I was reading a full transcript of this UK Observer article by Gore Vidal, called The Enemy Within, http://9-11congress.netfirms.com/Vidal.html http://burningbush.netfirms.com/Vidal.html & http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,819931,00.html.

[Full text also found at: http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=apnjl6%24odj%246%40lust.ihug.co.nz&rnum=1]

I've encountered stuff of various degrees of credibility because I read widely in conspiracy literature and flakey New Age shit, for some time, usually with my bullshit detector highly activated. Still, a journalist wouldn't be a journalist if she discounted any source out of hand. It is on the fringes and margins where you find the real stories. If the story is already in the mainstream media, it stands to reason a journalist wouldn't win any big points by reporting it, by definition, because someone else already HAS reported it. A journalist ought to find things previously unreported.

My model in the current age, since Watergate is long past and there isn't a media outlet in the US that would have had the guts to publish the Pentagon Papers today if it were handed to them, gift-wrapped, is Nicky Hagar, the New Zealand reporter who laid the wonky book exposing Project Echelon out into the world. I hope to meet this great man one day. It is no accident most folks have never heard of him, even though his story has had massive confirmations globally.

It is not an era for heroes like that. The death of Paul Wellstone should signal that to us all.

The problem is that when you open the floodgates of marginal literature, stuff without the corporate journalism gatekeepers' seal of approval, you find good stuff and utter bullshit all mixed in together. Since the reader is unable to conduct as thorough of research as the investigative reporter nee conspiracy theorist, how does one sort the wheat from the chaff?

I like the idea that the agent of the sorting is the reader, despite the buyer beware nature of it, the ease of duplicity and the PoMo erosion of standards of solid documentation. Readers should have never given over their agency and judgment to unelected and anonymous editors. It was a dangerous power shift. So in that respect, the mud that is the Internet Commons is a welcome slop for me.

And then I read Gore Vidal, one of those clearly pooh-poohed by mainstream media when it even troubles itself to acknowledge how far the wackos have fallen, usually in astonished tones: "Did you know some people EVEN BELIEVE the 2000 election was a coup and we are currently governed by a military junta?!" Outrageous! This is how we measure degrees of wacko-ness.

Yet when you move in slightly different circles, outside of the groupthink of corporate journalism, a general survey of the texts you might read would probably run at least 40% referring to the current government as apologists to the throne. I'd say that number is fairly conservative given Michael Moore's book "Stupid White Men" on the bestseller's lists and "Bowling for Columbine" doing so well, since Moore is one of those people who does not acknowledge the legitimacy of the current administration.

Here is an excerpt from Gore Vidal's The Enemy Within (from fairly deep in, but an article that pushes past my own limits of credulity, even as I try to weigh his ideas. Once the floodgates to conspiracy-land are opened, there are always those that stretch it beyond believability--and I've personally documented the UK Observer and Independent stretching things in reporting stories that I had considerable local knowledge of, which is the best test I am aware of: my own research)

Bush And The Dog That Did Not Bark

Post-9/11, the American media were filled with preemptory denunciations of unpatriotic 'conspiracy theorists', who not only are always with us but are usually easy for the media to discredit since it is an article of faith that there are no conspiracies in American life. Yet, a year or so ago, who would have thought that most of corporate America had been conspiring with accountants to cook their books since - well, at least the bright days of Reagan and deregulation?

This excerpt gave me pause, sitting there amidst all the other allegations. There is something of heft to consider here about the nature of the US conspiracy subculture and I want to point it out for anyone who may have missed it.

I was in a relationship once that was a bit of a brainwash. I wasn't allowed to have my own opinions. It snuck up on me slowly, but only 1 year out of the relationship did I realize that every day in that relationship was a mutual mind-share of the issues of the day where the 2 of us would hash out ideas (great fun, and part of what drew me to the relationship), but along the way, "we" developed a consensus that became "truth," pronouncements, "our" truth, which was then sanitized to share with others. It was a bizarre thing to realize, after the fact, during a breakup where I was made to believe my partner was not cheating on me, in spite of the evidence of my own eyes.

I also think a lot about what it must have been like in the Soviet Union during the time of state control of the media and Pravda being the official organ of the state. It is mythologized now, referred to as "The Iron Curtain." But what was that Iron Curtain? It is an industrial reference, it seems. It conjures an image not only of an impenetrable barrier, but also of a factory of the industrial age.

And once the Iron Curtain was gone, where did it go? To the rustbelt with other abandoned factories?

Much is made of Soviet dissidents and their role in relation to the Iron Curtain. And Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, voices of "freedom" that, when they could penetrate the Iron Curtain, fell upon a thirsty people desperate for "truths" beyond the lies mandated by the state, truths that the people, we were told, could see evidence that were blatant lies, thus helping them to realize that the voices coming in other ways, often jammed by the state were actually the "Truth."

So we read about the tense moments in Hungary in the 1950s, I think it was. We rally to what we believe are a people's longing for freedom, a people oppressed, told what to think, made to believe that white was black and black was white. We had Orwell's warnings against totalitarian states to reinforce our beliefs. The desire for freedom did not go away, no matter how oppressed a people were, we were told.

