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The
First Two Years of Insanity
by
John Chuckman
September
9, 2003
The
press recently ran stories about Americans reliving the horrors of 9/11 through
released emergency-call transcripts that include the last gasps of doomed
souls. Am I the only one struck by the extremely odd nature of this story?
Why
would people expose themselves to material that might well be regarded as
pornographic when used for anything other than an official investigation?
The
normal human brain works to soften or blot out memories of intensely disturbing
events, otherwise no one could function in times of crisis, and no one could
survive imprisonment or torture. You grieve for a while, and then you go on
with the often hard business of living. Occasionally, you grieve briefly again,
but when you actually indulge a taste for the grim past - and reading the
desperate gasps of the dying is about as grim as it gets - either you need
professional help or you are trying to exploit the dead to some purpose.
Why
would a respectable newspaper print such material? Well, I recall a service
station in Massachusetts with gas pumps that blinked out a message with
multiple exclamation points never to forget 9/11, over and over, as you filled
your tank. What this had to do with selling gasoline I don't know, but it
reflected a frenzied, dangerous kind of thinking, the thinking of those ready
to subject themselves and others to some form of control.
A
recent poll shows that about 70% of Americans believe that Iraq was involved in
9/11. That is to say, two years after the fact, most Americans believe an
absolute fantasy, not supported by any evidence. Poor old Hussein had a hard
enough time for years just holding things together in Iraq - a feat the vast
armies and resources of the United States appear incapable of repeating -
without running off and getting involved in terrorism.
All
this should be abundantly clear to Americans by now. They occupy Iraq. They
have looked into its every nook and cranny. There cannot be much there that
American administrators do not now understand, yet somehow the basic facts of the
situation remain unknown to most Americans. Instead they embrace fantasy.
Indeed,
it should have all been clear long before invading and occupying the place.
With all the electromagnetic intercepts, spy satellites, and daily over-flights
of the last decade, Iraq probably qualified as the CIA's most
intensively-recorded country.
Bush
unblinkingly calls Iraq the central front in the war on terror, but that's what
a skulking politician does as he asks for another $87 billion to clean up a
horrible mess he created. And what a platter of tax-payer goodies to set before
friends and supporters! There's a mother load of public paranoia and
misinformation out there to be mined, and Bush isn't about to set to work
clearing it away.
America's
velvet-glove fascists, the neocons, have exploited 9/11 relentlessly. In some
respects their activities do resemble the Nazis' exploitation of the Reichstag
fire. Then, the act of a mentally unstable man from Holland was immediately
seized upon to justify a quick and systematic destruction of the hated Weimar
Republic, whose Chancellor Hitler had only just been appointed.
Bush's
government was floundering before 9/11. He was well along to earning full
recognition of his vacuity - a notable achievement considering the immense
resources employed to "airbrush" a President's every move. Fate in
the form of nineteen mentally unstable men from the Middle East intervened and
dumped at his feet the gifts of excessive public fear and credulity.
Two
years after 9/11 the world is forced to accommodate an unhealthy, delusional
America, like adults fearful of confronting a disturbed child who paces the
schoolyard mumbling while carrying a loaded gun taken from home. It is not an
exaggeration to say that the situation often involves less rationality and
predictability than we knew from Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union.
John Chuckman lives in Canada and is
former chief economist for a large Canadian oil company. He writes frequently
for Yellow Times.org and other publications.
* The
Perfumed Prince and Other Political Tales
* A
George Will Follies Review
* The
Painful Horrors of Political Autism
* Enron-Style
Management in a Dangerously Complex World
* The Real
Clash of Civilizations: Liberals Versus the Crypto-Nazis
* Banality,
Bombast, and Blood
* Through A
Glass Darkly: An Interpretation of Bush's Character
* Of
Blair, Hussein, and Genocide