Conspiracy Logic and TWA Flight 800

Pierre Salinger says that he has an August 22nd Secret Service report that proves that TWA Flight 800 was shot down accidentally by the U.S. Navy.

According to the former Kennedy Administration press secretary, Navy ships testing missiles off the coast of Eastern Long Island in July assumed that all flights in the area were flying at 21,000 feet, so they used 13,000 feet as their test altitude. Flight 800, however, had taken off late from JFK Airport, and was flying lower than previously scheduled in order to avoid another plane.

Air traffic controllers, in “a tragic error,” neglected to advise the Navy, Salinger said, and a Navy missile blew up the plane. This scenario jibes with dozens of calls to the FBI from witnesses who claimed to have seen a streak of light heading towards the plane just before the blast.

Salinger acknowledged that the alleged Secret Service memo has been posted to the Internet for two months, but said he had waited until the elections to speak out, presumably to protect the incumbent Democratic president. “The truth must come out,” he told reporters in Cannes, France, on November 7.

Not surprisingly, the government has treated the ex-ABC News correspondent like some bizarre conspiracy theorist. “The United States military did not shoot a missile at this airplane,” New York FBI chief James Kallstrom scoffed. National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Jim Hall attacked Salinger “not only for causing consternation and pain to families of the victims but also for the fact that a once well-respected journalist would seize information he now admits was third-hand at best and try to promote it as some scoop of his.” Clearly, the government was not pleased about the Salinger bombshell in light of recent efforts to pin the explosion on mechanical failure.

Navy mouthpiece Lieutenant Commander Rob Newell responded that the nearest warship, the USS Normandy, an Aegis-type missile cruiser, was 185 miles south of the crash site. He said it wasn’t testing weapons, and its radar was set to a maximum range of 130 miles. The Normandy, Newell says, “couldn’t even see the TWA plane.” Newell said a Navy P-3 Orion anti-submarine plane was in the area, about 80 miles away, but said it doesn’t carry missiles. Jane’s All The World’s Aircraft, a standard military reference text, states that the P-3 is capable of carrying missiles.

Whether those 230 people were blown out of the air two miles above the Atlantic Ocean by a terrorist’s bomb, a mechanical failure or a missile gone awry, there’s something painfully amusing about the spectacle of government officials scrambling to deny the “friendly-fire” theory. Why do Americans persist in believing in outrageous theories about government crimes, accidents and cover-ups? Their standard defense is: We’re too nice to do such things. And if you don’t buy that one, try this: We’re too dumb—the government is just too disorganized to pull off a conspiracy.

The thing is, monstrous government conspiracies are now considered historical fact. In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson led Congress into a mammoth escalation of our involvement in Vietnam after North Vietnam fired at American ships in the Tonkin Gulf. More than 50,000 dead soldiers later, historians of all political stripes accept that the Tonkin Gulf incident was a fiction, a scam invented by LBJ to get us into the war. Why assume that today’s officials are any different than the ones who lied to us about that?

During the late 1960s, the FBI decided to put the radical Black Panther Party out of business. At the time, the nation was told that the Panthers had shot back at agents coming to arrest them and had gotten killed for their trouble. A few years later, it came out that the only shooting had come from the FBI side. According to autopsies, the black nationalists had been shot in their beds, sleeping.

The 1972 election saw political skullduggery assume epic proportions, as the Nixon Administration sandbagged the man they perceived as being its most dangerous Democratic opponent, Edmund Muskie. GOP operatives phoned New Hampshire primary voters at 3 in the morning, urging them to vote for Muskie. George McGovern won the Democratic nomination, but just to make sure, Nixon’s henchmen broke into his running mate’s shrink’s office and leaked his private records to the press, forcing McGovern to choose a new veep. If America had any decency whatsoever, McGovern would be allowed the four-year term he was cheated out of back in 1972, but as things are, he’s long-forgotten. Nixon, of course, died a statesman, and one wonders why voting matters in a country with such manufactured elections.

