Talk

The current presidential campaign seems the silliest when I read about it in corporate media, where the same stupid questions and superficial issues and ignorant points of view are rehashed endlessly.

So I’ve been ignoring the campaign as much as possible, but a recent hoorah caught my attention. It seems that Jeremiah Wright, the recently retired pastor of Barack Obama’s church in Chicago, said several things that pissed off the pundits, one of which was that the federal government is responsible for the AIDS virus and cocaine in black neighborhoods.

I don’t know whether the U.S. government released the AIDS virus and funded cocaine smuggling to bring about the deaths of as many black people as possible, but there are people who would be glad about such an eventuality. It reminds me of one of the racist cops in the O.J. Simpson case who had the opportunity to fake evidence. If Mark Fuhrman had the chance to harm Simpson, he did. And my assumption now is that if there were a way for racist government employees to harm black people en masse and anonymously, they would. Why wouldn’t they?

The best thing Wright said was that the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were America’s chickens coming home to roost, implying that actions of the federal government were responsible. Malcolm X said the same thing about John Kennedy’s murder, and corporate media denounced him, too.

As far as I can tell, the first U.S. citizen publicly to blame 9/11 on the actions of the U.S. government was Ward Churchill, then a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In an essay written shortly afterward, Churchill said that the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Department functionaries who worked in the Twin Towers were “little Eichmanns,” a reference to Adolph Eichmann, a Nazi technocrat from the Second World War who didn’t kill anybody, but who handled the scheduling and logistics that enabled that particular holocaust to happen so efficiently.

Churchill also pointed out that the World Trade Center contained military targets, like the government said the hospitals and other places bombed in Iraq in the first Gulf War did. The civilians killed by the U.S. were collateral damage, so the civilians killed on 9/11 were collateral damage, too. Churchill was correct about all of that. Now the pundits are demanding that Obama denounce Wright. For those in power, truth is always dangerous. They avoid it, and they demand that the rest of us do likewise.

The attacks of Sept. 11 have been blamed on the actions of the U.S. government by many people, most notably the guy who ought to know, Osama bin Laden.

One can say nearly anything without overt repercussions unless one seriously questions the motives of the government. As much as agents of the government and their corporate media lapdogs have lied to the public and each other, I don’t know why anybody believes anything that comes out of their mouths. I certainly don’t, and I hope you don’t either.