Berwick’s Progressive, Not “Dangerous”

I object to the headline of your recent profile of gubernatorial candidate Don Berwick (The “Dangerous” Democrat, April 24). What an irresponsible title for this article! Don Berwick is a progressive Democrat whose message has been clear: single payer, no casinos, decrease income gap. Why would you title an article about him using Glenn Beck’s words? This is completely out of bounds and irresponsible. Just to grab a headline?

Reeny Groden

Web Comment

 

Enemies of Clarity

Ah, Elliot Tarry (“Gannon’s House of Cards,” April 24), my old nemesis from Valley Free Radio’s “Bread and Roses Show” (hosted by the inimitable Joel Saxe). Quo vadis, dude?

Like many a conspiracist, Elliot likes to shoot off a bushel of facts like the finale of a fireworks display, in the hope that the sheer volume of them will make people go, “Ooooooh, Ahhhhhh!” and applaud. He ends his facts-pyrotechnics about the Marathon bombing (and its dead bomber) with the question: “In other words, did the FBI create a monster?”

Well, duh! The monsters created by the FBI and CIA over the years would make Dr. Frankenstein blush with envy. The ineptitude and double-dealing of both agencies, along with their perfidy, has scored as many own goals as any dysfunctional push-me-pull-you freakazoid iron-fisted gummint bureaucracy in the last 150 years.

But the point, my dear Elliot, is does one believe that the FBI and/or CIA created said monster because it/they wanted to set off a bomb in Boston? Hmmmm? Come on, Elliot, you know that you and your deluded conspiracists’ cabal are dying to make that connection! The same way you believe (along with all those tenured PhDs you are so enamored of) that the government arranged for jets to be flown into the Twin Towers and set the charges which later dropped the buildings. You know you do! And all who likewise believe such trifling notions are deluded, and the deluded conspiracists amongst us are as much the problem as any other enemy of clarity.

The antidote to all these meta-fictions are the words of Malcolm X (a man who knew a thing or two about conspiracies). Shortly after JFK’s assassination Malcolm was asked about it and explained it best. He said it was a “sase of the chickens coming home to roost.” You cannot be the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” as Dr. King said, and not have those chickens come a-knocking. And Malcolm’s words stand still as the best explanation for Kennedy’s murder. For every one of Elliot’s “architects and engineers for 9/11 Truth,” there are just as many who would swear the opposite on a stack of PhDs. For every expert who has definitively shown that Oswald could never have made those three shots, there are experts who can show (yes, definitively!) that Oswald could’ve made them. And on and on.

September 11, 2001 was the best example of the chickens coming home to roost since, well, Kennedy. But the CIA’s funding, training and empowering of Al Qaeda during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan is not an example of a later conspiracy to blow up New York and Washington D.C. It is another classic example of how imperial powers nurture their own worst enemies. 9/11 was not a conspiracy, it was the whirlwind we reaped for the ill winds we as a nation had sewn.

But Elliot does make one illegal move on the game of “Twister: conspiracy version” he’s playing. He says that me and “millions of Americans” share an “existential crisis” because we reject “the mention of exposed facts surrounding the JFK assassination, 9/11 and now the Boston Marathon bombing.” Did you catch it? “Exposed facts”? What facts are those, Elliot? They are the versions of events you choose to accept, but you cannot live with the ambiguity of opposing ideas, you cannot hold more than one thought at a time in your head—as is true of all conspiracists—so you title them as “Facts” and fire them off like whirlygigs at the fourth of July.

Still, it remains: either you believe with the faith of little children that our lives and history are controlled by the dark conspiracies of omnipotent elites, or you don’t. Elliot still does, I still don’t.

Joe Gannon

Northampton