Conspiracies!

The lesson went very well, she was roughly my age and had been studying English for 15 years by her count. Basically just wanted someone to speak with and to teach her new vocabulary. I had no proper idea going in (the previous teacher had left no notes), we started with some getting to know you questions, which I only had a handful of corrections for, and moved onto some entertainment articles I'd printed off the BBC and AP wire. I actually had way more material than I needed. This was a relief.

So what do Americans hear when people get drunk? 9-11 conspiracy theories. In Krakow I got tag teamed by a couple of Brits, Amed actually did this sober (he and I had the most coherent and lengthy discussion of this topic), and Zlatan decided that we really, really needed to discuss the possibility that Osama bin Laden does not exist the other morning at the gyro shack. (Both of my boys are Muslim, I think this makes a bit of a difference, but then again the Brits were citing chapter and verse from the 9-11 Commission Report.)

The general thrust of things is that United States government did the deed. In some theories the government was explicitly involved, in others Osama bin Laden is a complete fiction, and sometimes the act was perpetrated by something like the Illuminati or the Trilateral Commission. I will be the first to admit that there are things we do not know and may never know about 9-11 and that the government was covering its ass and pulling weird maneuvers from five minutes after the first plane hit. However, I don't see a compelling argument for an organized conspiracy in this. I know nothing about the physics of the Towers coming down or why Tower #7 came down, too. I have given up hope of finding an authoritative source on either. It seems that everyone with a theory has an agenda. I do know that lots and lots of mistakes were made by the intelligence community. I do know that what has happened since has benefited the Neo-Cons (former advocates of the New World Order) and the new military industrial complex (Halliburton, KBR, Blackwell, and hundreds of other 'contractors' that are doing for the military what we no longer believe is cost-effective for the DoD to do for itself). What I think basically comes down to this: if you apply Occam's Razor, then you find very little that cannot be explained by normal levels of American incompetence/laziness and real-politik avariciousness. Is it simpler to say that a vast, vast conspiracy was carried out by our government that killed 3000 Americans and remained secret in spite of it being investigate by a congressional committee whose report became a BEST SELLER, or that fewer than two dozen men were able to use a great deal of cunning and money to exploit the holes in a broken system and carry out a horrendous act? I'm in favor of the later. I suppose it's possible, maybe even plausible, to say that some agency or group 'ran' bin Laden or the group of terrorists, but the ideas that the government purposely did not scramble fighter jets that morning in September or actually planted explosives at strategic points within the World Trade Center is fairly ludicrous to me.

I think there are a number of things that go into the prevalence of these theories. For one thing it's far easier to say that the people 'in control' let this happen than to acknowledge that there are terrible and chaotic forces at work in the world, which defy the control of anyone but themselves. I think this is similar to the Vietnam era theory that 'we would have won if the government had let us.' Another thing is that Osama bin Laden was once a CIA financed 'freedom fighter.' Al-Qaeda may have been the invention of some intelligence officer in need of good memo material, does anybody know who is supposed to be in charge of this 'Network' or who remembers hearing about it before 9-11? Even if it was I'm quite willing to believe in the existence of a number of Islamic terrorists who were linked by common beliefs that found connections through old Afghanistan buddies and leveraged this through modern telecommunications technology. It doesn't help that we've been playing political games with people's lives in the Middle East for a century and that Arabs see themselves as a being continually shat upon by the U.S. A final note: the CIA, NSA, FBI, etc, etc, have something of a vested interest in the myth of their near magical prowess. This is fed by ridiculous action movies, which are often the only knowledge of America that foreigners, even some educated ones, receive. To counter this impression I have three things: MK-Ultra (failed mind-war program), Castro is still alive (we can't assassinate the dictator next door?), and Iran-Contra (even successful conspiracies are brought down by there being too many loose ends).

Sorry, didn't exactly mean to rant there, but I had a little to get off my chest. One does occasionally run into nutty things that you can't exactly argue through in one sitting, especially through a language barrier.

It's like last Friday again. At noon it was 80 degrees in the apartment. At four thirty there were cool winds and thunder rolling steady across the sky. At four thirty five it began to rain. When I left the lesson at 6:30 it was a real gutter washer. The kind where your umbrella, despite the general lack of winds, will only keep you dry down to your elbows. It feels really good. The air is cleaner, washed and ionized. And warm rain is still something of a novelty to me.

Found two new net cafes and a couple other interesting spots when I was wandering around looking for the lesson. It was right between nam. Svobody and Moravske nam., places that I've walked through a dozen times already. Amazing how your feet can move you from spot to spot so often, but you don't really know a place until you search for something in it.

In reference to an older post: 25000 crowns is about $1250 dollars (20 to 1 conversion) and about what one could/should earn per month to live comfortably here. (That's pre-tax, assuming legal employment.) Comfortably being rent, food, transportation, phone, professional attire/supplies, enough to live it up once or twice a month, and some to put away against the weeks and months of skinny pickin's. 25000 is about 109 hours/month at 230 crowns/hour (the starting pay MKM quoted me). Sam and Denis both seem to think that I'm worth about 300 crwn/hr in the current market.