This is what a middle-aged guy in a suit started screaming at a protester holding up an effigy of Bush with an American flag tied like a noose around his neck. Written on it was something about Bush being the world's biggest terrorist and seeking the truth about 9/11, hence the "truth is you're an ass hole" line. I watched this same guy in the suit, screaming at the anti-Bush protester that this isn't the place for political agendas, look up at another guy holding a sign that said "9/11/06 - Commemorating 5 years of the Clinton legacy," and he just smiled and nodded. Typical conservative, I remember thinking to myself. It wasn't that the day was being politicized that he was pissed about, it was that it was being politicized by people he doesn't agree with. As for the "hollowed ground" we were supposedly standing on? We were standing on the sidewalk plaza of the PATH station entrance, outside the entire 16-acre area of the WTC site. I just have a hard time buying a place as hollowed ground if it's where you catch a train to Jersey. I wanted to ask him how far away one would have to before he doesn't consider it hollowed ground anymore.
Oh, and the guy holding up the Clinton bashing sign had written on the other side "When the left says 'peace' they mean 'surrender.'"
But don't accuse the conservatives of politicizing 9/11, they're just "honoring the victims."
So what was getting a lot of people's panties in a bunch was the conspiracy theorists everywhere. And they were all over the place. They were wearing black shirts that had variations of "9/11 Truth" on the front and the backs looked like this:
Most of them were affiliated with the movie Loose Change, a documentary that puts forth alternative theories about what really happened that day, and followers of this guy names Alex Jones.
Now I'm as big a conspiracy theorist as the next guy. But I'm more of a "Oswald couldn't have acted alone" and "What was the involvement of the CIA in the El Salvadoran death squads?" kind of conspiracy theorists, not a "the moon landing was staged and the earth is flat" kind of one.
Unfortunately, a big number of the people at the event this last Monday were the second kind. I'm not saying they don't have a point to a certain extent. I do believe that there should be a much more independent investigation in to the attacks, rather than one run by old government cronies with an interest in the results and friends to protect. I also believe that there is a lot that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice and others knew and know that they are not telling us. Well, I believe that everything that comes out of that group's mouths is a lie. So I'm with them there.
But some of the things that they are purporting are a little far-fetched, and really, unnecessary to support the idea that our government had something to do with 9/11. There's a great article at Salon about this.
And the thing about conspiracies is that they require a small group to be involved, not a large one, or the secret part of a conspiracy in unsustainable. If you buy into a lot of the claims made by these guys, hundreds, if not thousands, of people would need to be in on it.
Now the Loose Change guys aren't part of the groups that believe UFOs destroyed the World Trade Center or that no planes hit them (there is actually a theory that they were holograms, seen by everyone in the area from every possible angle). But they do believe these basic things, as just a small example:
The planes that hit the WTC were remote controlled drones with no people inside.
No plane crashed in Pennsylvania.
No plane hit the Pentagon.
Flight 93, the one that crashed in Pennsylvania, actually landed in Cleveland that morning, with all of the passengers and crew from the other flights on board. This is my favorite one, because it just doesn't make sense in any way. As the Salon article asks, "...why would the government spare the lives of the people on those planes only to kill thousands more" at the World Trade Center?
Anyway, I'll leave it to others (this one is great, run by a guy who thinks there is a government involvement himself, just not done the way the Loose Change guys think) to debunk the conspiracy theories. I'm here to describe the action from the day.
Like I said at the end of the first part of this, the conspiracy theorists were a major presence. There were definitely several hundred of them and they were armed with copies of the film on DVD to give away for free to anybody who would take them. The interesting thing that happened was the spontaneous debates that broke out in the crowd. Someone would challenge one of the black shirt posse and there would be an exchange of ideas (sometimes heated and contentious, other times just someone wanting to know what makes the person believe 9/11 was an "inside job") which would attract a crowd gathering around to hear. Like this:
And this (guy making some sort of point like "why didn't that building fall if the one next to it..."):
It would get heated when people accused the conspiracy people of being "un-American" or "insulting the families" of the victims or claiming that they were "supporting the terrorists." It was always, as I saw it, the challengers that got all wound up, and for no reason. Especially this guy, with the Yankee hat:
He would follow the arguments around and get in the face of the people supporting the conspiracy theories. Unfortunately for him he didn't really have good counter-arguments. The 911 Truth crowd, while believing some really whacked out claims, were really articulate about why they believed what they believed. Some of these things were based on what people would call "junk science" but they made their side of the argument well. The angry guy with the Yankee cap (and really if you are a Yankee fan, why are you a chronically angry person?) usually only had the argument that "I was here," which really seems to be well beside the point. The guy claimed that he helped in the recovery after the attack, and that he saw body parts with his own eyes. How this made him "know that Osama did it" I never really quite got from him. He would also off to the side be saying things like, "I'll bet none of these black shirt people even got jobs" and "get these guys to a fuckin' employment office."
