"Weapons of Mass Stupidity" story resulted in FBI visit

[protect freedom impeach bush now]

this is the article that got someone a 'visit' from the FB Eye
(see the other DUer's post on FB EYE)

Why? Appears a copy was brought to a coffee house and
someone saw it (must not have like it) and next thing you know...

the FBI show up. They had traced the motor vehicle registration.


Wekolm to Bush-Askkroft's Amerika. :(

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http://www.indyweek.com/durham/2003-06-04/cover2.html

Weapons of mass stupidity

The marriage of television and propaganda may well have been the funeral of reason

B Y H A L C R O W T H E R

It's the inviolable first rule of democracy that all politicians will praise the wisdom of the people--a fulsome flattery that intensifies when they ask "the people" to swallow something exceptionally inedible. What the people never hear from anyone, or from anyone with further ambitions, is the truth. If a public figure wishes to leave the stage forever, a sound strategy is to offer his fellow citizens a candid and disparaging assessment of their intelligence.

In the aftermath of the conquest of Iraq, as we awake to the bewildering possibility of a United States of Asia, the patriotic pageantry and premature gloating call to mind an obsession that once gripped the great French novelist Gustave Flaubert. (In my recklessness I ignore the halfwit embargo on all things French.) Flaubert, according to W.G. Sebald, became convinced that his own work and his own brain had been infected by a national epidemic of stupidity, a relentless tide of credulousness and muddled thinking which made him feel, he said, as if he were sinking into sand.

At his low point, Flaubert convinced himself that everything he had written had been contaminated and "consisted solely of a string of the most abysmal errors and lies." Sometimes he lay on his couch for months, frozen with the dread that anything he wrote would only extend Stupidity's domain. Flaubert became a scholar and lexicographer of moronic utterance, painstakingly collecting hundreds of what he called betises --stupidities--and arranging them in his Dictionary of Received Opinions.

The wondrous blessing God bestowed, on Gustave Flaubert and on America's own great chroniclers of contagious stupidity, Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken, is that they lived and died without imagining a thing like Fox News. It's easy to laugh at Rupert Murdoch's outrageous mongrel, the impossible offspring of supermarket tabloids, sitcom news spoofs, police-state propaganda mills and the World Wrestling Federation. Fox News is an oxymoron--a Foxymoron--and Cheech and Chong would have made a more credible team of war correspondents than Geraldo Rivera and Ollie North. Neither Saturday Night Live nor the 1973 film Network, Paddy Chayefsky's corrosive satire of TV news, could even approach the comic impact of Geraldo embedded or of Fox's pariah parade, its mothball fleet of experts who always turn out to be disgraced or indicted Republican refugees. If Ed Meese, Newt Gingrich and Elliott Abrams couldn't fill your sails with mirth, you could count on the recently deposed Viceroy of Virtue and High Regent of Rectitude, my old schoolmate Blackjack Bill Bennett.

more.........

[TXlib]

1. I think...

I think what likely happened is somebody saw "Weapons of Mass ..." and thought it might be a how-to manual. The person likely phoned it in on the "better safe than sorry" premise.

Then, the FBI showed up to find out what he was really reading. Once they saw the actual article, and realised what it was about, they were satisfied it wasn't a threat.

I don't think the FBI has the manpower to chase people down and intimidate them on their choice of progressive reading material. Not yet, at least.