by Michael Hoffman
I had to be out and about this past weekend, rather than at my desk, due to family obligations, and not due to any involvement in the ho-ho-ho "Sanny Claws" commerce.
I don't know how it is where you live, but in the Coeur d'Alene, ID/Spokane, WA area, the people were out spending, but doing so joylessly. It was so rote and mechanical it was spooky. The Stepford Shoppers prowled the aisles as they were told, but joy to the world, conviviality, Christ? These were nowhere to be found. Instead, minimum-wage store clerks stressed out by not being able to afford to drive their gas-guzzling clunkers to work, waited on harried and haughty shoppers. Deck the halls with boughs of folly!
I assume it's better in Europe, even though they are mostly agnostics over there; still, the roots of the holy day ("holiday") run deep in the Old World and have more of an association with the root than the register; Europeans celebrate at this darkest astronomical season and they do so in quaint and lovely ways, from the nativity displays of Italy to the festive lighting of the Nordic countries.
Here in the Pacific Northwest however, it's a mostly grim, going-through-the-motions affair. The psychological state of the masses seems to be one of mild to acute depression. It's like they don't have a fighting spirit. They are being robbed and they don't seem to think they can do anything about it. Resignation reigns, and with it, despair.
Partly this is due, methinks, to an unspoken popular sense, not quite a conscious realization or outright affirmation, that the U.S. government was behind 9/11. Not only that, but also a sense that all indicators are that the government can only radically increase its power with yet another government-approved terror attack on U.S. soil.
Columnist Stu Bykofsky of the Philadelphia Daily News said it openly earlier this year, "To save America, we need another 9/11." David Addington, one of Vice President Dick Cheney's aides, is reported to have stated, with regard to the "FISA" court which oversees executive wiretapping, "We're only one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious court."
It's hardly a secret that the government needs another 9/11, or that the Bush administration was behind the first one; and since these dreadful facts are indeed known, if only at some sub-cellar level of the Group Mind of the American people, that's a terrible psychological burden to carry and goes a long way toward explaining the apathy and exhaustion we are witnessing, or that this writer observed anyway, here in the inland Northwest.
But it's more than apathy.
The American people are wounded, and therefore to a certain extent, incapacitated. We see this even here, among the readers of On the Contrary. On Saturday we broke the story on an otherwise obscure squib that appeared in New York City's "Forward" newspaper, confirming what your editor has been saying for years, that "Catholic conservative" super-hero, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, has been engaged in a sustained campaign of actively assisting in the promotion of Talmudic law clerks and lawyers at the highest levels of the American judiciary.
After we reported this outrage on Nov. 24, it should have been passed around and reprinted in some significant corners of the Internet. But it wasn't. To my knowledge, it was published only on our own blog, and that of Maurice Pinay: http://mauricepinay.blogspot.com/2007/11/disabuse-yourself-of-disinformation.html.
That was the sum total of the "publicity" for this shattering insight into the double-mind of the paleo-conservative right wing and the character of one of its most revered icons. But if we have been adulating one of our executioners, isn't that newsworthy, and shouldn't it be halted, by shining the light of exposure on it? A crucial revelation like this is empowering, if it is publicized. It liberates those who have been fooled by one of the cruelest cons ever perpetrated inside the bowels of our own movement. After all, Scalia is "one of us" isn't he?
But so far, the story has gone almost nowhere. Is this information only passed around when it appears in Pat Buchanan's column? If that's the case, then let me clue you in on a little secret: it never will be, due to the unfortunate fact that Mr. Buchanan is one of the main props of Justice Scalia's personality cult.
This is the Internet, and as Ron Paul's vibrant movement has shown, Paul's supporters have built him an impressive base online, through grassroots efforts. Dr. Paul confesses to knowing little about the web. So it was done for him, by self-motivating initiative.
Will this populist, Ron Paul-style energy branch out into other issues and endeavors? If it doesn't, then Dr. Paul can't make it. His movement alone cannot reanimate a corpse. Paul's momentum and offensive must serve as a candle of inspiration that motivates others to work on issues Dr. Paul can't tackle right now, precisely like what we are addressing here, a story which should snowball into a hugely embarrassing controversy for Scalia.
Is Justice Scalia going to be allowed to get away with this, without any questions being asked in public, and without his admirers being made aware that their support for him puts our nation on the road to the implementation of the Talmudic "Noahide Laws"? If so, that's quite a test of our apathy, isn't it? Is that why the Cryptocracy had the "Forward" float the story in the first place, to measure the depth of our outrage?
What the outrage?