There definitely seems to be a racial and economic component to the types of people who think “the government did it” (9/11) and those who don’t. “You know there’s something funny about all this,” said the guy who came to install my cable. He was African-American, about 35. “You telling me every man on those planes—and some of the women—wouldn’t be going after those hijackers? They didn’t even have guns!”
I talked to a cop who said he’d been down at Ground Zero for six weeks after the attacks. “I don’t have any symptoms yet, thank God,” he said. “But a lot of people are getting sick, so I’ve been going for my body scans.” He was a white guy, Italian, 45.
“The thing that got me,” he said, “was, there was no bodies. Almost 3,000 dead and no bodies. Just, like, parts. Fingers, stuff like that. It was like everybody was blown to bits.”
In fact the coroner’s report (which came out only last year), said that there were only a handful of identifiable bodies at the scene. Some of those poor people had possibly jumped. “They were finding body parts on the roofs of buildings blocks away,” the cop said. “How can they account for that?”
Meanwhile an editor friend of mine—a white guy, 35—says, “People have a psychological need to believe in conspiracy theories.” That’s what USA Today said, too. Another friend, a 40-year-old white woman who works in Hollywood, said, “Some people just hate Bush so much they can’t think about this rationally.”
According to Zogby, the polling company, people who are white, Republican, and/or have higher income brackets are less likely to suspect that the U.S. government is either involved in or covering up information about 9/11. African-Americans, Hispanics, and young people (under 30) are most likely to doubt the so-called “official story.”
I thought about this yesterday while reading a piece in the New York Times about the 17th century philospher Spinoza, entitled “Reasonable Doubt.” The writer, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, said that Spinoza “understood the powerful tendency in each of us toward developing a view of the truth that favors the circumstances into which we happen to have been born…. Against this tendency we have no defense but the relentless application of reason.”
She was talking in general about Spinoza’s influence on the development of democratic ideals. It made me think about the many reasonable questions around 9/11 which are being dismissed by people who consider themselves very reasonable, perhaps even more reasonable than others.
Spinoza thought that “reason must stand guard," Goldstein wrote, "against the self-serving false entailments that creep into our thinking, inducing us to believe that we are more cosmically important than we truly are.”
Every mainstream media outlet that has covered questioners of the official story—with the exception Vanity Fair, and CSPAN—has treated them with a certain, more-reasonable-than-thou attitude.
But how reasonable, really, is the assertion that 19 men with box-cutters foiled the 400-billion-dollar-a-year U.S. military? That not one among the countless fighter jets guarding this country could be scrambled to follow four hijacked planes that were in the air, all together, for hours?
How reasonable is the 9/11 Commission’s claim the mammoth, extraordinarily reinforced steel frames of the Twin Towers melted and collapsed in 6.5 seconds, due to some sporadic fires, which had been burning for only a short time (and which fireman at the scene said could be contained)?
How reasonable is its claim that a 255,000-pound Boeing 757, American Airlines Flight 77, disappeared into a 20-foot hole in a building—the Pentagon—leaving no mark of its 124-foot wingspan on the exterior?
And how reasonable is the claim that another Boeing 757, United Flight 93, crashed into a field, in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, when “debris fields” were found three to eight miles away from the site? Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to deduce that the plane was shot down? How reasonable is this official story, after all?
It reminds me of that scene in The Wizard of Oz where the apparition of Oz says, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” Some people find it less scary to look. There are those who seem to look over their shoulders when you begin to question the official story. My first reasonable question to them would be: What are you afraid of?
“It’s a shame what they did to those people,” on 9/11, said a South American immigrant, a craftsman, I talked to. “A damn shame. But the worse shame is nobody’s going to do anything about it.”
A good place to start is The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions by David Ray Griffin, available at www.amazon.com; www.911truth.org and www.911blogger.com; and the documentaries Loose Change and 9/11 Eyewitness on Google Video. The Bush administration tells us to be afraid, very afraid; but another president, Franklin Roosevelt, of course, assured us more reasonably that "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."