And so I do believe. But the mindfuck is still very potent. How did one become a dissident in the Soviet Union? By speaking truths not sanctioned by the state, or simply by saying unpopular things? Were all dissidents, truth-tellers, or were some utter wackos? In the narratives we have now, the dissidents are all glorified seekers after freedom, never wackos.

So maybe the people behind the Iron Curtain lived an odd life, with Pravda (questionable credibility, but officially sanctioned, and with, we can assume, SOME truths actually being told), dissident truth-tellers of truths one could see even with Pravda's disclaimers (successful factories and all that bs), dissident truth-tellers of truths that could not be verified by those exposed to them, dissident wackos who were full of shit, and this sometimes staticky radio-free whatever that beamed something in when you could get it that painted the Western World as a beacon of freedom and anything you could ever want.

Given all these choices, it stands to reason that Russian citizens developed an ear for discernment and bullshit, rather than being gullible putzes who gave their power over to editors and others. It would also stand to reason that they were often ill informed and didn't even know it.

Jump ahead to the present day. The grand narratives say the Iron Curtain was fallen and freedom of the press and free speech somehow rule in the world despite enclaves of oppression because there is not at this time a dominant World Order controlling the press. The Iron Curtain is gone, and in the West, China is so marginalized most Westerners have no clue how outnumbered they are on the planet by Asians. Westerners actually believe they rule the entire globe with democracy and freedom.

This is the power of mythos. But also more, a thing unnamed, invisible. For if these grand narratives are false, we have to explore what makes them false. They say there is no longer an Iron Curtain. OK, but if the narratives are false, then perhaps there is some other kind of Curtain. Was the Iron Curtain a visible thing to Soviet citizens? Or were they sitting behind it, like frogs in boiling water, vaguely experiencing cognitive dissonance, but not really being able to name it by the 2nd or 3rd generation because they'd never known anything else?

And are we those same frogs? Will we read future history books that describe the control of the dominant media in our time as censorship so extreme that the public was duped into believing lies on a widespread scale as to be able to call it some kind of a "Curtain?"

I will name it then. The curtain of Capitalism is a "Velvet Curtain," velvet for the luxuries of the plutocrats who hide from the serfs of our age the very fact that they are pre-industrialized serfs serving their liege lords in virtual slavery. At least feudal serfs knew what they were. A Velvet Curtain is a mindfuck as surely as an industrialized Iron Curtain is a mindfuck. A Velvet Curtain lies over you softly, so you don't realize you are suffocating until it is too late.

A Velvet Curtain envelopes all with blackness, sucking the light out of truths, blending into shadows so you can't tell what is actually curtain and what is shadow: real darkness and simulated darkness.

A Velvet Curtain is permeable, but usually it is a one-way barrier, just like links from the non-commercial Web to the commercial Web. The non-commercial Web links freely to the commercial Web, but the commercial Web does not deign to link back through the curtain, creating an artificial divide on the Internet that renders communities and online political movements almost invisible to newbies who are herded like sheep through link-turnstiles that more nearly resemble the waiting lines at Disneyland.

One-way permeability serves capitalism, which is why it is allowed in the land of the Velvet Curtain. It gives the illusion of free speech (people talking from the margins outside the Curtain, as I am doing here, are allowed to exist, never actually sent off to the gulag) while rendering free speech impotent.

From postulating this Velvet Curtain, let's return to the excerpt from Gore Vidal above: "...it is an article of faith that there are no conspiracies in American life..."

If we can say that a Velvet Curtain is shaping discourse in the Western world as surely as the Iron Curtain did in the Soviet bloc, and if the mainstream discourse, the groupthink and mindfuck of corporate journalism, is passing off untruths as truths, we can then expect to find a certain degree of cognitive dissonance in our culture as well, not just "Emperor's New Clothes" cognitive dissonance, but also the kind where individuals but not the society at large have personal evidence and are confronted with differences between what they see and what they are told.

Enter the realm of blanket dismissals of conspiracy theorists in Western media. With good cause, some of these are seen to be utter wackos. But can we make a blanket dismissal of anything? That would seem to be anti-intellectualism at its worst, and that forces would try to reinforce such an anti-intellectual and unquestioning dismissal is in itself suspect. Who would have an interest in creating an atmosphere of anti-intellectual dismissal? Who indeed, but the creators of the Velvet Curtain?

Those without a vested interest in the Velvet Curtain should feel in no way threatened by the asking of questions, any questions, no matter how nutters. Questions and answers expand our knowledge base, rather than restrict it. They add to an overall atmosphere of light, rather than the cloying velvet darkness of doing what you are told on a need to know basis.

Does secrecy serve anyone, really? Why do we have Government-in-the-Sunshine Laws, do you think? Darkness may hide troop movements, but it also hides many other less scrupulous things. And what use are troops when we live in an egalitarian world of freedom and democracy and respect for other cultures? (Don't groan and say I'm naive--utopian statements express how far short of freedom and democracy the world actually is, lest we continue to delude ourselves with a few democratic structures while structural dictatorships in the form of corporations act with impunity as oppressive governments unto themselves and create vast inequalities, anger, and resentment among those who are oppressed)

Will we one day look upon these conspiracy theorists as dissidents? Brave truth-tellers who didn't maybe risk the gulag but did risk other things, not the least of which is invisibility, in the land of the Velvet Curtain?

Welcome to our darkness. Consciousness is the first step to freedom.

Miasma
3:24:26 PM