I’ve tried my best
to sit out each year’s 9/11 Defeat Celebration. The editorial cartoons have
been predictably maudlin. I’ve seen a cartoon of a camera with tear in its
lens. Also one of St. Peter saluting a soldier on his way in through the Pearly
Gates; plus similar church/state death-cult mashups.
Since we no longer
have Bin Laden to Three-Minutes-Hate anymore, it seems that the ritual annual
scapegoat is now the 9/11 Truther. Every major media outlet, on or off line,
must run at least one patronizing article explaining that treason and
conspiracies don’t happen, even from an Administration provably guilty of both.
(Note Plame and Enron.) We are told to
believe the 9/11 Building Pancake-Collapse Theory, just as we were told to
believe the JFK Magic Bullet Theory, even though both defy the laws of physics.
And of course it is only polite to ignore the Bushian history of malign neglect
before the attack, and crass exploitation afterwards.
It seems that you
can assassinate a popular President, in broad daylight, with his head snapping
towards his alleged lone shooter, in defiance of the law of conservation of
momentum; and you can explain away this flaw in the narrative with a blatantly
unphysical theory; and you can get away with it! And forty years later, tall
office buildings full of workers and firefighters can fall at free-fall
acceleration into their footprints; a feat achievable by controlled implosion
and by no known other way; and you can explain this with another unphysical
theory, which the people will accept.
Why? For what
reason do people accept obvious nonsense?
Simple. The
alternative is to believe that this is a country in which a President can be
assassinated, or a gigabuck kilodeath atrocity can happen, with official
sanction and/or complicity. And this in turn implies, as Che put it, that “the
civil peace is already broken”. Who wants to face that unless they have to?
Anything for civil peace! So we must look forward, not backwards, right? Pay no
attention to the corruption behind the curtain!
But of course it
doesn’t work. The new normal after Kennedy included the Vietnam defeat, and
what we call the 60’s. So nobody got what they want; neither peace nor social
stability. And the new normal after 9/11 included two failed wars, plus airline porno-scanners.
I see this as a
recurring pattern. Once a generation, some big national trauma; a high crime
with policy consequences. However, crass political exploitation of the atrocity
meets resistance when physical evidence contradicts the narrative. Rather than
reform the story to fit the evidence, the evidence is reformed to fit the
story. The public is told a tale of a magic bullet reversing its trajectory in
midair, or of I-beams melting in a fire fueled by kerosene and office
furniture. And we are expected to accept these fantasies as real, for the sake
of civil peace. But it doesn’t work; after the crime and the cover-up come war,
chaos and ruin.
I say this is a
pattern; so I predict that in 40 more years they’ll pull the same stunt again.
Big photogenic crime, national trauma crassly exploited, poorly hidden high
treason, shoddy cover story patched up with pseudo-physics. It worked twice,
why not a third time?
I say; expect
this. Plan around this. Tell your kids to be ready; Big Lies are coming. Tell
them they’ll be told that a person can catch a computer virus, or that water is
explosive, or that marijuana is fissile; something, anything other than the
plain logic of Who Benefits?
For plain logic is
what’s at stake here. I see the crimes involved as not merely crimes against
the nation, but crimes against reason. I mean that in two senses; we are
dealing with fanatics and crooks who would violate our very minds; and also
that they sin at random. Their crimes target reason, and lack reason.
I don’t just want
the Fourth Amendment back. I want the laws of physics back.
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