- Think, for a moment, about how the events in your life
would sound if they were broadcast over the evening news:
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- "Man Heaves Boiling Pot of Spaghetti at Wall in
Disgust"
-
- "Florida Woman Refuses to Clean Family
Bathroom"
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- "Family Reunion Turns Ugly: Father Disowns
Son"
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- If you were the spaghetti-tosser, the recalcitrant
bathroom-cleaner,
or the disgruntled family patriarch, you may take exception to the sound
bites chosen by the local news editor to encapsulate the trials and
tribulations
of your daily activities.
-
- The reason for this is obvious. You know your own
history.
You know the events that led up to, and eventually culminated in, the
aerial noodle launch. You understand the connection of one bad hair day
to the next, and you immediately grasp the proverbial Big Picture. More
importantly, however, you know that the dazed and confused channel-surfer
at the other end of the remote control does not have access to this
information,
and worse yet, has only sixty seconds to make a judgment call about it
before the next Rice-a-Roni commercial.
-
- Much has been made over the years of the increasing
tendency
toward superficiality in news reporting. While obviously it is more
difficult
to simulate in print, both hard copy and broadcast news alike, have fallen
prey to reporting pseudo-news. News anchors have become 'on-air'
personalities,
non-news, (such as what to buy your significant other for the holiday
season),
gets equal billing with stories on foreign policy, and the whole mess is
packaged in tiny, out-of-context parcels that are hurled at the consuming
public like a game of dodge-ball played by a frenetic team of speed
freaks.
-
- Thus translated, a news clip regarding the case of the
man and the airborne pasta may dig down far enough to find the cause of
whatever it was that triggered his fit of pique. It may even become the
subject of "in-depth team coverage," whereby the public may learn
that this particular incident was not isolated, and the gentleman in
question
was, in fact, a serial offender, having tossed a veritable barrage of
spaghetti
over the course of a lifetime.
-
- What they will not find out, perhaps, is the relationship
between this hot-tempered individual and the woman who has forever hung
up her plunger. And there might just well be one. Human relationships
are complicated things, cutting well across interstate lines -
multi-generational,
multi-faceted, and systemic. And history, being an outgrowth of millions
of people interacting millions of different ways over millions of years,
is the same.
-
- This is one of the reasons - perhaps the paramount reason
- that government corruption and collusion are so difficult for a
news-consuming
public, already wallowing chest deep in factoids, to accept. The
'talking-head'
phenomenon and round-table discussions so popular in the modern political
milieu are well-suited to this sound-bite drenched media landscape, as
they allow the public to presume that they have just heard the profound
truth. The pundits, pontificating ad nauseum, provide the perception of
depth by the sheer volume of their words - and frequently their voices
- without ever delivering a holistic and "in context" view of
current events.
-
- Today I watched Michael Ruppert defending his theory
regarding massive government collusion in the 9-11 terrorist attacks.
The other panelists, predictably, were not convinced, and the arguments
they used to refute Mr. Ruppert were the same ones we have heard repeatedly
every time this particular "conspiracy theory" starts to see
daylight. Why were military jets not scrambled to intercept the hijacked
planes? Human error. Why did American intelligence ignore the warnings
from foreign source regarding the impending attacks? Outdated and
bureaucratic
organizations that donít talk to each other. How did a rag-tag
bunch of known troublemakers manage to board the doomed flights in the
first place? Lax airport security.
-
- A point-by-point refutation of Mr. Ruppert's argument
holds up well on the surface. Why? Because it is just that - a
point-by-point
refutation. Any one of these arguments, taken by itself, makes sense,
particularly to a people who are still dumbstruck and grieving, a people
who have been educated, both through the school system and through daily
interaction with their friends and neighbors, to believe that the Americans
are the Good Guys, decent and benevolent, right-thinking and honest.
-
- And most Americans are just that. So when faced with
people who are not that way, it sets up a clamoring of cognitive dissonance
that can be heard from from sea to shining sea. Into that cacophony of
disbelief steps the clean-up crews, the experts and pundits who emanate
from government-sponsored think tanks, and participate in panel-style
discussions
such as the one with Mr. Ruppert. These "experts" are quick
with the anecdotal counterpoints - and they seem pretty believable until
ñ and unless - one takes the time to step back and take a longer
view.
-
- In an excellent piece entitled, 'Uncle Sam's Lucky
Finds,'
published by the Guardian Unlimited on Tuesday, March 18, 2002, Anne Karpf
deftly navigates the scattered, pundit-tossed bread crumbs, and offers
an extremely compelling view of American intelligence propaganda at its
finest.
