Inside jobs and the heartland

[mqbush]

Responding to a forum discussion, I posted this about 9/11 and the culture war:

<"Joe">: Sure, Washington would have a problem keeping such a secret, and isn’t able to manage such a project. Who says it has to be Washington? Why not WTC lessee Silverstein, who turned a $7 billion profit on a $15 million investment in six months? Men have killed for a lot less. Or maybe PNAC, to get the “new Pearl Harbor” it needed? Or the real target was the accounting office at the Pentagon, to hide the $3 TRILLION disappearance there. Or the real target was the SEC offices in WTC 7, to erase the double dozen Enron-style corporate messes being looked into. Different bad guys, none of them government. Now, Michael Reagan says that anyone calling 9/11 an inside job should be shot as a traitor. The only way this makes any kind of sense is if he suspects government, and would rather protect mass murderers than let his precious Republican good old boys be attacked the way he and his cadre attacked Bill Clinton for being not Republican

Riddle me this: The getaway driver for bank robbers who killed a teller is judged guilty of murder as an accessory, yet Michael Savage is not considered guilty of murder after publishing and broadcasting his fulminating hatred to drive that man in Tennessee to shoot up a church congregation. In a society, no act of kindness is wasted, every act of hatred is “passed forward.” The fanaticism of Savage, Reagan, and others is as deadly as bin Laden’s; it doesn’t look so, since it kills in dribs and drabs instead of dramatically, 3,000 at once. Any War on Terror has to count the Savages of the world as kindred to bin Laden or else it is a farce.

I wrote the last paragraph because this weekend, at another wedding, I heard another conversation that dismayed me. Did you know that all of the ills of this country that are tearing us apart result from those Commie college professors perverting our youth, turning them into atheists? Yup, heard this straight from the salt of the earth. Now, the person who developed fire as a useful aid was an egghead. If the anti-intellectual salt of the earth had their way ALL of the time, we’d still be shivering in caves. Sorry, salt, but I’m going to keep rooting for the eggheads. Since progress in advancing civilization is accomplished by eggheads who can think of new things only if they cast off authoritarian blinkers, I’m all for these eggheads and their free-thinking, which allows their creativity. That means I have to work against all the Michael Savages of the world, all the authoritarians who would kill to keep anyone from rocking their boat, disturbing their comfortable status quo. It means my working against the wishes of my relatives, who want another thousand year reich of medievalism.

It’s tiring enough trying to “grok” the evil of Hitler. We don’t relish recognizing evil here at home as well, evil that perhaps aided in the murder of 3,000 Americans, aided the cold predations of corporations, aided the return to medieval modes of thought. We can’t say that we don’t like what physics says about 9/11 and so we’ll pretend that physics is a matter of opinion or belief, that we can ignore. We can’t do that without giving up any hope for a bright future. Once we let wishful thinking become the methodology of a politicized science we’ve surrendered to the thrall of ignorance, and we go backwards.