THE TURNING POINT
if only we knew
I realize George W. Bush has a 29% approval rating, but I still think of myself as being in a very small of minority of people who are not blindly accepting everything our president tells us.
I didn't fully absorb how many Americans distrust him and our government until I read today the results of a new Zogby poll that reveals 42% of Americans believe the federal government and the 9/11 Commission are covering up information regarding the 9/11 attacks, with another 10% unsure.
Which is to say, a majority -- 70 million voting-age Americans, to be precise -- currently distrust the federal government's official story of what took place on September 11.
The poll results aren't enlightening: even if 100% of Americans believe there was a cover-up, it doesn't prove there, in fact, was any conspiracy to conceal the truth.
What's significant, however, is what the numbers say about how our post-9/11 don't-question-our-government form of twisted patriotism is slowly -- and finally -- evaporating in the United States.
Three years ago, I was scared to even think, much less suggest, that the government might be hiding something about September 11. (And I was living in San Francisco and working in Berkeley!) If Zogby called me in 2003 to ask conspiracy-related questions, I would have assumed the CIA was secretly trying to trick me into saying something that would land me a one-way vacation to Guantanamo Bay.
I am especially surprised that this week's Zogby poll also asks about the mysterious collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, which was not hit by any planes on 9/11. The very fact that people are being polled about it seems momentous since many major news outlets have yet to report on it.
Of course, I could live for another 100 years and I still doubt I will live to see an investigation of WTC7.
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On a related note, I'm curious to hear others' thoughts on the trailers for World Trade Center, which has absolutely nothing to do with conspiracy theories, despite the fact that it's an Oliver Stone film.
I don't consider myself to be in the "it's too soon to do a movie about 9/11" camp.
But the trailer is unexplainably discomforting, as if I'm watching something I shouldn't be watching. I can't decide if it's exploitative, manipulative, jingoistic, just a bad tv-movie-of-the-week, or all of the above.
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