkling plain
..................................................Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
..................................................Where ignorant armies clash by night.
·
..........That's also our world Arnold is talking about, the same one we've got right now, here, today—though Jerry Falwell might not have agreed with that, and a trillion American born-agains might not agree with it, and ten-trillion made-in-America-morons might not agree with it. But none of that makes any difference. It's still the world we've got right now, here, today, no matter what they "think."..........Elitist, right? Condescending, right? Snobby, right? Classist, right?
..........Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. After all, if two hundred million made-in-America-morons don't start waking up and snapping to attention pretty swear-word soon, they're going to take the whole ship down, and, by god, that means swear-word swear-word well that they're going to take me down too. They're not going to slap themselves around, are they, or wake themselves up? And I know for swear-word sure that Amy Goodman isn't going to slap them around. The New York Times editorial board isn't going to do it—aside from the fact that they're pretty swear-word clearly made-in-America-morons themselves. Matthew Rothschild isn't going to do it, and neither are Frank Rich, Nicholas Lemann, Ariana Huffington, or, god knows, Alexander Cockburn. Nobody at The Nation is going to do it, Christopher Hitchens isn't going to do it, and nobody at The New Yorker, and nobody—for swear-word swear-word swear-word sure—at Popular Mechanics is going to do it, and body at The New Republic, or at Commonweal, or Commentary, or at (are you listening, Rabbi Lerner?) Tikkun, or at the Columbia Journalism Review—are you listening, Nicholas Lemann?—and nobody at NPR, or at Pacifica Radio, or at CBS, or NBC, or ABC, or PBS, or not even anybody at swear-word swear-word swear-word ABCKWXYX.
..........Socrates would have done it, if he were still around—would have gadded about like a horsefly and bitten 'em all on the asses, and then bitten 'em again and again and again until they finally woke up. And I know another one who would have done it, too, if she were still around, and that's Mrs. Ramsay. She didn't go easy even on herself.
..........She's sitting there, unlike any made-in-America-moron ever heard of, thinking. Thinking about life, and thinking about death, and thinking about life, and then thinking about death, and then about the nothingness that comes after you die. Back and forth, back and forth, she goes, getting more and more panicked, until—well, let's follow:
....................Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her
....................hands until she became the thing she looked at—that light, for example. And it would
....................lift up on it some little phrase or other which had been lying in her mind like that—"Child-
....................ren don't forget, children don't forget"—which she would repeat and begin adding to
....................it, It will end, it will end, she said. It will come, it will come, when suddenly she added,
....................We are in the hands of the Lord.
..........Ah, ha! Look at that! Hey, all you made-in-America-morons, look what happened to Mrs. Ramsay! It ought to make you feel a little bit better, right? Because misery always loves a little bit of company, yes? And Mrs. Ramsay did something just like you guys always do—that is, she stopped thinking; she fell back into habit; she did the equivalent of sticking a couple of those swear-word pluggy things into her ears, or of turning on the swear-word swear-word television set, for crap's sake.
..........BUT THEN SOMETHING DIFFERENT HAPPENS. Unlike the two or three hundred million made-in-America-morons who do that same sort of thing all the time and never, ever, ever, ever snap out of it, Mrs. Ramsay immediately catches herself; she immediately realizes what's she done; she immediately pulls the swear-word pluggy things out of her ears; she immediately throws a brick through the swear-word television screen; which is to say that she not only immediately re-establishes her own free agency as a thinking human being, but she also begins examining herself, examining her failure, and analyzing what kind of terrible force it could have been that had made something so awful happen to her.
..........Watch.
..............................But instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that. Who had
....................said it? Not she; she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean.
....................She looked up over her knitting and met the third stroke [of the lighthouse beam]
....................and it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as
....................she alone cold search into her mind and her heart, purifying out of existence
....................that lie, any lie.
..........It's a lie, then, that "we are in the hands of the Lord," and Mrs. Ramsey doesn't lie. She's a thinking, intelligent, self-possessed free agent—a citizen, not a consumer. She's angry with herself for falling into the empty, false, outmoded "lie" that "god" will take care of human beings. So why did she do it?
..........She doesn't find out. She doesn't tell us, either. A person could look at her in a forgiving and understandingly tolerant sort of way, concluding that one of the big things she's frightened about is the well-being of her eight children and so it's only logical that she might lapse back into a "wish"—a "lie"—that there really were a "Lord" to keep them safe.
