I had lunch with Mr. Media Man recently. No, not that same Mr. Media Man I spoke about in Rosebud #56, in December of 2006 (see archives). No, this Mr. Media Man and that Mr. Media Man don’t, I think, know each other, which makes it all the more striking that their outlook, worldview, attitude and ideas on almost everything are almost exactly the same. They are members of a Club.

“I sold my book,” Mr. Media Man said, off-handedly, glancing quickly at me through his cold blue stare to see if I had registered the wonderfulness of this. “I haven’t even written it yet,” he went in for the kicker. And then: “Sold the movie rights too….” Sipping his cappuccino.

Mr. Media Man comes to New York every so often from his home in the sticks to have lunch with me, and, I guess others he likes to feel smug about, and tell us of his most recent deals. I guess we are supposed to be suitably impressed and then go and praise—or damn—him to our other, media-involved friends. Either way, he gets some “buzz.”

Mr. Media Man insists we are friends, but I am finding it difficult to see the reasoning behind this. We knew each other long ago when we briefly dated, but ever since then our interaction has consisted of encounters like the one described. Oh, and he invites me to his book parties. Have to fill the room.

He is so thoroughly convinced of the unimpeachability of his "take" on things that I find it hard to add anything to our discussions. Anything, that is, that he won’t immediately dismiss, because if he doesn’t already know about it, how can it exist, and therefore how can he even consider it.

Somehow he got to talking, as people who have left New York do, about “how the city has changed since 9/11,” and from that, 9/11 itself, and then from that, the 9/11 truth movement—which Mr. Media Man immediately linked to the kind of crazies who pull the wings off flies, because that is what Men in the Media do. Those are the club rules. "Well how about Building 7?" I asked him.

“Most people don’t even know Building 7 existed,” Mr. Media Man said dismissively, as if that were the end of it.

He didn’t know himself. Mr. Media Man, a highly successful 40-something Man in the Media, had no idea, in March of 2008, that at 5:20 p.m. on September 11, 2001, a 47-story skyscraper in lower Manhattan, which had not been hit by any plane, collapsed into its own footprint. That it had housed the New York offices of the IRS, the EEOC, the SEC (lots of pending cases dissolved after its collapse), the Secret Service, the CIA, and Rudolph Guiliani’s emergency bunker. That it had suffered no structural damage, just a few small fires, which firemen at the scene reported could have been easily contained. That there is not one word about it in the 9/11 Commission Report. That there have been three different studies by the federal government on its collapse, all of which give different explanations. That many experts in architecture and engineering regard its collapse as a controlled demolition.

Mr. Media Man didn’t know about it, so it didn’t matter. So what? his cold blue eyes seemed to say.

He went off to meet with his publisher.

No wonder the Bush White House has seen such success with Mr. Media Men. They have the same convenient mindset: If it doesn't fit in with the agenda, it never happened. Keep saying so until the public accepts that as true. But first convince yourself it is true: 9/11 was pulled off by 19 Arabs with box-cutters. The war in Iraq is a success. The media tells the truth. And anyone who doesn't think so must be crazy. Or dangerous. Even a terrorist.

On March 7, on Fox News, Geraldo Rivera, talking about the bomb that went off at a military recruiting station in New York, said—without any evidence whatsoever backing him up: "I think that this bomber isn't Al Qaeda... He's more like those '9/11 was an inside job' kind of guys..."

Is money really all that great, that it makes one feel o.k. about doing a little dance for The Man?

See:
www.wtc7.net/
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_World_Trade_Center
www.911review.com/attack/wtc/b7.html
www.whatreallyhappened.com/wtc7.html
Loose Change, Final Cut at
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3719259008768610598
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/february2007/280207timestamp.htm