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The world is in tumult, but here in
the heart of Empire the level of creative political energy runs
flat along the bottom of the graph. As Iraq disintegrates amid
frightful slaughter, US generals propose to bring to life the
mad plan they once ascribed to Saddam Hussein, to dig a defensive
ditch round Baghdad, one of the larger cities on the planet.
In Afghanistan the Taliban are once again on the rise. Amid these
vivid implosions of the "war on terror," the US antiwar
movement is near dead.
Here in the homeland, the mightiest
names of the auto-industrial age have their backs to the wall.
Tens of thousands of men and women face grim times as Ford and
GM shutter plant after plant. Yet the pulse of organized labor
amid this devastation is feeble. From the environmental movement
there is an even fainter heartbeat, even as an actual conspiracy
-- official concealment of the toxic toll on New Yorkers from
the 9/11 attack -- finally comes to light. There's no convincing
energy plan beyond posturing about ANWR; no protest at the giveaways
of public lands.
Less than two months from the
midterm elections, the Democrats cower from confrontation with
a widely hated President. When Bush tries to annul America's
always frail commitment to the Geneva Conventions on torture,
Joe Biden complacently announces that the Democrats are happy
to sit this one out and let Republican Senators McCain, Warner
and Graham attempt to mount a counterattack. This is the way
to rally millions of antiwar voters in November? Bush's present
bounce in the polls shows the bankruptcy of Democratic strategy,
as supervised by Rahm Emanuel.
Outrage burns in many an American
breast, but there's scant outlet for it in the political arena.
A friend of mine took his family to the annual Puyallup Fair
near Tacoma, Washington. There was a CNN booth, in which a mini
"Democracy Wall", an 8-by-4-foot sheet of butcher paper,
was available for people to scrawl their sentiments in felt-tip.
Fast as the CNN staffers changed the paper, scores more hastened
forward to scribble their views, almost all of them harsh in
language toward both CNN and the President. Families photographed
each other in postures vulgarly disrespectful to the life-size
cutout of Wolf Blitzer. When an older man -- he turned out to
be the retired commander of a nuclear submarine -- rebuked the
crowd and called for loyalty to Bush, the mood turned ugly, and
for reasons of his personal safety he was advised to leave. "And
yet," said my friend, the anthropologist David Price, "try
getting these people to an antiwar rally."
It's as dismal a political
landscape as I can remember in thirty years. Yet some discover
a silver lining. They find it in the 9/11 conspiracy cult, which
I have discussed here in recent weeks. A politically sophisticated
leftist in Washington, DC, wrote to thank me for my attack, but
added, "To me the most interesting thing (in the US) is
how many people are willing to believe that Bush either masterminded
it [the 9/11 attacks] or knew in advance and let it happen. If
that number or anything close to that is true, that's a huge
base of people that are more than deeply cynical about their
elected officials. That would be the real news story that the
media is missing, and it's a big one."
"I'm not sure I see the
silver lining about cynicism re government," I answered.
"People used to say the same thing about the JFK conspiracy
buffs and disbelief in the Warren Commission. Actually, it seems
to demobilize people from useful political activity. I think
the nuttishness stems from despair and political infantilism.
There's no worthwhile energy to transfer from such kookery. It's
like saying some lunatic shouting to himself on a street corner
has the capacity to be a great orator. The nearest thing to it
all is the Flying Saucer craze. 'Open up the USAF archives!'
It's a Jungian thing."
The 9/11-ers, who've insulted
me and other radical critics for years as "gatekeepers for
the neocons", "CIA agents," and "fearful
for their jobs", are wounded when I call them nuts.* I've
had many e-mails repeating their delirious litanies about NORAD,
the collapse of the WTC buildings or the "missile"
that really struck the Pentagon. On this last matter, Chuck Spinney,
now retired after years of brilliant public service exposing
the Pentagon's budgetary outrages, wrote to me that "there
ARE pictures taken of plane hitting Pentagon -- they were taken
by the surveillance cameras at Pentagon's heliport, which was
right next to impact point. I have seen themÖboth stills
and moving pictures. I just missed seeing it personally, but
the driver of the van I just got out of in South Parking saw
it so closely that he could see the terrified faces of passengers
in windows. I knew two people who were on the plane. One was
ID'd by dental remains found in the Pentagon."
This won't faze the nuts. They're
immune to any reality check. Spinney worked for the government
... They switched the dental records ... The Boeing 757 was flown
to Nebraska for a rendez-vous with President Bush, who shot the
passengers, burned the bodies on the tarmac and gave Spinney's
friend's teeth to Dick Cheney to drop through a hole in his trousers
amid the debris in the Pentagon, the same way the paleontologists
did in the Sussex gravel pit when they faked Piltdown Man. Such
fantasists are not the foot soldiers of any movement for constructive
social change.
