Waiting for lefty
(To Shut Up)

Part I

Now we have the most formidable military machine in human history --- under the control of a government of wheeler-dealers and armchair militarists suffering from delusions of adequacy. This means the USA badly needs an intellectually honest, critical domestic opposition. However, sources other than the stereotype Left will have to generate that opposition, if it is to be taken seriously by a significant number of grownups. This became ludicrously clear to me in late September when I sat in at a discussion meeting by an aviary of old, new, and leftover Leftists.

The murderous airplane hijackings and destruction of the World Trade Center a couple of weeks earlier were the meeting's subject, and the air in the room fairly crackled with indignation. But the group's wrath was directed uniformly against the U.S., which was the injured party! The meeting was held before the U.S. had yet made any military response whatsoever, but the congregants were already boiling with indignation against the U.S. for all the terrible things which the group expected it to do in the future.

Living in the conditional future tense seems to be inescapable on the Left, like an occupational disease. Two generations ago, sentimental Leftists airily explained away Stalin's habit of breaking millions of eggs on the basis of the wonderful omelette that "the Soviet experiment" was cooking up for the future. The perpetual failure of that future to arrive rarely troubled its devotees, but you would think that the spectacular collapse of the whole sham would make them reconsider the logic of future-tripping. However, now the old trick of justifying backwards from an imaginary future had seemingly been replaced by a new one: indignation-in-advance. I asked myself how well this attitude would travel outside the air bubble in which the group was suspended.

The most vociferous of the group --- let me call him Lefty --- claimed to be entirely unsurprised by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He made passing reference to the well-deserved "Arab rage" against the U.S. for its many transgressions, and so on. However, the core of his analysis was that American ruling circles had been plotting to invade Afghanistan for many years, and the 9/11 events simply gave them the pretext to do so which they had long desired. Therefore, the U.S. plotters in government had undoubtedly connived in the 9/11 terrorist attacks and might even, he mused, have had a hand in organizing them. Most of the other congregants around the room nodded gravely.

The purpose of the plan to invade Afghanistan was, of course, to build an oil pipeline there. In Lefty's scheme of things, the oil business is the sole determinant of American attention to any part of the universe, thus explaining U.S. concern with such likely pipeline sites as Haiti, Kosovo, the moon, the planet Mars, and next Afghanistan.

Parenthetically, the eager student can find out all about the pipeline plots by visiting Rense.com. One of my favorite examples from this website conflates the plans for Kosovo and for Afghanistan, with a nod to another trouble spot which might be a misspelling of Chechenya. Referring to the Caspian Sea oil fields as being under a place called "Chenya," it confides that the oil must be piped out either across Afghanistan or by "tankers from the Black Sea, bypassing the Bosporus, up the Danube River and then through a very short pipeline across Kosovo to the Mediterranean at Tirana, Albania." The level of knowledge on display here --- Chechnya (if that is what is meant by Chenya) does not border the Caspian Sea, Kosovo is on the opposite side of Serbia from the Danube, and Tirana is not on the Mediterranean --- is altogether typical of the genre. For the benefit of its students, Rense.com also helpfully brings together convenient links on UFO sitings, alien abductions, crop circles, and the latest doings of Lyndon Larouche.

Lefty's information undoubtedly came from sources akin to those collected in Rense.com. Naturally, he was well aware that the vast pipeline plot was tied in with the IMF, the World Bank, Starbucks', the fascist board of Pacifica, the fascist settler state of Israel, the American Jewish lobby, McDonald's, the running-dog social democrats of Europe, Tony Blair, and, perhaps most sinister of all, the "bio-geneticists" with their genetically modified soybean. The connections between these assorted tentacles of the conspiracy were a little too complex for me to follow in detail, but they accounted for anything that happened, or indeed could happen, anywhere in our galaxy.