James Wolcott on "Grassy Knollers" - Democratic Underground

Minstrel Boy

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Tue Jan-25-05 07:26 PM
Original message

James Wolcott on "Grassy Knollers"

James Wolcott is a VANITY FAIR contributing editor

Grassy Knollers
Posted by James Wolcott

Rigorous Intuition, a blog with an, ahem, unique perspective, dips into the memory bag to retrieve a Johnny Carson flashback that brings back a whole spooky era.

"Try to imagine Jay Leno devoting an entire Tonight Show to Michael Ruppert {author of Crossing the Rubicon and overseer of From the Wilderness}, and the topic of Dick Cheney's role in the attacks of 9/11. Or David Letterman conversing for an hour with Dr Nick Begich, co-author of Angels Don't Play this HAARP, on the weaponization of the ionosphere.

"Because as bizarre and unlikely as those scenes would be, 37 years ago this month, Johnny Carson spent 50 minutes with New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison - and millions of Americans - on the subject of the state-sanctioned murder of John F Kennedy."

Carson didn't cotton to Garrison, the conversation was contentious, but still--imagine something that earthquakish in its implications being argued on the country's number one late night talk show. Rigorous Intuition also excerpts an ominous interview with Mort Sahl, whose agitation was responsible for Garrison getting booked on the Tonight Show, conducted in 1968 only a few months before the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. "If America goes, it will surely be an inside job," Sahl predicted. That's what the Bush administration is: a hammering cacophony of inside jobs.

Which got me to "thinking." Last week the Wall Street Journal ran an article on the improved fortunes of Air America, which is is picking up audience share and affliliates and proving doomsayers wrong. Good for them. But the network still has room for improvement.

I think Air America should devote an hour or two each week to discussing and delineating conspiracy theories regarding the machinations of the Bush administration, the oil companies, the interlocking Washington think tanks, and their media stooges. Some would say this plays into the hands of the right and the mainstream media, who mock any evidence of longterm coordinated activity from scheming factions as the frothings of conspiracy buffs. As Gore Vidal has written, "Post-9/11, the American media were filled with pre-emptory 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."

But if you're going to be dismissed as a conspiracy buff, why not embrace the term, brandish it proudly, put it to good use? Gay activists converted "queer," an epithet of abuse, into a battle cry by wearing it like a badge until it became semi-legitimized. Why not adopt "conspiracy buff" with defiant pride? Because of course there are conspiracies in American life, as Vidal is shrewdly aware--conspiracies to hide and blur Bush's service record and DUI; to protect the sleazy racketeering of Tom DeLay; to further the fortunes and ambitions of Ahmed Chalabi; to prevent a complete undertaking as to what transpired before on an 9/11 (consider Rumsfeld's recent Freudian slip about the 9/11 flight being "shot down" over Pennsylvania--scroll way down); to remake the Mideast to neocon specifications. Let's get it all writhing on the table.

It used to be said that liberals needed their own Rush Limbaugh. Well, now they have him; he goes by the name of Ed Schultz. What they don't have is their own Art Bell. Someone smarter and more rooted in reality than Bell, but someone to haunt the midnight hour and map out the coordinates of the power grabs being conducted under the phony canopy of the "War on Terror."