..........But she doesn't believe that for a minute. Something else made her say it; "she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean."
..........So, what was it? Well, maybe concern for her kids. But we've said that. So here's the big thing that "trapped" her: It was the blind and unthinking force of HABIT.
·
..........Mrs. Ramsay beat that force, which is a whole peck and half more than two or three hundred million made-in-America-morons are able to do—for whom habit is in their very blood, is the very stuff of their being—along with passivity, weakness, shortness of attention span, poor to nonexistent ability to delay gratification, unwillingness—or inability—to engage with any idea above the third-grade level, all of these being the necessary and long-cultivated traits and elements of consumerism...........And so back to the nauseating New York Times editorial. Where on the poor blazing surfaces of all the continents and all the seas did they get this "Freedom Tower" bullshit? I know the syndrome began long ago—and so A Nation Gone Blind says, too—whereby made-in-America-morons would accept just about anything, but has it really come to this, that they'll accept even unprecedentedly gargantuan lies in the form of the most ugly, empty, tasteless, shallow, Howard Johnsonian, Disney-fascisti vacuity as this one, the Great Lie of tacking onto on a not-yet building at Zero Ground a dopey, dumb, disgusting moniker like "The Freedom Tower"?
..........And not even New Yorkers object? What's happened to our country? There was an America once upon a time with a separate and highly gifted nation inside it that was called "New York," and in that nation no mincing, fake, corporatized, wan, pale, homogenized name like "The Freedom Tower" would ever have been tolerated for the time it takes to walk across the gangway of the Staten Island ferry, but would have been laughed out of town so fast it'd make your head spin.
..........But—alas, alas, alas—not even in New York any longer is there a population large enough of non made-in-American-morons to set up a resistance, to insist on something honest, solid, rooted, and, above all, something drawn from what's real, something true.
..........Good god, everyone in the nation should know—and I'm told that a hundred million of them do know, a figure I hope is true—that that idiotic building shouldn't even be built in the first place (more on that in a minute), but in the second place if it is built (god forbid), and if it's going to be named anything, it better not to be named "The Freedom Tower," for the sake of all that's holy, but "The Tyranny Tower," or "The Cold-Blooded Murder Tower," or "The Cowardly Sons of a Bitches Tower," or "The Neocon War and Fascism Tower," or "The Just Watch Us Crush 3,000 Human Beings and Not Give a Flying Fuck Tower," or maybe "The Watch Us Make Steel Girders Turn to Dust!! Make Millions of Cubic Yards of Concrete Disappear!!! And Grind 3,000 Human Beings into Tinier Pieces than You'll Ever Believe-and Still Not Give a Flying Fuck Tower"—but for the sake of truth, and for the sake of simple dignity, and for the sake of little babies and children, and for the sake of all that's living and all that's blessed and kind, and all that's good and true and vital and honest and dignified and worth living and all that's human in life everywhere on the big blue marble—DON'T CALL IT THE FUCKING, LYING, HYPOCRITICAL "FREEDOM TOWER"!!!!
..........One more thing—that inane, idiotic, stupendously absurd, tacky, Fasco-Disney, exponentially more stupid than any other part of this already immeasurably stupid building: Namely, that idiotic spire that's supposed to bring the already brain-dead monstrosity—in accordance with an idea worthy at best of maybe a six-year-old member of the Cheney-Jugend—to the perfect Fasco-Disney height of 1776 feet!
..........Whatever happens, at least tank that part of this already more than totally nutz plan! After all, if the stupid building somehow does end up getting built, there's only one conceivably good, honest, fair, appropriate, and just use it can possibly be put to, and that's to stick it up Dick Cheney's ass. And that spire, well, it's not going to help a bit. It's just going to stick like a narwhal's horn right up from of the top of his forehead to a height of 1776 feet. Not out of any consideration for Cheney, you can be swear-word swear-word sure, but, still, whoever you are, if nothing else than out of a last, tiny, flickering sense of honesty and appropriateness and dignity and style, take my advice and ditch the spire.
·
..........Well, it's now Saturday, the second of June, and I've been working here for nine days—not to mention that it was also nine days ago when I first threw up my breakfast over page B6. So diabolically and so well trained are the—how did it go?—"the traitors, liars, and criminals who operate, edit, write for, and produce the New York Times"—and so perfect is their sense of timing that just now, just this morning, right on the very dot of conclusion-time for this particular "Food For Thought," they popped in another news item—on page B2 this time—that's geared to bring up people's breakfasts pretty much all across the city...........Since I myself have been practicing gorge-control lately, I was able to control my own reflexes, but my heart goes out to the thousands of others for whom fate can't have made it possible they should be so lucky as I.
