Joe Bageant.com – July 6, 2007
Dear Readers:
I received this email today from a person who fully sees through the mass hallucination under which we all live and/or suffer. I have nothing to add. This letter speaks more eloquently on the subject than I ever could.>
Joe Bageant
Joe,
Grab a six-pack and sit in the comfortable chair. I'm so pissed. It's not you I'm mad at, it's the hologram you're always writing about, that imaginary world created by the media that controls our actions and directs our thoughts. I usually ignore the hologram by rarely turning on the television and only reading news on websites that attempt to be reasonable. But though I know the hologram is all lies, I need to go to it now because I know the people being lied about and there is no other source of information.
My husband is Palestinian and I lived in Jordan in 1995-96. This week I heard that two kids from the high school where I taught there (a school for gifted students funded by Queen Noor) are in jail in England for those (I snort and sneer and roll my eyes) "failed terror attacks" last week. And they didn't do anything, Joe. They are a young couple with a baby son, and everyone who knows or ever knew them agrees they could never harm another human being.
But it's not only that. It's that there is no evidence at all. Just none. The British government hasn't even tried to make a case or suggest a motive.
That's where the hologram comes in. I always understood what you meant by the term, but I didn't appreciate all of its aspects until now. It's a hologram because you see it, but it isn't real. You see police cars surrounded the car of a "terror suspect" and are told he led the police on a chase.
When you learn he is a neurosurgeon whose wife and baby were in the car with him, you might think he probably just pulled over when the police seemed to want him to, but only if you were still capable of using your own brain. After all, his name is Mohammed and his wife wears a headscarf, and the hologram has already shown us over and over what comes of that sort of thing. So maybe you'll just ignore what your brain was trying to say -- that neurosurgeons have a lot invested in their careers and no time for hobbies like blowing stuff up, and young mothers are fiercely protective of their babies, and therefore avoid hazardous things like having their husbands become terrorists and getting in car chases with the police.
The hologram analogy also works in the way the media are so hard to ignore. Even when you make a point of ignoring them, they are always there, flickering around the edges, burning impressions you can't quite get rid of. When my sister-in-law (head of the English department at their high school back then, an English literature professor in a university now) first emailed me the news story, I thought, "How ridiculous to think of Marwa or Mohammed involved in this!" After a few days of staring into the hologram searching for information, I had to ask "Do I really know what I know? Or could the hologram be right?" Not that there was any evidence offered. There was just a bunch of comments by neighbors about his beard and her "burqa" and the mailman saying they usually didn't get lots of packages, but then for a while they got some packages.
My common sense said, "Ooh, spooky stuff. Maybe even baby clothes." But it was all so tidy and comfortable in that TV/mainstream news site world. I almost wanted to be lulled into stupidly fearing the bad doctor and his mysterious wife, but my memories of the actual Marwa and Mohammed kept getting in the way. It would have been like an episode of "24" if only the nice young doctor could go ahead and turn into a mad bomber in my imagination. But because I once knew him, he just kept turning back into a really sweet, polite 15-year-old who was always clowning with his friends. I specifically remember thinking they were like a pile of puppies, and that memory shuts down the hologram for a bit until it blinks back on after a while. And Marwa, who I remember even more clearly, was such an intelligent, kind, delightful person that her sweetness makes me cry every time I see it radiating from a picture of her on the television or computer screen.
Why can't everyone else see it?
Meanwhile, though no evidence of guilt has been offered, the holo-discussion zooms ahead. How do we keep these monsters out?
Most commentators recommend increasing security and letting fewer aliens in, but even the well-meaning ones, who say, "They hate us because we've done awful things" are missing something. "They" may or may not hate "us", but no case has been made that "they" did anything about it, at least not in this instance. And the British have an embarrassing record of arresting totally innocent people in cases like these.
The facts known about Mohammed Asha and his wife, Marwa Da'ana, are entirely positive. Well-educated, hard-working, etc. The ugly things said about them are not facts, nor are they backed up by facts. A young couple has been separated from each other and from their son, imprisoned without charges in a foreign country far from their friends and relatives.
How do you think the people close to them feel? No one has heard anything of them. And already, now that their carefully constructed future has been smashed, that hologram has shut down and everyone turns to the others flickering on elsewhere.
Joe, are you still there? I'm done. Thanks for listening.
Jennifer
Los Angeles
www.joebageant.com/joe/2007/07/lies-about-fail.html
Last updated 10/07/2007
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