We Tried to Warn You

Dear Sam:

Yes, it's true. Many Americans still think Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks. As Fiddy Cent famously said, "That shit ain't right."

However, don't you think that anybody who believes such stuff at this stage of the game is kind of hopeless anyway?

It doesn't seem to me that it's Oliver Stone's job to relieve the ignorant of their ignorance. He set out to make a movie about the visual, auditory, and tactile sensations those who lived through the WTC disaster experienced. Like any good director, he had limited, well-defined objectives.

Remediating the foolishness of fools was not one of them.

The Buddha said, "Learning only makes a fool duller; knowledge cleaves his head."

Morris Berman in his book "The Twilight of American Culture" cites an educational survey which reported that twelve percent of adult Americans think that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife.

If Oliver Stone made a movie about Joan of Arc, would he be obligated to tell his audience that the protagonist was not Noah's wife?

It saddens me to realize that many of my countrymen and women are fat and stupid. But I'm afraid there's not much either I or Oliver Stone can do about it.

If you believe that vigorously and repeatedly supplying such people with truthful information will cause them to wake up and smell the scorched flesh in Baghdad, you're more idealistic than I.

The people I associate with -- people who have their shit together -- had this war doped out before it started. Without exception.

To this day, the best commentary I've seen on the Iraq War is this cartoon by Tom Tomorrow, which he published the day before the big clusterfuck began. Nobody's topped it yet.

I've shown this cartoon to people who believe that Saddam Hussein was in on the 9/11 attacks, and believe me, it made as significant an impression on them as a marshmallow hitting a cast iron anvil.

I'm gonna go ahead and post this email on my blog. Just this part of it I mean.

With Good Will Toward All,
Smokin' Slim, the prestidigitator of percussion