..........The Times piece is short, written by Glenn Collins, with a headline reading "Memorial Unit At Ground Zero Lists Donors."
..........Now, just to save time, let me explain what the article is really about before we go further. It's about an event here that's parallel to a period when German families of a certain wealth got the idea, back in, say, 1936 and after, that their bread was buttered on one side rather than the other. In other words, it looked to them that their interests would better be served not by the communists or by various tatters of Weimar Germany, but by Hitler, his plan being the best one for success, stability, profits, and accumulation of growth on capital. Now, today, in the U.S., regarding 9/11 and its relationship to money, no political parties are named, but they don't need to be. A person either gives to the place or organization where he or she thinks big growth in money is going to take place—or he or she doesn't. Well, after the May 24th news about the big insurance payouts, and after talk of a project worth nine billion overall—well, same as carrion attracts vultures, big money attracts big money.
..........The Collins article, in short, is about people deciding to give money to the cause of organized liars, traitors, fascists, neocon calumniators, destroyers of the Constitution, murderers, and criminals against humanity—for the very good reason that rich people think they'll make out a lot better by associating with these superbly organized and tightly knit criminals, fascists, and Nazis rather than with—well, you or me. In other words, every donor to the "Memorial Unit at Ground Zero" is also a traitor.
..........Let's read a little bit. The story goes like this:
..............................The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation announced a partial list of its major
....................donors yesterday, showing a wide range of contributions from well-known figures and
....................companies.
..............................Leading the roster, with a $25 million gift, was the Starr Foundation, and closely
....................behind at $15 million were Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who took over as chairman of
....................the fund-raising effort last year; Deutsche Bank, the memorial's neighbor in Lower Man-
....................hattan; and David Rockefeller.
..............................Gov. Jon S. Corzine of New Jersey gave $2 million.
..............................The lowest announced donation tier, the level of $10,000 to $99,000, included
....................gifts from former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and his wife, Judith, and former Gov.
....................George E. Pataki of New York.
..........Ha! When you've got the New York Times, who needs Jon Stewart? Look at it—it's a race to see who can get his snout into the fascist trough the first and deepest! Look at those phrases! "Leading the roster" for the Starr Foundation and then "closely behind"—Go, Bloomie, Go!—for the mayor who's not about to be left far back when fascism starts getting going good.
..........And, oh, poor busted up, speeding, seat-beltless, great-model-for-all-citizens Corzine, limping along with a puny two million. Kinda makes you think of Barbaro.
..........But the best—the absolute best!—is that stingy damned tightwad, Adolph! Look at that! Chipping in with chump change—but then, of course, he may know something about this lunatic "memorial"—like he knew something about 9/11 itself—that we don't know. We are talking about horse racing, after all, and nobody who's got the straight dope is going to put big bets on a drugged nag, or a crooked jockey, or a fixed race—that is, unless it's fixed their way.
..........On a lighter note, who out there wants to put money down on whether or not there'll be elections in November of 2008? We could start a pool (more about pools in a minute). But, either way, here's a tip from me: Adolph is the guy to follow. Do what he does and keep your money close to your chest. One more thing on the subject of whether there'll be elections—or whether, instead, we'll be stuck with Dong Cheney and his trained monkey for the indeterminate future. Be absolutely sure to read this article.
·
..........Now, since we're about to close, it's time to get down to serious business. The Glenn Collins news piece in the Times says that "Five million visitors a year are expected" to come visit the Zero Ground memorial. Now, the memorial itself, not even counting the really big-bucks "Fascist Holiday Tower" with its skull-piercing unicorn horn, will run to $600 million. Now, I think we should conserve, and I've got a way to save the entire nine billion dollars (by tanking the tower), and another way to save the six hundred million for the "memorial." My own plan might cost—well, I don't know, maybe a million dollars to get it built and then up and running. But here's the thing: after that, it'll bring in far more than a mere five million visitors annually and will earn astronomical profits...........Here are some numbers. Five million a year is only about 14,000 visitors a day. Tush! My plan will draw easily twice that number, so we'll be talking in the vicinity of 28,000 a day—in fact let's round up to 30,000, since even that's a conservative number. We'll set the entrance fee at something truly modest—five bucks, say, far less than the twenty-seven or twenty-eight dollars people are paying right now to see the "Bodies" exhibition down at the South Street Seaport. Thirty-thousand a day at five dollars a head comes out to a hundred-fifty thousand a day, and for the year something just short of $55 million—money that could go to any number of worthwhile causes—increased local growing of food, say, lowering the infant mortality rate, helping schools become schools instead of either prisons or indoctrination centers, as they now are, or even, god knows, lobbying so that corporations would actually begin paying income tax!
