Hey Toad here's another essay by Zepp Jamieson, sure he's a lefty but a good writer. Like I said above,, I'm on your bus now.. but here's some more food for thought. Oh I can answer Pat's question... You can bet your bippy they will call up the Reserves.
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Conspiracy theorists have this oddity. When one of their theories turns out to be true, and is so demonstrated, they promptly lose interest. The people who ran around in the sixties claiming that the FBI and CIA were spying on them for their political views and infiltrating their meetings promptly lost interest and moved on to something else the minute the government admitted that they had, in fact, been doing that very thing.
The folks who had been blasting the Warren commission report as a lie and a fraud and insisting that Oswald did not act alone became noticeably more dispirited as the notion that there was more than one shooter in Dallas gained widespread acceptance. They didn’t even wait for it to be verified; if the hoi polloi accepted it, then it was no longer a special idea.
Last month, I was chatting with a UFOlogist and . . . I don’t know. I think I got a little annoyed. He referred to aliens from the Pleiades, a constellation of stars also known as the Seven Sisters. The thing is, the Pleiades isn’t a place. It’s a direction. Seven stars, each further from each other than the nearest of them is to us, just happen to lie in the same chunk of sky. Referring to the Pleiades as a place is one of my pet peeves, along with movie spaceships that go “whooosh!” as they fly by in the vacuum in space, or people who think that if you fly faster than light, time will go backward.
Rather than grind my teeth, I decided to veer the subject away from the Pleiadeans and onto something more sensible. So I mentioned that I expected us to have proof of extraterrestrial life within a few years. His face lit up. At last! A Fellow Believer!
So he asked me how I thought this knowledge might manifest itself. I mentioned the Mars missions, and the vast quantities of water found on that planet, the plans to launch a probe to oceanic Europa, and the planned launch of telescopes powerful enough to detect the spectrographic signature of oxygen/water planets as they traversed their primary. A wide-eyed reader of Clarke, Heinlein and Asimov as a kid, nothing sparks my sense of wonder the way that stuff does.
His face fell. Clearly, he was expecting something more . . . Pleiadean. An actual discovery of extraterrestrial life wouldn’t begin to compete with his rich fantasy world of Greys, anal probes, and omniscient beings from the tenth dimension. Reality is for nerds.
In American politics, conspiracy theories abound like fleas on a two-humped cliché. Most, of course, involve erosions of our freedoms. The Birchers scream that the commies are just lying doggo, waiting to catch us unawares. Leftists scream about the Birchers. White supremacists warn of racial war and subsequent wars, and blacks give a sardonic look and say, “old news, boss.” There’s a whole bunch of people out there who believe that the Queen of England, the Bushes, and various European banking cartels are actually big evil lizards. Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl, we keep her ‘round to catch flies, as the song goes. (That IS how it goes, right?) In any event, you can be sure these lizards are up to No Good. Have you ever met an extraterrestrial giant lizard that can shape shift into human form that wasn’t up to no good? These people are vaguely scary, in the same way fans of Charlie Manson are.
Let’s suppose that Putsch’s doctor releases a report stating that the President is in excellent health, except that his tail came off when a cat caught him sunning himself one afternoon. The media would be all over that story, but the conspiracy theorists would promptly lose interest. They would say, “Yeah, we knew about that. Old news” and, covering their disappointment that perfidious reality had validated their beliefs, go on to new and ever more inventive theories.
Since 9/11, the left has been accused of paranoia and conspiracy mongering because many of us believe that Ashcroft is a totalitarian nutcase, and the President a febrile lightweight controlled by cold and vicious corporate types who won’t hesitate to kill a lot of Americans in the name of profits, especially in the form of access to oil. We warned from the beginning that Putsch would get us into a war for profit, and of course, right wingers and the press dismissed us as anti-American crackpots.
Well, according to the crackpot code, I should be losing interest in the whole thing, and launching investigations into whether it was true that H. Ross Ferengii might have really had a human mother.
With Ashcroft, of course, any doubts about his intents regarding our rights and freedoms vanished when he had the vast PATRIOT ACT ready to go mere weeks after the World Trade Center attacks.
Eight hundred pages, prepared in just two weeks? No. That was planned well before the attacks. Congress, of course, passed it without even reading it.
Putsch and a for-profit war gained some substance when he inexplicably attacked Afghanistan in the wake of the attacks. Of course, now he has a puppet government that is going to let him build a pipeline (assuming the puppet government can keep control of that ungovernable land) and gave him a place to build a huge air base. Seems that he was secretly building one in Qatar, too, long before the “Get Saddam” noises suddenly came up and we started hearing idiot noises about Saddam and Al Qaida being in complicity.
Any possibility that this was a crackpot belief died yesterday when a friend of mine came into my office, waving a opinion section from the San Francisco Chronicle. He was excited about a Molly Ivins column on class warfare
http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/national/ivins/story/3963907p-4989405c.html (truly one of her best) but even more excited by a Pat Buchanan column on the Iraq attaq. “Pat Buchanan is right on the beam!” he declared.
I refrained from saying, “Guy, you’re Jewish.” Chances were good he knew that already. Nor did I have any reason to suppose that he had converted from being a Jewish liberal to that of a neo-fascist anti-Semite overnight. So I read the Buchanan column.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/pb20020812.shtmlHe was condemning the proposed attaq on Iraq, and doing so loudly, clearly, unequivocally. Further, he was asking the questions that Congress, much of the media, and far too many Democrats have been shirking on.
I found myself in agreement with every word the man said in that column. That column only, mind you. Let’s not get carried away here.
But recently, I seem to have developed other unlikely allies. Brent Scowcroft warned that the Iraq attaq could unleash “Armageddon” in the Middle East. Dick Armey and Tom DeLay have questioned the need to attaq Iraq. Even Henry Kissinger is against it. I never thought I would be on the same side as Henry Kissinger regarding war policy at any time, but here we are.
Every ally we have is against the proposed attaq except Britain, and even there, their military leaders have publically warned Prime Minister Blair that such a plan is sheer folly.
Putsch claims that he has secret knowledge that he can’t share with Congress and that is why he wants to do this.
Buchanan is absolutely right. This decision, both constitutionally and morally, rests with Congress, and Congress alone. If Putsch tries to launch an attack unilaterally, we should impeach him immediately, and invoke the 22nd amendment, declaring him unfit to fulfill the duties of his office. He is NOT going to cost us hundreds of billions and get tens of thousands of people killed, including Americans, without a good reason why.
I guess with all this agreement coming from the right, I should remember that I’m a liberal, and jump to some other conspiracy thing I can rail about. I mean, that’s pretty bad company I’m keeping. Normally, I go wash my hands after reading a Buchanan article.
But the trouble is, I’m not a conspiracy buff. I opposed the Iraq attaq, not because I thought it could happen, but because it would. I’m not about to lose interest just because my opinion is suddenly held on a widespread basis.
This is too big for partisanship, and I’m very glad to see that among the right wingers, that feeling is growing rapidly.
Let’s save the country from Putsch’s folly – or at least make certain it isn’t folly. We can fight one another on other things later. America comes
first.
