Like everyone else in this country (except, we can hope by now, a few official-type investigating officers), I don't know who was responsible for yesterday's ghastly bombing in Boston. And like less than half the people in this country, it seems, I know I don't know. It's distressing how many folks seem to have decided it absolutely, positively, proven-beyond-all-doubt has to be…well, whoever they're most afraid of. How many acts of terrorism now have been initially blamed on certain foreign villains and then later it turned to be some home-grown psychopath?
A little while ago, a so-called Terrorism Expert was on CNN saying the kinds of things that self-proclaimed experts say when they don't know anything and feel they have to say something. He's sure it was a group like Al Qeada. Why? Because there were two bombs and a "lone nut" (his term) couldn't have managed two bombs. Ergo, it had to be a whole group.
I'm not sure why one person couldn't plant two bombs. Wasn't the 1996 Olympic Park Bombing committed by one guy who'd been going around planting multiple explosive charges? Why is it so impossible for a guy who could make one and plant one bomb to make and plant two?
Years ago when I was immersed in Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy talk, I found this interesting. There was a theory that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, had killed John F. Kennedy. There were elaborate theories that involved hundreds, even thousands of people who got together, killed J.F.K. and then managed to keep the secret within their very large circle. But I never saw anyone with a theory that two or three people had killed Kennedy. It was always one guy or a whole mob.
It seemed to me that most of those who held out for the whole mob had worked backwards to get there; that they'd started with the assumption that The Crime of the Century had to be about something way bigger than any motive a gnat like Oswald could have had. So then the narratives diverged: Was it a Big Conspiracy in which Oswald was a patsy? Or a Big Conspiracy in which Oswald was utterly uninvolved? There were dozens if not hundreds of theories within those two categories. But there were no theories involving Small Conspiracies.
I have no real point to make here…just my observation that folks are too quick to make the leap from Lone Nut to Big Conspiracy. Right now, we shouldn't be jumping to either because we don't know. And some of us even know that.