Okay, I want to give up and move to the woods

Jimmy Breslin, writing in New York Newsday for December 16 on the people he talked to who were visitng the World Trade Center site:

In the wild exulting over the capture of a defeated man, Hussein, you'd think that the trade center would not be as continually and vigorously inspected by sightseers. After all, Hussein had nothing to do with this. Bin Laden is your man.

Yet small crowds such as this one with their tour guide gathered through the afternoon for the length of the fence looking out at the famous and frozen real estate.

Each person you spoke to, and they were from all over the country, were pleased that the new trade center would be the world's tallest building. Also, they were supremely happy because Saddam Hussein had had something to do with blowing up the Twin Towers.

Time after time, people told him that Saddam Hussein was involved in the attack on the World Trade Center. Despite the lack of evidence. Despite the fact that even Shrub has had to specifically deny any knowledge of a connection. Despite it all, the meme has been established.

I was out there for some time, taking notes and hometowns, and it was all the same. Saddam is bin Laden.

We talk about facts, about logic, about "getting the truth out," about "if only people knew," about ideals, about hope. Yet even when the facts are out there, when the logic has been shown, when the truth has been told, when the people damned well should know, still they don't. They don't know. They don't listen. They just believe, believe the images and spin fed them by the corporate government eagerly abetted by the corporate media - the very same government and media who, they will tell you when you ask them (oh, the irony), are full of thieves and liars and who they don't believe for an instant.

I just want to go to bed and pull the covers over my head.

I said this two weeks ago but it bears repeating:

Sometime during Ronald Reagan's second term, I remarked to a friend that I was no longer so disturbed by Reagan as I was by our eagerness to believe him. ....

Someday, someday, these days will be looked back on as a time of madness. It will be compared to the Salem witch trials in psychological thrust if not in precise practice. And we will wonder, as I have wondered, and we will speculate, as I have speculated, on "How could they possibly think that way?"

But for the moment, it is indeed a matter of surviving a dark time.