A 9-11 Media Moment

On my way to work on the morning of September 11, I turned on my local morning talk show (which airs on the all-talk/sports station). A song was playing, and it went on much longer than the usual clip. As I listened to the lyrics--"Let's roll for freedom, let's roll for love"--I made the connection ("Let's roll") and remembered the date. The song seemed well-constructed, but the message seemed a bit too... something. I guess I felt it was feeding into celebration of those brave souls who fought against the hijackers on that fall day in 2001, as well as playing off of larger fear issues. It turned out to be by Neil Young. I was quite surprised that the man who brought us the ironic lines "We got a thousand points of light... for the homeless man/we got a kinder, gentler machine-gun hand" would present, maybe 14 years later, another song that is so... well, almost the opposite. In the earlier song, he was criticizing the presidency of the senior George Bush, using Bush’s famous inaugural speech ironically. The song ended, and there was no commentary. It seemed to be the closure on whatever they'd done for talk about 9/11.

I changed the channel and landed on the Free Beer and Hot Wings show, the generally sophomoric replacement for Imus on my local classic-rock station. Two men were debating the question of who was truly behind the attacks on September 11, 2001. One was the editor-in-chief of something called Skeptic magazine; he was putting forth an idea of conspiracy. The other fellow was on the other side, supporting the standard story (al-Qaeda, terrorists). Both were Ph.D.s. Both sounded reasonable and smart, at least up to a point. In about five minutes, however, neither fully addressed the other's points, and each engaged in some level of ad hominem attacks. The Skeptic fellow ended with commentary on the debris. Experts would have expected jet-fuel-caused collapse to result in 15 stories of debris; there were only about three. Also, there was a fine dust over Manhattan for days, and 1100 bodies were never recovered. Computers, furniture, steel, people had been vaporized, he said. So the causal mechanism (what a great phrase) had to be some higher-energy source. Then he made a leap--"probably something developed within the Star Wars program, something involving lasers, masers, or plasmoids [not sure about that last word]." That seemed to be a considerable leap of logic or faith. I’m not taking a stand here on the question of alternate possibilities regarding who and how these acts were perpetrated, just relating how this exchange struck me. And on the other side, the largest argument against conspiracy presented by the fellow supporting the standard story was that people can't keep their mouths shut--how would the truth not come out? He referenced the Lewinsky scandal and the Clinton impeachment--“There were only two involved in that event, and the story got out.” Again, this does not seem to me like clear and skillful debate. Rather intriguing for 15 minutes spent with radio personalities, no?