Anarchy's Pets
"Let's wind the clocks back a year. These cops and lawyers wouldn't dare cross any of you. I mean, what happened? Did, did your balls drop off? Hm?" - The Joker, The Dark Knight
The terrorists have not only won, my fellow Americans, they're continuing to win. They've been running the fucking table for a decade and are on a winning streak even the 1998 Yankees could only envy.
I know it's tough to stomach and it even makes me sound borderline treasonous and seditious but the plain fact is we're a nation of cowards and shrewd opportunists who know how to capitalize on that manufactured terror. That's why the bad right wing joke depicting President Obama as the Joker is so ironic.
It's ironic because, at best, the 44th president is all about maintaining the status quo in this charade of bipartisanship that, at the very least, intends to keep the government open for business, to keep the establishment humming. The Joker was the exact opposite.
Just before the Joker blows up a hospital in Gotham, he tells Harvey Dent,
Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it. You know, I just... do things. The mob has plans, the cops have plans, Gordon's got plans. You know, they're schemers. Schemers trying to control their little worlds. I'm not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are... It's the schemers that put you where you are. You were a schemer, you had plans, and look where that got you... I just did what I do best. I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets. Hmmm?
Substitute "city" for "country" and you pretty much have the radical Republican / Libertarian agenda. Far from our centrist, quasi-Republican president being the Joker, it's the madmen flying under a convenient Tea Bagger banner who are the real Jokers, the actual agents of chaos. Because there's lots of money to be made in chaos, which, in a way, makes them even worse than the Joker since the Joker wasn't interested in money or power. To the Joker, chaos was both a means and an end, its own reward. All the Joker was interested in was in Chaos leveraging itself for more until anarchy, grossly, existed within its own self.
The PNAC neocons, with the benefit of hindsight, almost seem like a quaint group of old patriots who only wanted what was best for this nation and its national defense. As we all know, many of the PNAC signatories in that January 1998 letter imploring President Clinton to invade Iraq are the ones who gave us such fascist abominations as the Department of Homeland Security and the USA PATRIOT Act.
The Joker in The Dark Knight was pure ideology, a maniac who at least could say his motives were pristine and untainted by gross ambitions and desires such as political power and avarice. But this new breed of Jokers we're now seeing present a combination of ambition, greed and love of controlled anarchy more dangerous than diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate.
Or perhaps I should say thermite.
Because only thermite bombs such as the ones planted in the Twin Towers exactly a decade ago could've melted the steel girders. Not burning jet fuel, a thermite bomb laced with massive amounts of sulphur. Only 3000° F heat could've melted those girders (according to senior management of the steel beams' manufacturer, Underwriters Laboratories). Burning jet fuel would've produced no more than 2000° F. And no skyscraper in planetary history had ever collapsed as a result of a mere fire.
And you can plainly see in this picture of the North Tower between the 8:45 impact and the 10:30 collapse, the fire is plainly out, meaning the temperature, regardless of any ancillary accelerants, could've only gone down after the fuel burned itself out.
But when a building demolition expert pointed out that burning jet fuel alone couldn't've weakened the steel beams to the point of collapse, he was forced by a person or persons unknown to recant and to revise his statement that only a controlled demolition could've pulled down WTC 1 & 2 and WTC 7 in their own footprints at free fall speed. Suddenly this expert was now saying, "Well, on second thought, maybe the girders could've collapsed in 2000° heat..." This story, which was originally published under the title, 'Explosives Planted In Towers,' New Mexico Tech Expert Says was disappeared almost immediately by Reuters.
Meanwhile, the pilot who'd shot down that jet over Shanksville, PA had been imprisoned and may still be, according to Susan Lindauer. Satam Al Suqami's (Not Mohammed Atta's) passport landed in pristine condition on a Manhattan street just a couple of blocks from Ground Zero. The FBI had begun descending on the al Qaeda-contracted flight schools in Florida mere hours after the attacks, flight schools that were owned by Dutch nationals who were paid assets of the CIA.
And don't even get me started on the "plane" that hit the Pentagon.
All in all, when one juxtaposes the official narrative with the facts, it's obvious the 9/11 "truthers", as they're derisively called, have much better unanswered questions than the government has answers. The official narrative has holes in it big enough to fly a 767 through. And the Obama administration, obviously, is no more devoted to getting the truth out there than the Bush administration that tried, twice, to block the formation of a 911 Commission.
From a purely law enforcement viewpoint, one has to ask, Who benefits the most from the atmosphere of fear that directly rose from the ashes of 9/11? As Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein in that parking garage in 1973, "Follow the money."