Richard Aldrich's book on British
intelligence, The
Hidden Hand (2002), describes how a report for the Pentagon
on declassification recommended that "interesting declassified
material" such as information about the JFK assassination
"could be released and even posted on the Internet, as a
'diversion,'" and used to "reduce the unrestrained
public appetite for 'secrets' by providing good faith distraction
material". Aldrich adds, "If investigative journalists
and contemporary historians were absorbed with the vexatious,
but rather tired, debates over the grassy knoll, they would not
be busy probing into areas where they were unwelcome."
By the same token, I'm sure
that the Bush gang, and all the conspirators of capital, are
delighted at the obsessions of the 9/11 cultists. It's a distraction
from the 1,001 real plots of capitalism that demand exposure
and political challenge.
"The tendency to occultism
is a symptom of regression in consciousness", Adorno wrote
in Minima
Moralia. "The veiled tendency of society towards disaster
lulls its victims in a false revelation, with a hallucinated
phenomenon. In vain they hope in its fragmented blatancy to look
their total doom in the eye and withstand it ... The offal of
the phenomenal world becomes, to sick consciousness, the mundus
intelligibilis."
Last Friday we ran a
temperate and polite piece by JoAnn Wypijewski about the
"9/11 was an inside job" crowd down at Ground Zero.
Unlike me, JoAnn didn't use the N(ut) word. She was duly rewarded
thus:
From: ann archy <artguerrilla@alltel.net> Sent:
Sep 23, 2006 6:43 AM
To: jwyp@earthlink.net
Subject: fuck you...
that's EXACTLY what you said
to me and approximately half the country...
so right back at you: FUCK
YOU insufferably self-righteous, faux-progressive assholes who
deny and dismiss nine one one skeptics with the condescending
wave of your foreleg... (that also means matt rothschild, who
evidently skipped all his physics classes, as well as any instruction
in logic...)
jesus what children you are:
WATCH the towers falling, and if you have the slightest recall
of high school physics, if you have the barest understanding
of strength of materials and building construction, then you
would know that the 'collapse' of ALL the wtc towers was SOMEHOW
not 'right'...
geezus, YOU ignorant morons
who ignore not only physical evidence which is IRREFUTABLE, but
the circumstantial evidence which is breathtakingly consistent
in pointing to an inside job either instigated or allowed to
happen by the bush cabal, are -evidently- purposefully hiding
from any/all indications of such... i think of you as nothing
more than propaganda victims who are too afraid to follow the
evidence to the necessary conclusions... you are useless...
fucking hypocritical chickenshits:
i DON'T have to know the complete and totally accurate count
of how many were involved, who they are, how they arranged matters,
etc, etc, etc, to KNOW that something ain't right, PERIOD...
there is AT LEAST a superficial coverup of what happened, EVEN
IF nine one one went down the way the (internally contradictory)
accounts of the administration claim it did...
go ahead, be JUST LIKE your
closed-minded conservative fiends (who odds are- have more of
a sneaking susupicion of nine one one's perfidy than you do),
who deride their opponents (what, no facts to resort to ?), snort
and roll their eyes (without ever debunking serious claims),
and generally lump the fringe of the fringe with ALL nine one
one skeptics so as to dismiss them all in one convenient lumpy
conspiratorial clusterfuck...
i say again: FUCK YOU, douchebags
of freedom...
it is so tiresome to hear the
ONLY argument that anti-conspiracy morons make: "oh, you
silly, lunatic sheeple, don't you know the gummint/leaders are
far too incompetent and slow to accomplish such a tremendous
undertaking..."
anidiotsezwha?
oh, that's fucking brilliant:
the most 'advanced' (sic) civilization, the most sophisticated
war machine, the most finely honed, cruel, secretive, lying political
organization in his story, and yet THEY can't do what osama bin
forgotten and a handful of cohorts managed to do... fucking
brilliant...
did you even GET the gist of
YOUR OWN (and others) IDIOTIC 'argument' ? ? ? don't you understand
that the plain-reading version of that 'argument' is FUCKING
NUTS on its face ? ? ?
...and that's all you morons
have to 'refute' ALL nine one one 'anomalies', etc ? ? ? geezus
h. kee-rist, you are one dumb bunny... you don't even see how
you resort to dishonest rhetoric and bullying reichwing tactics
to make the bad thoughts go away... what a joke: kneejerk 'lefties'
(*snort* weak tea, if you ask me) who resort to the same despicable
tactics as conservative droids in order to dismiss nine one one
skeptics... are you capapble of seeing the hypocrisy (not to
mention denial) ? ? ?
just stay in the kiddie pool
if you can't swim in the deep end...
don't forget your water wings,
baby-citizen...
art guerrilla aka ann archy
Note: A shorter version
of this column ran in the print edition of The Nation that went
to press last Wednesday.
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