-
- For while it is credible to assume that the various
alphabet
soup agencies that constitute our national security system might have
missed
India, France, and Russia chirping something about terrorist attacks as
early as last spring, it is not credible to argue that these same agencies
- who prior to September 11 could not find their arse with both hands -
had, within weeks of the attacks, successfully identified all the
hijackers.
Following a trail of fortuitously placed flight manuals, Korans,
'terrorist
handbooks,' (and please think about that one for a moment), and most
amazingly
of all, an unscathed fragment of Mohammed Atta's passport, the feds moved
swiftly to construct a case implicating royal Saudi bad boy, Osama bin
Laden.
-
- It is possible, I suppose, that one of the hijackers
would become careless and leave a flight manual lying around, or that the
hand of some unseen deity would pluck Mr. Atta's smoldering passport out
of the ruins of the WTC, (and then lay it gently at the feet of an FBI
super-sleuth), but taken together, the improbability of such serendipity
rapidly begins to become an impossibility.
-
- Due to the enormity of the operation - and perhaps also
due to the Pentagon's budgetary needs - shortly after the event, the
terrorism
experts began speculating about how September 11th could have been planned,
financed, and perhaps even rehearsed, without arousing suspicion. They
posited that underground cells of terrorists had lain hidden in sleepy
suburban bedroom communities for perhaps as long as a decade, flying under
the radar and waiting for their appointed hour to strike.
-
- Again, taken by itself, this is a plausible explanation.
But lay these stories next to the ones that tell us of devout Muslim
suicide
bombers, (already a contradiction in terms by the very nature of the
religion),
preparing for a holy war by making a trip to Hooters, drinking heavily,
and then leaving their apartments strewn with terrorist paraphernalia.
That's when the official version begins to leak like a used condom. Are
we to believe that these highly-disciplined fanatics who completely escaped
detection for perhaps a decade, threw all caution to the winds in their
final hours and said, 'What the hell? Letís have a beer.'
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- Nevertheless the stories are not placed side-by-side
by the journalistic corps. One day we hear the story of the miraculously
salvaged passport, but it is framed by a sound bite extolling the virtues
of Preparation H, Verizon wireless, and Big Macs. Two days later and
similarly
displaced, we learn that while making a routine search of an abandoned
vehicle, the FBI discovers a trunk-load of bright yellow books labeled,
'Terrorism for Dummies.' In our busy minds, moving through our busy lives,
the two stories are never connected and hence become plausible.
-
- This, then, is why a forum such as the panel discussion
featuring Mr. Ruppert is not as effective as, for instance, a lecture or
a book. And it is why a point-by-point rebuttal of the 9-11
"conspiracy
theory" rings righteous to those who want so desperately to believe
they are governed by fundamentally decent human beings. Taken
individually,
points a, b, and c may be dismissed as paranoid nonsense, but it is only
when they are laid end to end and the connecting lines are drawn, that
an arrangement emerges, making it possible to see not only the relationship
between point a and point b, but the one between point a and point c as
well.
-
- History, you see, is systemic, not anecdotal. Current
events, as reported by the modern media, whether through deliberate
propaganda
or just sloppy journalism, are quite the opposite. Being systemic, the
larger the historical event, the more touch points there are to other
events.
The more complex the system, the more necessary it is that the informed
observer not mistake an individual cell for the entire organism. In the
end, when confronted with a unified theory such as the one proposed by
Michael Ruppert, one must not succumb to the temptation to take the event
out of context. The pile of noodles did not, after all, get there by
itself.
Someone had to throw the pot, and someone had to piss off the
pot-thrower.
-
- Murderous government corruption is nothing new. The
arguments set forth by Mr. Ruppert and others who have the ability to see
beyond the firestorm of factoids, are neither illogical - particularly
when viewed in their totality - nor, unfortunately, without precedent in
the history of the United States. The evidence to support similar events
is well-documented in the records of administrations past, yet it only
takes a talented sophist to refute an individual point. And, as we know
all too well, the media has no want of those. Who, after all, has the
time to research all the details themselves? Much easier to let Biff,
the square-jawed anchor man tell you what happened, and then allow Bob,
the high-brow expert, tell you how to think about it.
-
- Historical events are no different than the ones that
make up your own life. The only way they can be understood is in
relationship
to each other, and in the context of what has come before. So stop and
think, the next time you are tempted to reject a conspiracy theory out
of hand, how your life would play on the eleven oí clock news. Tell
me if those disjointed fragments that constitute your life story would
be fairly and accurately reflected in one hundred words or less,
particularly
when preceded by a zippy, attention-grabbing leader, and followed by a
blaring advertisement extolling the virtues of softer bathroom tissue.
And then tell me if you still accept the official explanation about what
happened on September 11, 2001.
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