It seemed at one point that virtually every other psychopath in the military industrial complex (uncharitably referred to by peacenik liberals as "war profiteers") found themselves in the Bush government, many of whom in the highest positions. Dick Cheney's name is synonymous with Halliburton, a corporation whose stock has exponentially increased in value and split too many times to count, especially since the invasion of Iraq. Former Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff and his employer stands to profit quite handsomely from the sale of high tech machines designed to invade our privacy in the name of security.
And that's just the tip of the tip of the iceberg that's sinking this ship of state economically, socially and diplomatically.
All happy coincidences, as the Republican Party would love for you to believe.
The one thing that we haven't done in our mad dashes under tables and beds is ask our parents and grandparents what they did after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and declared war on the United States. I wasn't around back then but I know how to read history. And, at least as importantly, I know what's not in the history books to read.
For one thing, FDR and Congress didn't immediately begin stripping their fellow Americans of their Constitutional protections and civil liberties. FDR was all too well aware of Hitler's Enabling Act (the forerunner of the USA PATRIOT Act) and the thought of setting up a fascist dictatorship swaddled in the American flag never occurred to him.
It never occurred to FDR to set up a Department of Homeland Security that would then prove spectacularly inept at catching terrorists.
And the government didn't depend on war profiteers like Halliburton and Blackwater and Kellogg, Brown and Root to fight these wars, there was no creation of InfraGard that would be duly deputized by the Justice Department to kill American citizens. There was no circumvention of posse comitatus that gave FDR a loophole to put federal troops on our streets.
And you want to know why that was unnecessary? Because we were actually allowed to defend our homeland through civil defense agencies, neighborhood watches and air wardens. Because, you see, back then, our grandparents had balls and fought for those same protections and liberties that their fathers, grandfathers, great grandfathers and so forth died for.
They didn't cower in their doorways and hope the bombs didn't hit them in the suburbs, they didn't allow themselves to be publicly groped by ill-trained, minimum wage-earning losers or kick mothers off planes over breast milk or bottles of shampoo.
And if FDR had tried to sign into law any of those things, it would've undermined everything we were fighting for on three different continents. And wouldn't that have been silly, taking away freedoms that millions of men and women were fighting and dying for overseas that the government would then indefinitely suspend?
Yet that's exactly what we saw here in the United States under Bush. And you let him. You let the son of a bitch by puling, "Oh, please, Mr. Bush, keep us safe from the turr'ists at least until I pay off my house or exercise my stock options or until I find out how the last season of Lost pans out."
Anything, anything for safety and security for ours and our own. Because we forgot those prophetic words of Thomas Jefferson when he said that the tree of liberty had to be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Because we forgot Ben Franklin when he presciently said that anyone who gives up their rights for security deserves neither.
And if you still hold out hope that Obama is going to relax the grip his fascist predecessor began in 2001, that he's going to wipe out the PATRIOT Act and give us back our rights and liberties, then you deserve to suffer under that man for another four years.
We've been plunged into a time share of hell, renewable every four years, happily being led on a short leash attached to a tight collar because we're the pets of anarchy, dim shadows of our ancestors who found a way to beat the Axis powers 70-75 years ago with actual ingenuity, determination and courage.
And somewhere along the way, as the Joker said, our balls dropped off.
4 Comments:
JP, how could you write about American cowardice and FDR's actions after the Pearl Harbor attack without mentioning the internment of the Japanese? Not bashing FDR, just pointing out that cruel over-reaction has always been a part of the American national character. Look at the KKK during the 1920s, anti-Irish mobs in the 1850s and too many other nasty episodes to name. It's been a country of sniveling, slaughtering scumbags from the Injun-killing git-go.
Yeah, you're right. That was in my original mental notes but somehow it got pushed out in the final draft.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military/news/debunking-911-myths-world-trade-center#steel
Jet fuel burns at 800° to 1500°F, not hot enough to melt steel (2750°F). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their steel frames didn't need to melt, they just had to lose some of their structural strength—and that required exposure to much less heat. "I have never seen melted steel in a building fire," says retired New York deputy fire chief Vincent Dunn, author of The Collapse Of Burning Buildings: A Guide To Fireground Safety. "But I've seen a lot of twisted, warped, bent and sagging steel. What happens is that the steel tries to expand at both ends, but when it can no longer expand, it sags and the surrounding concrete cracks."
"Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100°F," notes senior engineer Farid Alfawak-hiri of the American Institute of Steel Construction. "And at 1800° it is probably at less than 10 percent." NIST also believes that a great deal of the spray-on fireproofing insulation was likely knocked off the steel beams that were in the path of the crashing jets, leaving the metal more vulnerable to the heat.
It was still not enough to make the towers collapse. That'd never happened to any skyscraper on fire, including the one in Spain.
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