Maybe I Worry Too Much
[=T.A.M.;2328334]Pomeroo/Ron:
I like the caption to your post. I too have realized they will never learn, and never change.
The positive way to look at this is that they are the endless ball of wool for us to bat around when things get dull.
TAM
Thanks, TAM. I have to confess that I no longer take pleasure in jousting with the loons. I fervently hope that I'm wrong, but something tells me that they're making progress. Much of the American voting public is apathetic and apolitical. That explains why all those screeds breathlessly informing us that we have entered a new age of Republican or, alternately, Democratic dominance invariably turn out to be all wet. The average person is far less ideologized than partisans of either side would like to believe. Voters are fickle creatures who rarely trouble themselves to analyze issues. The Democratic triumph last November would have been a Republican triumph if the public had perceived some tangible progress in Iraq, some clearly discernible movement toward a recognized goal. Lost in the shuffle is a serious debate over goals and long-term prospects.
When dissatisfaction with Bush's policies makes some voters more receptive to the conspiracy liars' pernicious message, the rational members of our society--whether Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives--suffer in the long run. I wrote in an another post that the Nazis were initially viewed as a bunch of unruly cranks. The severe economic woes besetting Germany caused more and more otherwise sane people to turn to the loudest voices offering the most unequivocal solutions--bad times call for extreme, dramatic measures.
In the sixties, a large, amorphous group of kids, steered by agenda-driven leftist radicals, agitated for a pointless revolution that very few adults wanted. But what if we had been in the throes of a depression, a worldwide economic crisis? Power to the People! would have sounded less jejune.
The conspiracy liars are easy to ridicule because their message is so comprehensively stupid. It disturbs me that they don't care--not even a little bit. I sense a hint of Goering in the air-- "When I hear the word 'culture,' I reach for my pistol." They aggressively reject logic and evidence. They pointedly refuse to fight the rationalists by Marquis of Queensbury rules.
Expose the fabrications of the nutters about the term "pull," and they acknowledge nothing: they never concede an inch of ground, no matter how untenable. They start inserting the word into conversations where it doesn't belong to create the conditions for a shift in meaning. If enough people fail to notice, or notice but refuse to object, eventually they will infect the language itself, and "to pull" will come to mean "to blow up." It won't matter that people in the demolition industry never used the term in that fashion. Despite the prescriptions of academics and writers who care about words, usage is ultimately shaped by sheer weight of numbers. The argument that the loons misuse the term "pull" to make their case against Larry Silverstein loses steam once the term's meaning has been altered in the public consciousness. When it is no longer ridiculous to talk about "pulling" a building, the liars will have advanced a step.
Above all, the 9/11 Fantasy movement must be viewed as a lynch mob. Whether we're talking about leftists who don't really buy into the preposterous woo, but who simply want to see the Great Satan punished for its sins against the downtrodden of the world, or rightwing anarchists, for whom undermining the government--any government--is an article of religious faith, we're talking about a movement that is profoundly anti-democratic.
I am wrongly perceived as presenting in a forum devoted to conspiracy theories a brief on behalf of George Bush. What I'm attempting to convey is that Bush is a politician. The remedy for undesirable pols is voting them and their parties out of office. If the conspiracy liars manage to transform Bush into a monster, well, Hollywood has taught us how to deal with monsters: Destroy them. It is not an exaggeration--rather, it is a grotesque reality-- that the 9/11 fantasists would literally kill-- murder, hack to pieces, torture to death-- Bush and Cheney for crimes these men quite obviously did not commit. I'm not making a partisan political argument here. I'm defending the democratic process against those who, acting on irrational impulses, would subvert it.
Most of us who participate in these forums regard the twoofers with undisguised contempt. How could such fools pose a serious threat? (How could beer-swilling brawlers have hideously disfigured the culture that produced Goethe and Beethoven?) They are so staggeringly ignorant, so mouth-breathing, drooling-moron obtuse, so granite-skulled impervious to reason: they are, in a word, barbarians. Except, they lack a barbarian's curiosity about more advanced cultures. I'm reminded of the words of Hilaire Belloc: "We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on these faces there is no smile."
