Gravy
Downsitting Citizen
- Joined
- Mar 27, 2006
- Messages
- 17,078
Thanks for your kind words, Myriad. I'm perfectly comfortable with the label "amateur historian" when the subject is New York City history. But I don't accept that label as it relates to much of the 9/11 work I've done, for a few reasons:
1) There's a fair amount of invective in my papers, which isn't something you'd find in professional work. I could just demonstrate that someone is behaving like a creep without calling them that. The reader is perfectly capable of deciding, and no doubt many are turned off by my harsh language. I do that because I want the subjects of the invective to get angry. I want them to be so angry that they might – just might – go back and do their homework, intent on getting the evidence that will shut me up. It would be nice if they realized that the gravity of their claims necessitates such study, but that's rarely the case. One prominent exception I can think of is Russell Pickering's abandoning his no-plane Pentagon claim and taking down his website. I try to motivate the others by shaking facts in front of them and daring them to refute them. I want them to get pissed off and really try. And when they fail, I want them to understand why they've failed and to feel it. Normally I'm non-confrontational, but when someone like Tony Szamboti keeps spewing the same nasty, serious, unsupportable claims and keeps promoting indefensible work, I'm going to let them know it in no uncertain terms. When I screw up, I feel bad and try not to repeat the mistake. It's my hope that other adults try to do the same. The difficulty is getting them to admit that they've screwed up. The non-historian in me feels free to introduce humiliation to the process when facts alone aren't getting it done.
2) I deliberately make little use of the tremendous wealth of human experience and knowledge about 9/11 in NYC, Shanksville, and D.C. My position has always been that people who experienced those events firsthand should never be bothered about these conspiracy claims unless there's a compelling reason to do so. Although I've spoken to many witnesses, firefighters, cops, rescue workers, and family members informally, and that's been useful as background material, I have never found a compelling reason to seek them out in order to involve them in this. The conspiracists, on the other hand, have the opposite problem. They must contact these people to get the "real, untold story" but they almost never will, because they're not interested in anything that doesn't fit their agenda. Has William Rodriguez contacted Arturo Griffith, which he promised to do over a year ago? Of course, we often see how conspiracists handle the human element, e.g. John Schroeder, Val McClatchey, Wallace Miller, Lloyd England, Mike Walter, Charles Burlingame, Bernard Brown, Larry Silverstein, the FDNY.
3) I rarely make use of the enormous library resources at my disposal. I've read several books about 9/11 but have done almost no library research. Likewise, I haven't filed any FOIA requests, and I've seldom contacted experts in the field to solve a particular issue, as Ron Wieck, Scott Sleeper, and others sometimes do. While there are many 9/11-related issues that might be fascinating to study in depth, for me most of the conspiracist claims don't qualify, and I'm fine exercising my Google-fu.
So as far as 9/11 goes, I consider myself not a historian and barely a researcher. I'm an information organizer. To me, research takes work. Most of this stuff is quite easy. It's just time-consuming because of the number of claims to deal with.
