Yes, this is exactly my sense of things. I’ve always had an intuitive understanding that the world works in a very dark and different way from the official version, and I’m afraid I get very impatient with people who don’t see it. Jay Ackroyd over at Atrios’s place:
At a conference I was at this week, Daniel Ellsberg recounted a time in 1969 when he explained to Henry Kissinger what would happen after he was given the dozen or so clearances above Top Secret (the existence of which is also classified, of course). What happens first is you feel like a fool. You’ve published books that you now discover were filled with stuff that was wrong. You have believed you understood how things worked for your entire professional life, but you now find out you were completely wrong, that the real world is entirely different from what you have been told. The books you’ve written, the lectures you’ve given are based on a false understanding of the world.
But this stage only lasts a few weeks. After you have been reading this material hitherto unavailable to you for a while, you begin to see everybody else as fools. Only with people with these top level clearances know the truth. People whom you previously regarded as experts become ignoramuses, doubly so because they don’t realize that they actually know nothing.
And so your conversations with them become telling them what you want them to think.
I’m thinking specifically of the famous story from Robert Reich where, shortly after Bill Clinton’s inauguration, he’s furious when he’s told he can’t implement his economic policies “because of the bond market.”
There’s a whole other reality out there, and not only do we not make the rules, we don’t even know what they are.
This reminds me of a passage in Tom Clancy’s Hunt for Red October, when the chair of the Senate (?) Intelligence Committee is summoned to some meeting. He’s feeling all smug, because it’s really fun, being in the know. Then he finds out the meeting is to inform him that his top aide is a Russian agent. Not so much fun anymore.
Somebody, I don’t remember who, blogged that they were convinced that a newly-elected President, sometime between the Inaugration ceremony and the balls, is taken to the situation room and shown the real footage, not the Zapruder footage, of Kennedy’s assasination, and informed of the reality of their situation. It wouldn’t surprise me.
It was either Bill Hicks or George Carlin. “Any questions, Mr. President?”
Think: The Bilderberg Group
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilderberg_Group
Also featured on Jesse Ventura’s “Conspiracy Theory”.
And even though I’m certainly not what you call a Conspiracy Nut, this particular episode struck me somehow as being probably true. Especially after reading the Wikipedia entry.
I didn’t know the Dutch background of the group, so ya think I should change my logon name??? haha
The headline reads “Clearance.” But it might as well read access. Eh?
So. Do we quit, then?
What do YOU think?
I think I’d like to concentrate on things where I can make a difference.
Shoveling your driveway, then?
The problem, Susie, is that we can’t know in advance what makes a difference…