Super-duper arguments, Angry Guy!
And that was all he had. Really, nobody was able to counter them with anything smarter than, "if you don't like this country fuckin' leave." Ahh, nothing like a return to the good old Cold War standard of "love it or leave it" and "move to Russia."
I just watched this whole time, never really getting involved in the arguments. I did have a nice little conversation with a fireman about Wilco because he saw my shirt. Found another fan in the crowd. But I couldn't believe how little the people arguing against the conspiracy theorists could make a good point. When one would say that there's no way the fires could burn as hot as they claimed the one in the WTC did because kerosene doesn't burn that hot, no one could bring up that jet planes don't run on kerosene, but on jet fuel (hence the name).
It could have something to do with the fact that most of the people trying to argue with them were brain dead zealot Bushie types with American flags all over their clothing along with phrases like "let's roll" in silk screen. Or the woman holding the sign that said something along the lines of "People united + Support for troops = defeat of axis of evil."
The only thing in this country dumber than George W. Bush is one of his sheep using his terminology. What sucks about these people is that they say "united" but what they mean is that I should believe in their ideology or shut the hell up.
And another thing, I didn't get a picture of them (I guess I just couldn't stomach it) but the flag wearing government/Bush supporters are really crappy sign makers. Everyone who had a sign of some sort that bashed on Clinton/Democrats/liberals or used some sort of Bushism in it was holding the most pathetic piece of poster board that was scrawled on with black magic marker. Crooked and uneven. At least the paranoid people know how to go to Kinkos and get a slick banner made. I mean come on people, your hero spent good money getting his "Mission Accomplished" sign made.
Of all the wacky things I heard that day, from holograms faking the plane crash to Bush being a Trotsky-ite (seriously, some of the paranoids, calling themselves "real" conservatives, think Bush is a Commie. I wish), I didn't hear anything that made me laugh/wretch more than these two comments:
"Our government wouldn't purposely hurt its own citizens." This guy needed to go to a history class that talked about the Tuskegee experiments the Bonus Army or the Japanese American prison camps, among other things.
"Nobody benefited from 9/11." Apparently this guy never heard of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Rice, or Wolfowitz.
The black shirt crowd might be paranoid, but at least they don't blindly trust our government no matter what. Thomas Jefferson would be so disappointed.
There was also the admonition that this is the wrong day to do this and that "you can do this the other 364 days of the year. So I guess there is no-1st Amendment holiday of which I was not aware. And I wondered how it could possibly have been so easy for Dubya to convince people that the Patriot Act was a good thing. And the whole idea that they had a problem with politics being injected into the day was a weak argument at best. Bush has been propping up his presidency with the dead from that day five years ago (and would do so even more later that night to celebrate the anniversary), and Giuliani was down in the pit of Ground Zero running for president at that very moment.
Eventually the conspiracy crowd gathered for the rally to listen to Alex Jones talk, among other people, but mostly him.
And he screamed a lot through his megaphone and some of the flag waving crowd around me made statements that went along the lines of blowing him off as a misguided academic or a liberal nut. And this is where I get bothered. Alex Jones is a loud-mouth radio host, not an academic at all. He is also a religious nut who has a lot more in common with the Michigan Militia types and Pat Buchanan than he does with Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn. Don't put him on us liberals, he's not our fault.
There was also this guy:
He was your basic ranting bible-thumping loon who didn't really make any sense. He kept saying that all the "stupid, stupid people" would be going to Hell. It made me make the joke to the guy next to me, "Wow, all of Alabama is going to Hell?" He laughed.
All in all it was a trippy day. It almost made me proud to be American. Lots of ideas, albeit a lot of crazy ones, debated in a free-exchange of ideas in a public forum, and no punches thrown. Sometimes it looked like someone might take a swing, but as far as I saw it never did.
But that mild pride is easily dashed by seeing shit like this:
Apparently Captain America was hanging around somewhere but I never spotted him.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment