I kept interrupting work yesterday to read articles online about 9/11 — not the best thing to do when you're trying to finish what's supposed to be a funny script, I suppose. But I'd go look something up on the web and everywhere you looked, there were pieces about 9/11 so I read a few. Our pal James H. Burns even wrote a nice piece about what that day did to the Broadway community.
A particularly interesting one I found was this short piece by Josh Marshall. In it, he makes the point, which I never thought about in quite this way, that all of that tragedy was achieved by a pretty small band of people, almost all of whom perished in the effort. I suppose that is one of the reasons for all the conspiracy theories that seek to gin up a larger enterprise and blame it for the crimes of that day.
During the years I spent too much time studying and talking about the assassination of President Kennedy, I kept reading discussions of the need some felt for "balance." The murder of J.F.K. seemed so earth-shattering, so monumental that it was hard for many to accept that it could possibly have been done by one lone nut with a mail order rifle. Even Kennedy's widow quoted some authors who noted that the crime seemed out of balance; that you wanted to put something bigger on the side of the scale that represented the perpetrator(s) so Kennedy would have been killed by something bigger. It hadn't occurred to me that the same yearning for "balance" may go a long way to explain all the 9/11 "Truthers" and folks who insist it wasn't that small band of fanatics. It had to be a worldwide conspiracy involving much, much more.
I don't think it was anything more than what we've been told. I also, after spending years in Conspiracy Buff Land, came to the conclusion that the Oswald-acted-alone explanation made twenty times as much sense as any competing scenario — and unlike the others, actually had pretty solid evidence behind it. The alternate theories will never go away and neither will all that rock solid "proof" that the World Trade Center was a controlled demolition and that darn near everyone but you and I were in on it. And by the way, I'm still not so sure about you…