Sounder wrote:But mine was not an idea,
It wasn't
much of an idea, I'll grant you that:
Sounder wrote:the next picture has Emilie Parker... shortly after having been murdered.
I expect to continue to wonder what you think of as being ‘examinations of actual issues of conspiracy’.
Oh, I'd say there's a lot going on here once you get past the same old lameness, some of which has to do with the manipulation of the news cycle to create confusion in regard to the details of these crimes. We continue to see the destabilizing effects of crimes like this magnified through the treatment of the release of information from law enforcement and the general much-commented-upon ineptness of the press. The hidden players in power don't have to cause shit like this to happen, they can easily play upon the emotions of the news-saturated populace to provoke near-panic, distrust among the citizens towards each other, simultaneous demands for both more guns and gun control laws, questions about "mental health", and even further antipathy between the citizens and the government simply by providing a raft of bad information upon which to float any and all theories and concerns. All these issues wind up helping the politicians and their money-men in the long run, providing set after set of issues with which to swing vote blocs and ultimately disenfranchise various groups of people, and much joy is felt across certain swaths of the land.
The parallels to Brabant make sense, but they don't need to fake a massacre or false flag us to do this. All things considered, between the actions of the government and the mannerism of its people, America is likely the most violent nation the world has ever seen. In the realm of personal anecdote, even in the fairly sedate environs of my own life, I've been caught in the midst of two gun fights myself. I've known killers, assassins and psychopaths. I had a very good friend who'd killed four men, two with his bare hands; another, who died shooting it out with police in a barricaded house having taken his own father hostage; another, less close but more poignant, killed double digits with knives in service of his country and never got right with it. And I could go on. They were all young men in their early to mid twenties, like Lanza, like Loughner, like Holmes. I recognize those guys, to an extent. They remind me of people.
It strikes me now as I write this that what I'm saying is that I've known a few serial/mass killers-at-large. I never really saw them that way before. I guess I romanticized them into something I could deal with. I always saw them as victims.
And that was in my relative youth - it's many times worse now. America trains you to kill in so many little ways. I don't trip too hard on the lack of motive in Newtown, because I'm familiar with the impulse:
right there is where I felt I was wronged, and right
there is a gun, like a horse and carriage.
If most folks haven't had these kinds of experiences, it's a bit of a surprise to me, and they're lucky for that. I'm a pretty ordinary person in most ways. Maybe if I hadn't been through all that it would seem more obvious to me that these events are all staged. And, like yourself, I see the seemingly ceaseless killing going on under the imperial auspices ridiculously overshadowed by the local horrors visited upon Fairfield County in the guise of a man described by a maddeningly sparse biography and as unlikely an ID photo as you're like to come across, in many ways tailor made for the story, in other ways completely out of place, any place. No one seems to have known him but his mother, and she's not available for interviews any more than the dead of our wars or the parents of the dead children.
I suspect Lanza had a rich online life, even if we haven't been granted many details of his existence there. Handy with computers, living in his mother's basement, he must have spent hours making friends and gaming acquaintances much like we talk to each other here, much like people do all 'round these days. It shows a measure of the true anonymity that is carried by online lives that these environments have proven largely inaccessible to journalists - the details are probably known only to those granted open access to such files, the cyber survelliance crews that surely have their ways to track his machines and trace him around the net. They know what he was doing, but they're not talking either. Why should they when staying mum creates so many lively diversions? His online friends may have some clues, but maybe they're not sure who he was or sure of much else. Or maybe even that stuff is as opaque as the rest of it all when it comes to explaining what happened to folks who've never seen anyone frustrated enough or blasé enough to kill. Like I said before, there's really no justification that could possibly satisfy anyway. They say about inexplicable madmen that they suddenly snap, but I don't think it's like that. I think they plan idly, then maybe not so idly, then one day they're just ready and it's all mapped out and seems like as reasonable a thing to do as another.
It's idle speculation, sure. And maybe it's mainstream and doesn't fall under "actual issues of conspiracy" per se, but weirdness, yeah, and horror. Is it somehow worth any more than wondering why the sister wears the same dress in the photos? I don't know - I can imagine any number of perfectly reasonable ideas why they'd share that dress. It's a pretty dress, and it belonged to the dead child. Maybe it was a gesture of remembrance by the mother to bring her little girl's memory to meet the president in the form of the hand-me-down. Maybe she thought it would have pleased her dead daughter to have her favorite dress on her sister for the occasion. Maybe the little girl really wanted to put it on. And maybe it was just the best dress the newly-eldest sister had around to wear.
But yeah, I think you quickly run up against the limit of your ability to really know anything concrete about what you read about and have to make some decisions about how to proceed. I decided Emily Parker's really dead. I can't justify that decision in any non-maudlin, proof of concept way that doesn't rely on my sympathies for complete strangers and sources we all consider compromised. I'm not there. But that was the decision I made rather than creating the pageantry of a farcical sham incident radiating out from the supposition of her survival and running with it.
Anyway, no hard feelings I hope. It just kinda got my hackles up when you started fishing an idea I thought we'd dealt with rather thoroughly a few dozen pages back. You know that thing when a bad notion seems to rise again and again from the dead yet never really grows any new flesh on the bone, never really adds any more flavor to the soup, and you feel like you have to strike it down all over again before it picks up momentum, because if you don't that's all that might be left? Well, maybe you don't, but I do, goddamit.
