A Dot Too Far

Nothing was delivered
And I tell this truth to you,
Not out of spite or anger
But simply because it's true. - Bob Dylan

It seems appropriate enough that that old Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times," isn't Chinese at all, but American. What's more, it may have been coined by Robert Kennedy, which makes it so appropriate it hurts. And as interesting as our times are, and may even be beyond our imagining, it astonishes me how much attention is paid to the far less compelling and unconvincing distractions.

The conclusion of the Libby trial tells me I was right to have tuned it out a long time ago for expecting nothing but a Black Fitzmas. Juror Denis Collins can now say the jury wondered a "number of times, 'What are we doing with this guy here? Where's Rove... where are these other guys?"' The investigation is inactive, says Fitzgerald, and has been for some time, and all the liberal blogosphere has to show for its years of better-not-pout best behaviour is the head of a failed pornographer most of it wouldn't have heard of before he became what unhappy jurors are calling the "fall guy." And a head still attached to its body at that, since Libby just jumped the queue for a presidential pardon in another year and a half.

I wish conspiracy culture had some higher authority which could hold accountable the voices who said things would prove so different. I don't mean those who merely speculated incorrectly, but the ones who claimed the prerogative of inside information and "unnamed sources." Perhaps some of them did, and what they were told was simply wrong (or more likely, not so simply). But I hope at least the trial's end helps expose the disinfotainers, and separates honest truth seekers from mere consumers of conspiratainments.

Remember the 28 indictments, including Cheney and Bush? Remember, good God, the MI-6 agents caught trying to blow up the Chicago subway? And I've always been curious, and increasingly suspicious, about the intentions of Fitzgerald's oft-cited and seemingly well-informed anonymous cheerleader "Citizenspook" ("Libby was just an appetizer," he wrote last month. "The plot thickens. Be patient. FITZ!"). The one time he turned away from fanning expectations for "Treasongate" was to bizarrely slag Daniel Hopsicker as a "damage control mole messiah for the government.... They are grooming him as the atom bomb to destroy the 911 truth movement." And why did the only 9/11 researcher left who could be called a legitimate investigator deserve such approbation? Naturally, because he doesn't believe the towers were "laced with explosives," and "How could anybody with even half a brain look at the Pentagon footage and not have serious questions about what hit [it]?" In other words, the wedge issues. And who do you think might be driving the wedge?

There seems a prevailing consensus that a concession of uncertainty is a sign of soft-headedness, or even indicative of complicity in disinformation and cover-up. At the risk of being tagged a disinfo artist, I don't think so. When I'm unsure of something - and I'm unsure of a lot of things - I like a nice maybe or perhaps. In fact, I think an admission that one might be wrong should be the price of serious appraisal. Not only am I disinclined to heed those who claim to have solved the puzzles of our time's hidden riddles, but I'm likely to red-flag them with suspicion. And the same should go for me if I ever say, unreservedly, that This is the way things are.

I'm going to try not to write any more on this subject, because after I'm done I feel like I've only helped feed the energy sink, but here I go again: I'm not on board with demolitions and Pentagon missiles, partly because I find the physical evidence unpersuasive. Though "physical" is a misnomer, since it's almost entirely based upon selective video clips and cherry-picked testimony. (For instance, that the first thoughts of a witness in a tower's sub-basement was not unreasonably of bombs somehow becomes "proof of pre-planted explosives.") But also, and more deeply, because I'm suspicious of how these narratives have acted like cancer cells to effectively ingest, mutate and bury the chance for a credible and effective 9/11 Movement. The most recent example may be the flap over BBC "foreknowledge" of building 7's collapse, which has wound up a lot of people for, I think, some pretty poor reasons.

To many, it's an unchallenged assumption that no one expected WTC 7, and so Aaron Brown's report that "we're getting information that one of the other buildings... Building 7... is on fire and has either collapsed or is collapsing" is received as confirmation that someone pre-released the "script," rather than as evidence that its fall may be yet unexplained but was not a surprise. That is why so many cameras were fixed on it to capture its fall, and yes, that is why the fire team was "pulled." The day was full of confused, false and conflicting news, and that's the nature of reporting an unprecedented catastrophic event in real time. Yet the medium is not the message here.

But you know what? I could be wrong. I just wish 9/11's demolition experts could make similar admissions.