..........Anybody who's been through a decent introductory literature class in college—"western" literature or "world," I don't care, so long as it's really literature—may well remember the first third of Dante's great epic poem, The Divine Comedy. Most people don't get around to reading the whole thing—all three parts, The Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—but a standard chunk in sophomore college classrooms is the first and also the most alluring, readable, riveting, and fascinating of the three, Inferno, or that section of the poem describing the long, hard journey Dante makes (guided by Virgil) into hell, down through the nine major circles of same (with their numerous subdivisions, or "ditches"), and, exactly thirty-four cantos of terza rima later, back up onto the surface of the earth—at the opposite pole he started from—on the eve of Good Friday, 1300 (Dante died in 1321), looking up at the stars.
..........I don't know where, or if, you went to college, but I do hope that you were able to make the Inferno journey and that the trip happened to be offered by a decent and lively instructor. If it wasn't, or if you didn't—you know, if the instructor it wasn't decent, or if you didn't go to college or didn't read the Inferno—let me offer a tip, which is that you can do it yourself. There are plenty of translations into English to choose from, of every tone, manner, and sort, but I'd recommend the one by the late John Ciardi. It's not always the most elegant translation—but then Dante wasn't always the most elegant poet, as Ciardi will bluntly and entertainingly point out to you. Overall, though, I still think Ciardi's is the most honest, approachable, durable, unimpeachable, and above all un-fancified translation a person could hope for. There's little doubt but that, for Ciardi, the translating was a labor of love—and there's little doubt but that the book's apparatus—the headnotes, footnotes, and introduction (get the introduction by MacAllister if you possibly can)—are the clearest, best presented, and most helpful you're likely to find.
·
..........Now. To business. Once you've read the Inferno, or even part of it, you'll know that one of Dante's poetic and religious ideas is that each sinner in hell, or each category of sinner, should necessarily be punished in a way appropriate to the nature of his or her sin—in what Ciardi calls Dante's concept of "symbolic retribution."..........A famous example is that of the adulterous lovers, Paolo and Francesca—who in hell are swept around and around in a great wind, just as they were swept away by passion in life. Heresy for Dante was a sin narrowly defined—all you had to do was deny the immortality of the soul and—presto!—you were a heretic. One such was the great general and warrior, Farinata degli Uberti, a towering figure of dignity and authority whom Dante revered deeply. This reverence came about because, after a battle in which Farinata had soundly defeated the defenders of Dante's beloved home town of Florence, every one of the great military leader's general staff advocated that he burn the city to the ground. But Farinata alone resisted, and the glorious city was saved.
..........Even so, no matter how much Dante loved and admired and respected and revered him, Farinata was also a heretic—and so, since he'd denied the immortality of the soul, his punishment was to lie for all eternity in a red-hot iron tomb. A last example is that of the grafters—specially interesting because graft was the sin falsely charged against Dante himself when, on pain of death should he return, he was exiled from Florence. One of the hundreds and hundreds of wonderful small details in the poem is Virgil's warning to Dante that he'd "best not be seen / by these Fiends," meaning the demons with grappling hooks who torment the grafters—since the demons might detect the "scent" of graft, albeit it a false one, on Dante.
..........The grafters, in any case, spend eternity in a river of boiling hot pitch—tar. Whenever one might surface—so much as a single buttock appearing above the surface of the pitch—the demons tear away at the flesh with their hooks. Ciardi explains the symbolic retribution:
..............................The sticky pitch is symbolic of the sticky fingers of the Grafters. It serves
....................also to hide them from sight, as their sinful dealings on earth were hidden from men's
....................eyes. The demons, too, suggest symbolic possibilities, for they are armed with grap-
....................pling hooks and are forever ready to rend and tear all they can get their hands on.
