This Week's New Yorker Magazine: Paranoid Style

[Dover]

Just read an article in the New Yorker that almost made me lose my lunch.
Predictable, but unsavory. It's title, Paranoid Style - How conspiracy theories become news , by Nicholas Lemann.

As the media prepares us all for the changing of the guard (a Dem win)
it will now focus on all those nagging 'loose ends'- the univestigated crimes, the dangling questions that people have about "what just happened" as they try to regain their equilibrium after the blunt force of the Bush bludgeoning. And as the Dems lead the parade on the media floats, we will be told it was all just a bad dream. And the real authority will make it all better so long as we leave our cynicism at the door. All these silly notions and 'theories' about 'what just happened' needs to be put to rest now so that we can all hold hands and raise our voices together....

"I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony...."
Why do I have this sudden thirst for a Coke......?

And they will begin to turn on the messengers that would keep those "old" questions in the foreground and try to regain authority as the main voice of authority. "Are you going to listen to THEM or US?" These party-poopers will be cast out by a weary public thirsty now for the koolaid.

And so goes the article in the New Yorker. The author reviews, summarizes and demonizes the bloggers, shade tree journalists, documentary films, books, etc., basically ridiculing this cacophany of voices who insist there IS a ruse.

While these voices may only have parts to the puzzle, and may even arrange them strangely and differently coming up with different pictures
(which is the focus of this article, rather than the underlying reasons for all the noise and questions to begin with)
they ARE in fact a reliable and uncensored voice of truth in that they ALL recognize they are part of a vast and calculated deception. They just can't quite put the whole puzzle together...yet. There is no consensus...or proof.
Not that 'proof' is essential within the new Big Brother doctrines.

But there lies the rub. What if we are left to hold onto only a few pieces of the puzzle without ever getting all the pieces together? Does that mean the deception wasn't and isn't still real? Of course that is what THEY suggest. And a good enough reason to simply move on.
Hey, you know sometimes a cigar is only a cigar. People are just human and events can be unrelated coincidences...or three...or ten. Let's not jump to conclusions without "ALL THE FACTS". But then, we CAN'T know all the facts, can we? We just have to trust in their higher authority.

Well, let's look at how many pieces of the puzzle have accumulated from all these amateur sleuths and truthseekers! It is a tsunami whose cumulative effect is huge. And we are all learning to trust those little inner voices as our "higher authority", more reliable even when we can't get an immediate consensus.

True, we may never have all the facts. But truth as well as untruth
resonates on levels inaccessible to even the best propagandists.


A vast conspiracy? ACH! The author addresses and dismisses it with the same plea of incompetence that has blanketed every unpopular and horrific experience the people have endured. An incompetence that is 'only human'.
Don't mistake these high powered strategists as competent professionals!
So to summarize, they are just like you and me, only much smarter and therefore deserve our obedience.

He says (parenthesis mine)

Almost all this material, though, treats correlation as causation and jumps across open evidentiary spaces to make things that aren't demonstrably connected look as if they were (of course the MSM never does that!).
Larry Silverstein's insuring the WTCenter shortly before Sept.11th doesn't necessarily mean that he was forewarned about September 11th (oh is that the only evidence that links him?); Halliburton's contract-winning success wasn't necessarily dictated by Cheney (but we'll never know because these meetings are "top secret" and classified), nor was its prospect necessarily a motivation for war (ha!). We never get to see the moment when President Bush hears and signs on to the views of the Project for the New American Century.
We don't see the White House learn, before the war, that Saddam Hussein has no weapons of mass destruction but decide to say that he does anyway. We aren't in the room where the big defense contractors give the determining push for the war in Iraq. We don't see the editors of Time and Newsweek decide to back the Administration. (No, that's why they all go to Davos and Bilderberg meetings, to name just two...no see, no hear). But we are left with the clear impression that these things took place, in effect if not in a specific form.

It's a view of how the world works that mistakenly empowers particular and evil forces with the ability to determine the course of events, and it misses the messiness and contingency with which life actually unfolds. As Hofstadter put it, "Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a vicitm of his past, his desires, his limitations. He is a free, active, demonic agent. he will, indeed he manufactures the mechanism of history himself or deflects the normal course of history in an evil way." (Yep, alot of versions of history in circulation but lets let them continue to write it their way).
One doesn't have to deny the horrors of the story to see it as not so neatly explicable. Tragedy is more profound if it is permitted to entail not just the malignancy but also people screwing up.