http://www.studioeight.tv/LR/
image courtesy of Industrial Light & Magic
Booster Shot
for release 11-14-05
Washington D.C.
I remember vividly. It was five minutes after eight (Central) on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 and I was awakened by a phone call from a friend. She worked on the 50th floor of a downtown office building. She said, "They are sending us home because of what is happening." I'm still half asleep. "What is happening?"
She said, "Turn on your TV, Lightning Rod."
I tuned in just in time to see the second jet hit the towers. I watched aghast as the shining spires collapsed in a cloud of dust and death. It was on live television. Then it was re-played for weeks. As a nation and as a world we all felt the horror of this terrible act. It unified our nation in grief even more profoundly than the Pearl Harbor attack. We witnessed the horror of the 9/11 attacks with our own eyes.
It wasn't a hot fifteen minutes after the collapses that I began asking myself questions, the obvious ones at first. Who did this and why? How did they pull it off?
Then other questions began to occur to me. Questions like – Was this spectacle produced by Industrial Light & Magic? It was just too perfect. One plane hitting fifteen minutes after the other and then the collapses that looked like perfectly executed building demolitions. How did they get all of those camera angles in less than twenty minutes? And the most pressing question of all – Who would benefit from such an event?
I immediately knew who would benefit from this disaster. It was the floundering, undefined, unelected Bush administration. When 9/11 happened, the BushCo bunch was wondering how to legitimize a questioned presidency in the face of the 2000 election fiasco. The president, in the first nine months of his reign had mostly been seen jogging and reading books to school children.
Then the jets hit the towers and as we all soon knew, it was a new world. I could just see Dick Cheney, in his undisclosed location, watching the towers crumble and pumping his fist just like Tiger Woods does after sinking a forty foot putt. This was the sinking of the Maine and the Gulf of Tonkin and Pearl Harbor all rolled into one. I'm sure the words of William Randolf Hearst were ringing in his ears, "You provide the pictures, and I'll provide the war."
Not since Pearl Harbor has an American government been handed such a blank check. The history of the past four years has shown how they have cashed in on it. The Patriot Act was crammed down our throats. The neocon agenda was advanced both with repression at home and aggression abroad. They got to have their imperial wars and were able to pad the nests of their cronies, all in the sacred name of the War on Terror. Like Ollie North said, "It was a neat deal."
I'm not a conspiracy kinda guy. I think most things in this world are pretty obvious and evident. I don't usually need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. But my email box gets stuffed daily with articles from people sending me byzantine conspiracy theories about how the boys at Bushco engineered this whole thing and how they put their Saudi buddies up to helping them out with their political problems so the whole cabal could continue to get richer and more powerful. It's not implausible. I have no proof as to who instigated these acts, but I do know who the beneficiaries of them were. According to Capitol Hill Blue there is a memo floating around Washington suggesting that the boys at BushCo are wishing for another blank check in the form of a new terrorist attack on American soil.
Now we see this administration floundering again. They've spent their fabled political capital. The lock-step support that they enjoyed from their majority in both houses of Congress is eroding. The president, with his approval ratings in the thirties, is perceived as a political liability for those seeking re-election in 2006. America doesn't trust him anymore; nearly two-thirds of voters think he is dishonest. There is a scandal in every closet. The war is going bad. Sounds like time for a bomb to go off in the bathroom at the Super Bowl.
Poet's Eye memo to BushCo:
Double Secret background.
Operation Pop Shock
Step One:
Have a group of celebs gather for an awards ceremony. Call it anything. The National Award for Excellence or The Patriot's Plaque. Get People Magazine's 50 most beautiful faces and the Academy Award nominees and Paris Hilton and Oprah and a few obnoxious comics and Mohammed Ali and some washed up quarterbacks, maybe even the Bush twins. Gather them all in Grauman's Chinese or The Hollywood Bowl or even the Kennedy Center. It would be a big gala and all the networks would be there, maybe even Matt Drudge.
Step Two:
Set off a concussion bomb during the ceremony. The cameras will be rolling. Not a big bomb that will kill too many people, just one with a lot of smoke and noise that will only set some Halston gowns on fire and break a few eardrums. Suggest that you plant the bomb in the section where Warren Beatty and Michael Moore and Barbara Streisand and Arianna Huffington are sitting.
Step Three:
Go on TV and announce that because of fancy intelligence work and with the help of the Dept. of Homeland Security, that the president has prevented this bomb from being a 'dirty bomb.' This was only a 'clean bomb' which proves that he is in control and is protecting America from the forces of evil. Think of it as a Nerf Pearl Harbor.
Step Four:
Sit back and watch the approval ratings go up.
Step Five:
Send check to Lightning Rod Consulting.
Well, now time passed and now it seems
Everybody's having them dreams.
Everybody sees themselves walkin' around with no one else.
Half of the people can be part right all of the time,
Some of the people can be all right part of the time.
But all the people can't be all right all the time
I think Abraham Lincoln said that.
"I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours,"
I said that.
– Bob Dylan