......................................................................(The Inferno, New American Library, p.182)
..........And now, after this little introduction, we're ready to return again from the early 14th Century to the early 21st Century. With Dante as guide, we can now, at last, propose a "Ground Zero" memorial that's genuinely and truly an appropriate one.
·
..........It's very simple. On 9/11, our leaders brought down on human beings the most grotesque and morally repugnant forces, no matter whether the initial impacts on the twin towers were airplanes or something else entirely, as remarkable research now increasingly suggests may be a real possibility. The key matter, though, is the moral ugliness and utterly repugnant inhumanity of what was done, not to mention the purely reptilian cold-bloodedness revealed and proven in countless ways by the long and complex preparations for these despicable crimes...........And, we do dare say, despicable they were. The hideous, ugly, vile, putrescent, malignant, purulent, gloating, monstrous so-called human beings who planned, organized, arranged, and finally put into action these monstrous and despicable crimes—men with commonplace-sounding names like Frasca, Myers, Cheney, Giuliani, and Hauer, organized, planned, prepared for, and pulled off these hideous mass murders—and, worse, they did it for the sole reason of paving the way for more hideous mass murders, and for more committing of crime upon crime on human beings and on the people of the United States of America.
..........Think how disgusting, how monstrous, how despicable: To have known that the buildings were going to be brought down and not to have cleared them of people beforehand. To have known that the towers were going to be transposed from steel and concrete into nano-particles of dust—to have known that and even then not having told the people inside the buildings to get out, or not having given them time to get out before initiating the ten-second-long destruction of each building and of everything and everyone inside them—except, that is, for lots and lots of office papers that for some reason never got hot enough to burn, and ditto for Mohammed Atta's passport.
..........And the firemen and the cops. People above the impact lines were one thing—and a thing hideous enough, since even they could mostly have been saved if 1) the doors to the rooftop hadn't been locked, and 2) if the rescues had been done, by helicopter, etc., before the detonation-buttons were pushed. But, oh, no, criminals like our guys, criminals like Dick and Fred and George and Adolph and David and Larry—with guys like these, the buildings come down with all the firemen, and with all the cops, and with everyone else who's still below the impact lines, guys like John P. O'Neill—all of them still inside.
..........Does anyone understand? Does anyone understand how a person like Adolph can actually be campaigning for President? Does anyone understand why every fireman in the entire country isn't in open rebellion, insisting on avenging their murdered comrades, insisting upon accountability, truth, and justice? Does anyone understand why every cop in the entire country isn't in open rebellion, insisting on avenging their murdered comrades, insisting upon accountability, truth, and justice? Does anyone understand why every plain person like all those plain people who were murdered, who were turned into fingernail-slivers and bone-fragments and dust-particles—why every plain person isn't in open rebellion, insisting on avenging their murdered fellow citizens, insisting upon accountability, truth, and justice?
..........Are all of us nothing any better than made-in America-morons?
..........Just have a look at the way Adolph behaves in this video clip, and then just think for a minute or two about how on god's green earth it can conceivably be that he's not only out and walking around I but that he's actually running for the swear-word, swear-word, swear-word presidency of the United States!
..........Well, I'll tell you what I'm voting for. I'm voting for a 9/11 memorial that would satisfy Dante and would seem just and fair and true to his high old fourteenth-century sense of morality, integrity, truthfulness, dignity, accountability, and trust—even if it doesn't even register on the dead brainpan of two or three hundred million made-in-America morons.
..........My spirit be with the old poets.
..........I'll do it alone if I have to.
..........But I'd sure like some help. There've got to be some non made-in-America-morons left around somewhere.
..........We rent a bulldozer, go on down to the site, and we set about dozing out a good-to-generous pit, a little smaller than Olympic size, maybe, say, a hundred-twenty by a hundred feet. Fifteen feet deep would do all right, though I'd aim for twenty if it were up to me. And then-this would be simple; we could truck it in at first, and then later pipe it up in a continuous stream from some of the big commercial hog farms down south—we'd pump liquefied hog shit into the pit until it was full, up to just about half a foot from the top.
..........You see where this is going, I'm sure. The punishment is a symbolic representation of the sin, just as in Dante, making it unquestionably just, fair, and appropriate.