The American government has admitted to overthrowing the governments of Argentina, Iran, Panama, Chile and countless other nations. It tried to kill Fidel Castro with cigar bombs, train Laotian hill-tribe people to fight the Vietnamese, tapped millions of phones and opened millions of letters. There’s never been a satisfactory explanation for the JFK assassination or the killings of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. They tested dangerous drugs on prisoners and soldiers without their consent. Oliver North testified on national television that the Reagan-Bush Administration imported cocaine for sale on American streets to fund illegal weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras. A secret plant irradiated the residents of downtown Cincinnati for decades, with tacit government approval. Just last week, the Pentagon admitted that it’s been covering up the extent and seriousness of Gulf War Syndrome for the last five years. With that stellar record, it’s not exactly shocking that many blacks think the government invented AIDS as a form of systematic genocide, or that they buy into the recent San Jose Mercury-News series accusing the government of dumping narcotics on the inner cities. Eight percent of voters supported Ross Perot in the last election; maybe the Texas billionaire’s story about the government’s plan to disrupt his daughter’s wedding sounds a little wacky, but it’s completely conceivable.

Trust is fragile. Every time the government tells people a tax is temporary and later opts to make it permanent, every time it promises a public work that doesn’t get built and every time some newly-declassified document proves that our leaders lied about something 15 years ago, citizens learn that their leaders are both malicious and dishonest. Unfortunately, the credibility gap between politicians and the public they supposedly serve has rarely been more extreme than it is now. That’s half of the reason why, even if Pierre Salinger turns out to be wrong about TWA Flight 800, Americans are so easily persuaded by conspiracy theories. The other half is that they often turn out to be true.

(Ted Rall, a syndicated cartoonist and freelance writer based in New York City, has written for Might magazine, Maximumrocknroll, P.O.V., the New York Press and numerous other publications.)

© 1996 Ted Rall, All Rights Reserved

The Melting Pot Boils Over

Driving west across New Jersey recently, I was relieved to see the mile markers drop to single digits, and finally to zero. I was struck by a sign posted at the state border that read: “Welcome to Pennsylvania: America Starts Here.” As someone who grew up in Ohio, that seemed to make perfect sense. New Jersey is, perhaps, more “America” than Manhattan; nothing in America is less American than New York. Still, New Jersey isn’t really “America.”

Continuing my trip—I was traveling to visit my mom in Dayton—I wound westward through a 15-mile-wide sliver of West Virginia that serves as a de facto DMZ between the mid-Atlantic and Midwest regions. As I crossed the bridge in Wheeling, Ohio’s welcome sign declared “Ohio—The Heart of it All.” Indeed, the media had yakked a lot last year about the sweet irony of forcing the warring nations of the former Yugoslavia to sign their peace treaty in the “heartland.” There’s no doubt you’re in what the French would call l’Amérique Profonde when you pass through hundreds of miles of open fields or talk to the residents with their hard, earnest faces and blandly confident accents.

Going back east, however, I encountered that same “America Starts Here” sign at the Pennsylvania-West Virginia border. Now, this was confusing. Was Governor Tom Ridge, who signed the sign, implying that West Virginia—or for that matter, Ohio—was less American than Pennsylvania? After all, there are several un-American anomalies unique to Pennsylvanians, not the least of which is something called “Dutch” cooking. (When in Pennsylvania, starvation isn’t always a bad thing.) Anyway, this got me thinking about which places are really “American” in America.

From watching Hollywood movies, you might make the mistake of thinking California is “America”, but the only reason those dry hills and weird L.A. cityscapes are featured so prominently is because directors are too lazy to pack up a camera crew and go somewhere else. Californians are nationally reviled as kooky, New Agey, politically-correct weirdos who lounge in their hot tubs while race riots, mud slides and brush fires rage around them. Clearly, California is not “America.”

The South isn’t “America,” either. Although they’ve produced things that all Americans love—Elvis, greasy breakfast food, racism—they have those dumb accents. And they’re too slow. The ex-Confederacy has ceded the cultural and political dialogue of this country to the Yankees ever since Appomattox. National TV anchormen reflect the cultural norm—ever wonder why neither Tom Brokaw nor Dan Rather drawl? America is so unsouthern that we import cultural icons like Peter Jennings and Michael J. Fox from Canada. No one would give the South a second thought if it weren’t for the Super Tuesday primaries held once every four years.

You can’t count Nevada, Colorado, Wyoming or Montana, either. Sure, mountains get a nod in “America the Beautiful,” but real Americans are suspicious of people who live in the hills. Mountains are for “Deliverance” extras, militia types and flying over. There isn’t much farming there, either. “America” has lots of cows, lots of corn, maybe some grain. You also have to have some minorities—at least a few token ones—and the Rockies are as white as a freshly-bleached piece of Xerox paper.

The Pacific Northwest doesn’t even pretend to be “American.” The only thing Washingtonians and Oregonians have in common with the rest of the United States is that they hate Californians, except more so, because Californians mostly live in Portland and Seattle. It rains all the time, conifers outnumber deciduous trees, which are both outnumbered by dead trees, and bait shops in the middle of nowhere offer double cappuccinos. Americans go to Javaland to test their mellowness with caffeine. It ain’t America.

Then, there’s the stupid states, the places where there’s no proof that anyone actually lives. Idaho, according to a half-decent River Phoenix movie, has a lot of empty space scarred by flat highways, but that’s pretty much what you’d suspect. Then there’s Arkansas, Oklahoma, the Dakotas, etc.

Indiana is only notable as the inconvenient place separating Chicago and Cleveland for no good reason. The Northeast has a lot of stupid states like that. (Who the hell cares about Rhode Island, Maryland, Rhode Island, or Delaware?) New Jersey, long the butt of New York-based comedians’ gags, is more than 50 percent paved. Now that’s stupid. The ultimate stupid states are Hawaii and Alaska. Three decades after statehood, national maps rarely even show these add-ons, and 48-star flags are quickly snapped up at yard sales. Puerto Rico, if granted statehood, would become another stupid state schoolchildren remember to forget.

You can make a case for the Plains states, but not that many people actually live in places like Kansas, Nebraska or Iowa. There’s certainly something very “America” about all those amber waves of wheat and stuff, but there’s the whiteness problem again. Also, they don’t have any real cities. Cities, of course, are the least American thing of all. Nonetheless, the ideal American state would contain one or two decent-sized cities surrounded by a lot of suburbs, surrounded by oceans of agribusiness. Think of California, but with rainfall and without the Californians. Also, ever since “Children of the Corn” and Bob Dole, most real Americans get the willies when they think about the Great Plains.

Our national consciousness centers around the hard-ass Anglicans who landed at Plymouth Rock, but New England is, ironically, not America. They have those weird accents up there, for one thing. They eat seafood that doesn’t come in cubes. Even the conservatives are liberal. The states are all too small. It’s cool, but it just ain’t America. New York, with half its population living in one apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and the other half in heart-shaped tubs in the Catskills, is too schizo to be American. In fact, New Yorkers pride themselves on the very un-Americanness other Americans deride.

So, we’re left with the original Northwest Territory, the area running west from Pittsburgh, south to the Ohio River and just west of the Mississippi River. Minnesota and Iowa are out, however, because it’s so cold there that everyone talks like they’re in Denmark. Also, there are liberals there, and Americans are not liberal. We’ve already ruled out Indiana, but let’s also delete Michigan, which is definitely a dumb state for having both a Lower and Upper Peninsula. What the hell were their cartographers thinking?

Which leaves us with Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin and western Pennsylvania. Delete Pennsylvania because of the strange food. Illinois goes because of Chicago, and it has that New York State identity duality problem between urban and rural. I was in Wisconsin recently, where several people made strong arguments for the land of dairy being, in fact, the “real America.” Actually, Wisconsin has a lot going for it—a few decent-sized cities surrounded by suburbs and lots of farmland in between, conservative whites mixed with enough blacks to be noticeable but not to have any political influence and a pretty average geographical size. Still, it’s all the way up there on the Canadian border, and to me any state that purports to be America has to be in the middle of the country.

Although it’s the last holdout, and I would love to see the place of my origins declared as the only American state in America, Ohio doesn’t quite pass the test of Americanosity either. My hometown, Dayton, used to call itself “America’s Most Average City,” and that was true. Its generic demographics made it a favorite site for pollsters and product testing. The trouble for Ohio is that it’s all city—most of the state’s inhabitants live in one of eight cities, making it one of the most urban places in the Union. America isn’t urban, you know.

Some of you touchy-feely types (hello California!) might conclude from the preceding that there is no such thing as a generic America; that the United States is a brilliant hodgepodge of cultures, mannerisms, architecture, music, foods and attitudes, and that the amalgamation of this social cocktail has created a country that is unique in its diversity and tolerance.

But these days, the only thing Americans have in common is hatred. They hate immigrants from countries other than the ones they came from. They hate members of other races, other religions, other genders, other sexual orientations. The rich hate the poor, and the poor hate them right back. Americans read hate in the newspapers, watch hate on television and talk hate on the radio. Forget business—the business of America is mutual contempt.

