If you haven't read the column yet, here it is.
To the editor
...
I think you are completely awesome. But the Osama
tape is real. I was hoping you would realize this.
True, America is evil, Israel is evil, radical
Muslims are evil ... but Nick, the tape is real.
Why don't you discuss Osama's possible motives for
letting the tape get out? Why do you concentrate on
the technical aspects of the videotape? Your
writings are usually more subtle than this. I'll tell
you about motives: Osama and his group are very
proud of what he did, he knows he is going to be
killed soon, so he wants the world to know that it
was indeed he who masterminded the bombing. Now
for all eternity the world will know for certain,
that it was one OSAMA BIN LADEN who is to
thank for beginning the end of the West.
Come on, Strakon, most of your black-helicopter
stuff is rational and well-thought-out, but this is
just paranoid silliness. There are ways the United
States lies, and there are ways it doesn't. This is
not one of them. Sheesh.
Frip
Strakon replies
Being in a mood of Christmas cheer, and awed at being called "awesome," I will let Frip
get away with that "black-helicopter" crack.
But even if he is a highly placed intelligence
executive — or even if he is Bin Laden's confessor — I can't figure out how he knows
what "for all eternity the world will know for
certain" about Bin Laden, his motives, and the 911
plot. My own writing was more modest, relying
more on doubt than on certainty. And I'd hate to think
that skepticism is now to be equated with paranoia.
The aspects of certainty, or at least confidence,
that my column does reflect flow from my habits
of mind involving government and my general
assumptions about human action. On those questions,
Frip and I will just have to disagree; I stand by what
I wrote.
We must disagree, too, on the proposition that "America is
evil." My belief is that the United State is evil; but that as for America our patria — the unstained remnants of
her — our dream and memory of her — all
those things are, in a word, good.
Finally, as for the end of the West, I have written
extensively on this subject, and on occasion I have
even been accused of being subtle. I will eschew
subtlety here and declare that the beginning of the
end of us white Westerners has nothing to do with
Wile E. Bin Laden, who in the context of
civilizational history will be lucky if he is awarded a footnote.
Although I always try to do my own thinking, I have
ended up agreeing with James Burnham on a
number of points (if often along a different
path). One important point of agreement is concisely expressed
in the title of his best-known book:
The Suicide
of the West.
December 21, 2001
One primary thing makes me doubt the tape —
it's too good to be true. It's the wet dream of those
who want to legitimize blaming Bin Laden
for 911. It contains everything that anyone would
want him to say in a confession, all in one neat
package, just as if the White House had written a
script for him. It's like finding a tape where Clinton
admits killing Vince Foster, screwing Paula Jones
out of her right to legal redress, threatening
Gennifer Flowers's life, bombing the aspirin factory
just to get Monica off the front pages, committing
perjury, framing Billy Dale of the Travel Office,
selling pardons for contributions, and all the rest.
It's just too perfect to be believed.
Bureaucrat X
Strakon replies
You can bet on one thing, BX. The Red Guard mediadrones who are drooling over the Bin Laden tape would have haughtily and smugly and categorically rejected a similar tape starring Bill Clinton.
December 21, 2001
Strakon writes: "But here's one thing that is true: from where we sit it's impossible to tell for ourselves."
That is by far the most important point for anyone to take from this
column. It deserves pull-quote status.
Strakon's respondent "Frip" missed that all-important assertion,
and he thinks that Strakon was saying that the tape was a fraud. (How he
knows it was not, he does not say.) But Strakon not only was not saying
that, he was saying something much more important.
Where states, their actions, and the motives of their drivers are
concerned, more and more often we cannot know what actually happens.
Will we ever know whether George W. Bush "really" won the Florida vote?
Only after he became popular did recounts say that he had. Joe Sobran
recently pointed out that information concerning the Pearl Harbor attack
remains classified, despite the fact that Nazi Germany, imperialist
Japan, and the Soviet Union are all gone. From whom are these secrets
being kept?
And as long as there are state secrets, there must be gaps in our
knowledge of what the state has done and of what it is doing. There must
even be gaps in our knowledge of how large the gaps are and how
important they are!
I am reminded of poor Winston's Smith realization that he could not
really know whether the year even was 1984, so much history had been
distorted. The "history" that he routinely rewrote for the Ministry of Truth was itself not real history, but merely an earlier rewriting.
Finally, I cannot resist commenting on Strakon's rhetorical question, "In the
circumstances, which sort of production would have been more credible: a
dark, muddy, jittery videotape such as the one we were handed; or an
ultra-sharp, ultra-high-fi DVD?"
This is one of those questions that might have generated different
answers of varying plausibility just a few years ago, but today it can
be answered with absolute certainty merely by contemplating another
rhetorical question:
Which movie did audiences leave thinking they had seen a real
documentary — "The Matrix"? or "The Blair Witch Project"?
Ronn Neff
December 22, 2001
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Senior editor, TLD