..........As they showed no mercy to those whom they slew, harmed, and destroyed, so now no mercy will be shown to them; as they denied others the properties, rights, and dignities of justice, so the properties, rights, and dignities of justice will be denied to them; as they deprived others of life, so they—albeit it not in ten seconds—will be deprived of life; and, above all, as their sins against other human beings were the most vile and repugnant known to humankind, so they will be immersed in the most vile and repugnant of substances known to humankind.
..........For as long as they live, these prisoners—prisoners taken, tried, and convicted by citizens, officers, and figures of the law, justly—will live isolated in individual Guantanamo-style cells, held without right of appeal to any agency of humanity whatsoever, held further without right of appeal to any legal agency whatsoever. Twice each day, these criminals—some you'll know readily by name, Dick and Fred and George, for example, Adolph and David and Ralph and Larry, then also the other George, and then the other-other George, and of course Bill and Condi, Paul, David and Melvin and Richard and Douglas, while many others are quite certain to be unfamiliar—will be brought en masse from their cells and, naked, be required to stand side by side along pit's edge. At a given signal, all will dive into the liquefied hogshit. Any who prove recalcitrant or who hesitate to jump will be encouraged by the pushing of hands, the poking of night sticks, or—if need be— by application of taser.
..........The regulations will be such that all prisoners will swim laps in the hogshit until reaching a point of exhaustion such that they sink from sight, whereupon one of the twenty hydraulic arms stationed around the pit will at once be extended to the point where the prisoner disappeared, a claw-like device with net attached will be submerged and then rapidly brought back to the surface with the body of the exhausted prisoner, who will be lifted to the side of the pool and deposited there. If necessary, CPR will be administered before return to his or her cell. Additionally, should a prisoner be discovered to have been faking exhaustion—malingering—in order to be plucked the sooner out of the hogshit, that prisoner will be summarily thrown back into the hogshit and given three permanent demerit marks, designating him or her an uncooperative prisoner. (See below, under additional point number two.) It should be added that the requirement of disappearing beneath the surface of the hogshit before being plucked to safety from it (the plucking out is of course a clear suggestion of the mercy of the new, re-established state) is in keeping symbolically with the effort made by the 9/11 criminals to keep their participation in the crimes hidden from view. As the guilty criminals hoped to remain unseen then, they now must become unseen beneath the surface of the pool of hogshit.
..........Three additional points require mentioning before we close. One of these has to do with the safety and well-being of the estimated ten- to eleven-million annual visitors to the hogshit pits (there will actually be, as you'll be shown in a moment, two pits). Simple, safe, inexpensive bleachers will be constructed along one length of each pit for onlookers' seating, and each visiting onlooker, not only because of the tremendous stench but also because of the very real possibility of airborne irritants, pollutants, or diseases, will be required at all times when within less than thirty yards of the pits to wear "Adolph" brand respirators with certified and government inspected HEPA filters. No exceptions or waivers will be allowed. All respirators will be disinfected between uses.
..........Second, a specific aspect of the regulations governing the prisoners should be mentioned. Obviously, a great temptation is offered by the lip of the pool or pit, and prisoners might often be inclined to swim along the very edge in hope of stealing temporary rest or support by curling their fingers over the lip and supporting their weight in that manner. Whenever guards (a great percentage of them retired firemen and policemen) observe this behavior, regulations require, first, that the prisoner be shoved back into the hogshit, and, second, that said prisoner, before being returned to his or her cell, be required to sink into and be retrieved from the pit not just once, but twice. This regulation, strictly observed, carries the quaint designation of "waterboarding."
..........Finally, as is universally known, the crimes of 9/11 fall into two general categories, the first being commission of the original crimes, the second being the aiding, abetting, or the covering up of those first and heinous crimes. For this reason, the memorial site will actually consist not only of a single pit filled with liquefied hogshit, but of two pits. The second will be much, much longer and wider than the first, but at the same time much more shallow, having a uniform depth of exactly two feet. The reasons for these differences are, first, that for every one actual committer of the 9/11 crimes, there exist as many as three or even four hundred abettors, aiders, or coverers up—and therefore a very great deal more physical area will be needed for them. The shallowness of the second pit, too, and obviously enough, symbolizes the ethical, emotional, and psychological shallowness of the aiders, abettors, and coverers up. An overwhelmingly great percentage of these sinners, after all, will be either journalists or corporate executives, both of these categories of sinners being irredeemably corrupt and ethically vile creatures whose shallowness is well known and broadly self-evident.
