Marc Estrin

SPAM BLOCKER ON

March 1, 2005

Hoa Ngo, our excellent web engineer, informs me that the spam blocker is now in place, and he’s free to open my blog for comments. There is a dark side to this.

The other day, when I told a friend I was working on a comic novel about 9/11, he pondered a bit, then said, “Hmmm, there must be a niche for that.” We both laughed. But ruefully.

Back last May, I published a review of a crucially important book, David Ray Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor, a compilation and discussion of many of the unanswered questions concerning the 9/11 attacks. (If you have any interest in this subject, see at least http://counterpunch.org/estrin05252004.html). The review brought much email, including a short story narrated by a passenger on one of the doomed flights.

This got me thinking that perhaps the only way certain material can be presented for public consideration might be via fiction. The minute one tries to present any serious alternative to the official story, one is immediately classed as a “conspiracy theorist”, i.e. a nut (as if conspiracies never happen!), and so delegitimized, dismissed and disappeared. But if it’s admittedly fiction—and comic fiction at that? So I decided to write a 9/11 work of my own. It’s called 

Skulk.

Over the past months, I’ve brought up the 9/11 question with many smart, politically-informed people, and the reaction I encounter most often is some version of “I’m not going there.” Our city attorney, a long-time activist for peace and justice, said exactly that.

“Why?”

“I just can’t go there.”

Spam-blocked. And a very high-level full professor of physics:

“I don’t want to hear about it.”

“But Dan, you’re a scientist. Have you looked at the data? Seen the engineering analyses? Looked at the photos and videos?”

(He hadn’t.)

“Too improbable.”

“Will you read a couple of articles I’ll send you?”

“No.”

Spam-blocked. But what—in this case—is spam?

My feeling is that, though armored in jack-boots, the Bush administration still has an Achilles heel: their possible complicity in the events of 9/11. The public seems ready to dismiss two fraudulent, disastrous wars with more wars threatened, two electoral frauds, innumerable financial and ecological disasters charging, on exacerbated and unattended to, and a yawning income gap—among other horrors. But my desperate hope is that people will not tolerate proof, or even wide-spread discussion, of their own government planning, executing, or simply stage-managing the 9/11 attacks.

I can hear the spam-blockers slamming shut already. But wait. Griffin is very good here. He does not accuse or even theorize about how 9/11 happened. He simply notes the contradictions and impossibilities of the official story, and then discusses eight possible levels of administration involvement from level one—simply taking advantage of the event to advance a pre-existing agenda (a widely held analysis)—to level eight, active planning and execution. Without assuming some level of complicity, the facts simply cannot be explained. He leaves it to the reader to demand the investigations which might resolve the enigmas.

I’m for questioning spam-blockers