America ends here.

(Ted Rall, a syndicated cartoonist and freelance writer based in New York City, has written for Might magazine, Maximumrocknroll, P.O.V., the New York Press and numerous other publications.)

America as Cost-Benefit Analysis

As if our country didn’t already have enough to worry about—advancing technology, downsizing, Pamela Anderson—here come the economics of rape.

An exciting new Justice Department study, “Victim Costs and Consequences: A New Look,” reveals that the “average rape” costs its victim $5,100. This sum is based on such out-of-pocket expenses as medical bills and visits to counselors. So, locking up a rapist at the cost of $20,000 a year—the average annual cost of housing an inmate—obviously doesn’t make good economic sense, the authors say, until you factor in “the effect on the victim’s quality of life,” which then brings the total average rape cost to $87,000.

Therefore it may be a good idea to lock up rapists——assuming, of course, that the average rapist would otherwise have performed at least one average rape every 4.35 years. The Justice Department plans to attach tracking devices to a random sampling of 1,200 average rapists to determine the average rate of rapist recidivism. Criminologists will present their recommendations to the Congressional Budget Office, which will then decide whether it makes more economic sense to put rapists in prison or to let them run amok.

Government analysts have also priced the “lost quality of life” for a murder victim at $1.9 million. This amount includes the average murder victim’s average pain caused by an average bullet or average knife shoved through an average heart or lung, the net total of average relatives’ average bereavement, the average number of days the mourners miss from work and the resulting loss to national productivity, as well as average burial costs and uncovered medical expenses. Do bear in mind, however, that people murdered next year will be entitled to a 4 percent cost-of-living increase to account for inflation, minus depreciation.

The average murder investigation costs only $1,400, which at first glance seems to mean the police could catch only one out of 1,357 murders and still be fiscally ahead of the game. Assuming that the average murderer serves 20 years in prison, however, the cost of housing him would be $400,000. Therefore, from a profit-loss standpoint, it only makes sense to continue pursuing murderers if at least one person is convicted for every 4.75 unnatural deaths (the $400,000 cost of housing an inmate for life, divided by the $1.9 million cost of an average life).

Actually, a number of factors mitigate against even considering rape and murder to be “crimes.” First of all, the American medical industry derives an annual benefit from the livers, kidneys, eyes and other organs donated by murder victims that are worth billions of dollars in transplant fees.

Furthermore, when jailed, a murderer or rapist fails to contribute an average of $45,000 in value-added labor to the economy. Over a 20-year sentence, this comes to a loss of $900,000—plus that additional cost of $1.9 million if the inmate should get murdered in prison.

Additionally, many murder victims are smokers, whose secondhand smoke would undoubtedly have killed many of their acquaintances and coworkers, as well as themselves, had they lived.

The statistical analysis is clear: murder—in reasonable, non-Dahmer quantities—is good for the economy, and should be immediately legalized.

If the inmates currently in American penal institutions were released and given even menial jobs, their increased production would cause the Dow Jones Industrial Average to soar at least 300 points. The Treasury Department is currently calculating the effect of legalized killing on interest rates. In the meantime, this much is certain: While we’re coddling the funeral-going, absentee-worker relatives of murder victims, our stockholders are taking a beating and our Asian competitors are laughing themselves silly.

While we’re on the subject, The Cato Institute reveals that the average welfare family receives $17,500 in government benefits, the post-tax equivalent of a $25,000-a-year job. Given that the minimum wage of $4.25 an hour pays a full-time worker just $8,840 a year, assuming no vacation, at first glance it seems that we’re paying people not to work.

But the Cato study fails to take into account the Justice Department’s analysis, which demonstrates the financial viability of murder and rape. Our society needs to find some way to get people off welfare, and out murdering and raping where they belong. Sure, rape and murder may seem like horrible crimes, but it’s time to let go of antiquated ideas of morality. In the brave new world of 21st century international competition, traditional notions of right and wrong offer nothing to a society trying to maximize its asset-liability ratios.

It’s all in the numbers!

(Ted Rall, a syndicated cartoonist and freelance writer, is the author of All The Rules Have Changed (1995). He was a loan officer and financial analyst from 1985 to 1995.)

©1996 Ted Rall, All Rights Reserved.