..........The punishment of these sinners will differ as well from that of the actual committers. That all of these sinners are cowards goes without saying, and this is the reason why nakedness is required of all of them all the time. When cowards do evil, they hide behind their cowardice. Here, then, they are to be deprived of anything to hide behind. The aiders, abettors, and coverers-up will be required for a period of one full hour each day (in round-the-clock shifts, there being such multitudes of the shallower sinners) to wade through the shallower pit of liquefied hogshit and splash and spray and throw as much of it and as energetically as they possibly can at one another. As in their post- 9/11 careers they regularly and routinely and cynically and criminally threw vileness, malignancy, fraud, falsehood, and deceit at their readers and at all normal citizens—who believed they could trust the journalists and other coverers up—so, now, they must be required to throw the equivalent at one another and to have it thrown in turn at themselves.
..........Finally, at the end of each hour of wading and throwing, each sinner, before being permitted out of the liquefied hogshit pool, must lie down under the surface of it, disappearing from sight for a clocked period of no less than sixty seconds. As they hid the truth from others, now they must suffer by themselves being hidden.
..........The names of many of these sinners will be extremely familiar, as in the cases of many of the journalists and many of the candidates for political office. In the shallow liquefied hogshit pool will be Frank and Matthew and Alexander, Amy and Ariana and Maureen, Nicholas and Michael and Thomas and David, and of course Jacob and Herbert and even Paul, and there'll be the other Nicholas, and Gene, and Ted, and countless, countless more. As for the corporate executives and corporate policy makers, and as for the myriad editors and publishers, let their names be memorialized by hollowness, vacuity, and emptiness, just as their entire careers were memorialized by the same. Of other hollow names, however, great numbers will be familiar, like Sam, Jim, and Adolph, Chris, Hillary, Mike and the other Mike, Mitt, John, and George, Dennis, Bill, Barack, and the other John, and then, of course, Tommy, Fred, and Joe. In addition-though some will have been mentioned already-all four-hundred-thirty-five members of the House of Representatives will be seen in the shallow pool, where attempts to recognize them will constitute a great deal of spectator interest, ditto for all one-hundred members, aside from those already mentioned, of the United States Senate.
..........And so we end. I ask only that you consider the wisdom, justice, appropriateness, leniency, cost-effectiveness, and potential for social improvement through financial growth of my plan for the 9/11 memorial at the location so inanely, erroneously, and opportunistically named "Ground Zero" by the very same criminals who attacked it.
..........I ask you, that is, to choose between my plan and the absurd and criminal plan of Elliot, Adolph, and Larry. Let me recommend, as you work toward making your decision, the following dozen books, every one of which pertains directly to the decision you're being asked to make. After you've read these books, I'm absolutely certain that you'll see the excellent and true superiority of my own memorial plan over Elliot's, Adolph's, and Larry's, or over any others similar to theirs, and that you will both willingly and happily join me in the implementation of it, and, before that, in the festivities of the ground-breaking ceremonies, time and date soon to be announced.
..........
..................................................................................................................................—Eric Larsen
..................................................................................................................................—June 4, 2007
THE BOOKS:
1)
Ahmed, Nafeez Mosaddeq. The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked September 11, 2001. (2002)
2)
Ahmed, Nafeez Mosaddeq. The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism. (2005)
3)
Barrett, Kevin. Truth Jihad: My Epic Struggle Against the 9/11 Big Lie. (2007)
4)
Barrett, Kevin, John Cobb, and Sandra Lubarsky, 9/11 and American Empire: Christians, Jews, and Muslims Speak Out (2007)
5)
Chossudovsky, Michel. America's "War On Terrorism." (2005)
6)
Griffin, David Ray, and Peter Dale Scott. 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out. (2006)
7)
Griffin, David Ray. Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action. ( 2006)
8)
Griffin, David Ray. The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions. (2005)
9)
Griffin, David Ray. The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11. (2004)
10)
Hicks, Sander. The Big Wedding. (2005)
11)
Larsen, Eric. A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit. (2006)
12)
Marrs, Jim. The Terror Conspiracy: Deception, 9/11, and the Loss of Liberty. (2006)
13)
Morgan, Rowland, and Ian Henshall. 9/11 Revealed. (2005)
14)
Ruppert, Michael C. Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. (2004)
15)
Tarpley, Webster Griffin. 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA. (2006)
16)
Zwicker, Barry. Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-Up of 9/11. (2006)
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