Ladies and gentlemen, I am very excited to bring to you the latest member of the jonnygoodtimes.com staff, the Donspiracist. The Donspiracist is going to be looking a little closer at some things that deserve a 2nd look. He begins with this column, on 9/11.
In his very entertaining book of essays Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, Chuck Klosterman writes about a pre-9/11 email he sent his friends asking them to make a choice. Would they rather go on blind date with someone they knew was attractive and successful? Or would they prefer to go on a blind date with someone who was attractive, successful, and “very patriotic”? Almost immediately, all his friends responded that they would date the first person. Klosterman claims he wasn’t surprised, nor am I. A quick poll of my friends and co-workers returns similar results.
Why is it that so many of us think of patriotic people as undateable? Even in this post-9/11 age where one’s willingness to express love for America is a kind of litmus test, I secretly believe patriotic people are lousy in bed and would make dull significant others.
Why?
The answer to that question lies in imagination. Being patriotic really doesn’t take much thought or creativity. In fact, it takes none. It’s a stance, a reflex, a script, a cage. It cannot be compared to other types of loyalty because it doesn’t involve the same kind of love as say love of a woman, a parent, or even a local football team. Patriotism is rote. It comes from the part of us that likes to deliver the expected behavior. In fact, it has a lot in common with going to church on Sunday. Most of us who do so are motivated not by intense deep belief but by obligation that emanates vaguely from somewhere in our childhood, but whose precise location we cannot locate. All we know is we get defensive if we stop going and someone in a social situation points that out. Faux pas in the making. Patriotism is that old pair of jeans we refuse to throw out even though they stopped looking good on us years before.
Which brings us to the 9/11 Truth movement, a burgeoning internet community that makes the patriotic types spit with rage. 9/11, they say, is settled. The 9/11 commission has published its findings. The names of the terrorists have been discovered. The victims have been mourned. The rubble has been cleared…
But has it? 911truth.org is a leader in the movement to question the official line that our government and our media have settled on.
If you look at the “top 40 reasons to doubt the official story of what happened on September 11th, 2001″ on 911truth.org, you might not feel so certain. Number 3 is one of the most thought provoking: How was it possible the Pentagon was hit 1 hour and 20 minutes after the attacks began? Why was there no response from Andrews Air Force Base, just 10 miles away and home to Air National Guard units charged with defending the skies above the nation”s capital? How did Hani Hanjour, a man who failed as a Cessna pilot on his first flight in a Boeing, execute a difficult aerobatic maneuver to strike the Pentagon?
Or if you checked out Alex Jones’s two websites, prisonplanet.com and infowars.com, you’d see links between 9/11 and events that are still unfolding. His favorite piece of evidence is about WTC 7, which was not hit by a plane but did collapse anyway, for no apparent engineering reason.
Or if you read David Icke’s Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster , you’d see research that the 9/11 commission blatantly ignored, especially linkes between the Bush and Bin Laden families that would make Michael Moore speechless.
Or if you read George Washington’s Blog, you would see an explication of false flag terror and how it has played a role in the history of many nations. In a recent entry, he writes: Many timid writers and commentators are finally waking up to the fact that the powers-that-be are whipping up fear of the enemy in order to justify their imperial wars of aggression and a consolidation of power at home .
Or if you went to NY 9/11 Truth, you would see how people are organizing seminars and establishing ballot initiatives to inform the public that the official line is wrong.
To ignore all this as the ranting of lunatics, as mass self-deception, shows a rigid acceptance of what we are told is true. And you know what? Most of us still have enough kid in us to resist that. Most of us have enough imagination and creativity to wonder if maybe, just maybe, history is more fable than it is fact.