© 2006, UrbisMedia
The guy who parked his Ninja crotch-rocket a few feet from my table at the café was offering his disquisition on 911. First of all, the Israelis were behind the whole thing; just how will come out some day, or never, he says with complete assurance. The young girl who is his audience (this guy likes to ride the statutory line) is one of the local kids I call the “illustrati”. She is tattooed to the extent that the only jobs she will ever be able to get are as a barista or a circus sideshow curiosity. “The plane that crashed in Pennsylvania was shot down by a missile, and there was no plane that crashed into the Pentagon—it was a missile.” The bemused “illustrata” did not ask as single question, or raise an eyebrow, probably because they were pinned with several silver rings.
With great effort, I kept my mouth filled with espresso rather than what I was thinking. Only blogs exceed cafés and bars in conspiracy theories about 911. They are viruses that arise from the stuff that falls out of the back ends of bulls.
Conspiracy theories are typically the way people connect events to preconceptions. But prophecies are the way that people connect events to what they allege is foretold, or foreordained. Prophecies enjoin those who are “chosen” to fulfill them. I suppose that if this guy was a Ninja-riding evangelical fundamentalist he might have been impressing this illustrata with appropriate passages from Revelations. It doesn’t matter, it’s just stuff that fell out of the back ends of bulls sometime in the first century A.D. In any case, he didn’t supply much more than an intro for this piece.
911 is a date now seared into American history, world history, with exploding jet fuel. It’s also, ironically, the number we call when we have “fallen and can’t get up!” What is doubly tragic about it is that it occurred “on the watch” of a man least intellectually, or morally apt to promulgate a judicious response to it. After he finished listening to school kids read, and then hiding out in a presidential bunker, George Bush emerged to find himself standing on smoldering rubble at “ground zero,” one hand on the shoulder of a fireman, and the other clenching a bullhorn, seeing his presidency, his destiny, defined for him in World Trade Center debris. The man who had been seen largely as a buffoon, a thief of the office he held, now found himself; God really did want him to be president. His power would grow out of the fear and trepidation of his people the way a black hole sucks matter into its depths. He must have felt it so that very day. The business flop, National Guard gold brick, and pampered daddy’s boy and driver under influence, now saw himself in almost prophetic terms. George Coeur de Lion, assuaging his nation’s fears with federal largesse now available to him with little question or oversight, and vowing a “crusade” (at least until he was told to stop using that word) top avenge this reprise of Pearl Harbor. He was “the war president.”
If one were a conspiracy theorist it would be facile to assert, in hindsight, that, knowing what they knew beforehand, the Bush operatives just let 911 happen. There’s a paper trail that can be fashioned into a veritable “plan” to give George Bush his the presidency he would not have been able to fashion without the assistance of 19 middle-eastern (though non-Iraqi) hijackers. There were the pre-existing neo-con plans to invade Iraq. There were the ignored briefing memos that all but gave the date and time (but Condi called “historical background”). There were even some warnings from our intelligence agencies. The only unknown was if, and when, the enemy would pull the trigger.
This would all be vehemently denied, of course, and by the same kinds of people who, for ideological reasons, might level a similar charge at Roosevelt in 1941. History is full of such trigger events—the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the Mukden Incident, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution—but they are the detonators; there has to be a prime charge to create the explosion. It’s relatively easy to come up with a detonator, but the prime charge has to be in place and, of course, explosive. The conspiracy theorists are asking for a big stretch in credibility here; the risks of the Bush administration operating a scheme in which Americans fly planes into buildings and fire missiles into the Pentagon, especially for a bunch of bunglers like the Bus crowd, it beyond belief. Unless there is direct proof it is best left to historians and “grassy knoll/second shooter” assassination theorists to build careers around them; better to perceive Bush as a bungler than a perpetrator. Indeed, his lack of perspicacity all but dictates such a conclusion. He may be arrogant, a bully, and an opportunist, but he doesn’t have the mental stuff it takes to fashion a conspiracy.
But seeing 911 coming and ignoring it because there might be some political (and other) advantages in letting it happen, is closer to being credible. On that there is a lot of evidence that lends clarity to the 20-20 vision. For Bush it fit the “prophecy” scenario; the credulous are always ready to connect the dots with passages from Revelations. The smarter people among the neo-con cabal knew to seize the political moment, but did not reckon on the quagmire.
It is difficult to imagine (the evil genius theory) that George Bush had an inkling that power would devolve to him as easily, as surprisingly, as it did. Like most acquisitions of power it became addictive, vision blurring, and potentially self-destructive. The shell-shocked electorate, save some sober minds, signed on, Congress got out its rubber stamps and signed off, the dogs of war strained at their leashes. Bush could let his religiosity fashion the fight as one between good and the “axis of evil,” giving vague historical reference to Reagan’s “evil empire,” and clear symbolism for his fundamentalist base. This was not time for that liberal moral relativism. This was about survival. Then, when the enemy is routed we will seed the vanquished nations with our secular faith in democracy (and unleash our Christian evangelists on them, too). It was like some chapter and verses from the Book of Revelations—at least to credulous cretins who believe that all has been foretold. Without even taking a “mandatory eight-count” America was up off the deck and heading off to pummel the biggest, but easiest jerk it could find, no matter how irrelevant he happened to be.
It played well at home, but was based on a fallacious and ultimately fateful misreading of its self-delusional prophecy. Bush pere’s blitzkrieg was over in a comparative flash, so quick there wasn’t a hint of what might have eventuated had they gone all the way to Baghdad. So why shouldn’t a debilitated Iraqi army, a weakened economy by years of sanctions and inspections, be a cakewalk for the grand army of Bush fils ? The “Decider” decided to “shock and awe” them with all of that wonderful military might we have been spending our money on. It would be another snap victory, like daddy’s, but this time we would pick ‘em up, dust ‘em off, teach ‘em a little democracy, make some war-profiteering friends very rich, and snatch some crude.
But there is always a problem with when events seem to align with “revealed truths”; it turns the telescope around and details become lost, theories become reified, things get neatened up like a pimple-complexioned personal add portrait dropped into Photoshop. But the devil, as they say, “is in the details.” None of the strategists of the Vietnam conflict seemed to be able to imagine that the North Vietnam’s would be willing to lose millions to America’s “mere” 58,000 casualties. The carpet bombing might have forced them to throw in the towel eventually, and then we would have found ourselves in a perpetual and more debilitation guerilla war, you know, like after the “shock and awe” of Iraq. How do you compare the willingness of people to fight to the death for their land to the tortured proposition that attacking the wrong country on the basis lies somehow makes America safer? And now 911 approaches a sort of full circle, as the number of American soldiers killed there approaches the number of Americans who died here in the events of 911.
The polls are now showing that Americans might be coming out of their post-911 stress syndrome. Now they need to find a way out of the quagmire. The prophecy is dead, but conspiracy theorists will carry on and will continue, mostly to amuse people like me, eavesdropping at cafés. But I would like to know just who is supposed to have fired that missile that allegedly hit the Pentagon. Could it have been the “second gunman on the grassy knoll”?
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©2006, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 6.14.2006)