-Caveat Lector-
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/Pitt062501/pitt062501.html
By William Rivers Pitt
The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the
rigidity of the system of ideological control�'indoctrination,' we might
say�exercised through the mass media. �Noam Chomsky
June 25, 2001�In the early morning hours of Thursday, June 22, 2001,
a man named Jared T. Bozydaj took to the streets of New Paltz, New
York, with an Intrac Arms 7.62 semi-automatic assault rifle. He fired
pointedly at police officers, wounding one officer named Jeffery Quiepo
in the arm. The shooting went on for several hours before Bozydaj was
disarmed and arrested.
Bozydaj was described as being highly upset by the execution of
Timothy McVeigh. He apparently had decided to take revenge in
McVeigh's name on the police, whom Bozydaj referred to as "control
mechanisms for the government." Weapons and literature in his
apartment indicated that Bozydaj had been planning this attack for
some time.
New Paltz is a small community near the Hudson River about an hour
north of New York City. The downtown district is filled with small stores,
as well as a number of bars that cater to the students of the State
University of New York (SUNY) New Paltz, the campus of which is only
a few blocks away from where this shooting occurred. The best word to
describe the place is 'quaint.'
My girlfriend was born and raised near this town. I have spent many
drunken hours with her in the bars that now bear the bullet holes from
Bozydaj's rampage. My girlfriend's parents report that much of
downtown New Paltz is roped off with yellow police tape today. One can
see quite clearly the damage done by Bozydaj's assault rifle, and the
police believe it is a miracle that no one was killed.
One SUNY student reported that eight bullets passed through her
bedroom wall, and said that she would have been shot in the head if her
radiator had not deflected the rounds.
I discovered this story on the forums of DemocraticUnderground.com,
where someone had posted it as a topic for discussion about McVeigh-
oriented violence. I forwarded the link, a story from the Zwire news
service, to my girlfriend, for obvious reasons. She called her parents and
got the story from the ground. The local New Paltz paper, the Times-
Herald Record, covered the shooting in detail, and she sent me the link
to their story.
The next day, my girlfriend called me."I haven't seen this story in any of
the newspapers," she said. "It wasn't on CNN or Peter Jennings last
night. Why do you think they aren't reporting this? Some guy shot up
my town, and shot a cop. That's news, isn't it?"
I am a news junkie, and had myself noticed that this interesting and
disturbing story had not appeared anywhere in the national news media.
Using the words "New Paltz" and "Bozydaj," I searched The New York
Times, an obvious place for this story to appear, and came up empty. I
did the same at CNN.com, The Washington Post, ABCNews.com and
several other news outlets, and found nothing.
A man, motivated by the execution of Timothy McVeigh, had gone on
an hours-long shooting rampage directed exclusively at cops in a small
New York town with a sophisticated assault rifle. He blew a hole in a
cop, and shot hell out of every storefront in the vicinity. He nearly put a
bullet through the head of a sleeping college student. Somehow, this
was not deemed newsworthy by virtually every major news outlet in
America, including the Times of New York, the state where this
shooting took place.
Why?
An immediate explanation is that the editors of these news sources
were acting out of a sense of responsibility. For most Americans, the
name Timothy McVeigh is synonymous with pure evil. It is likely that a
decision was reached among the purveyors of our information that
nothing should be published or broadcast that will give ear to those who
consider McVeigh a martyred hero. The fear, I suppose, is that if
enough of these kinds of stories get out, some of our militia-oriented
citizenry will think the Revolution is finally at hand, and take to the
streets of their own small burgs with rifles at the ready.
This kind of quiet censorship, however, raises some disturbing
questions. If unreported McVeigh-motivated shootings like this are
happening in New Paltz, where I am lucky enough to have eyes on the
ground, where else are they happening, and going unreported? I have no
friends in Akron, Butte, Silver Springs, Kissimmee, El Paso, or
Needles. Where else in America is violence like this breaking loose?
Why are we not being told of it? What else is being withheld?
Noted linguist Noam Chomsky has observed many times that the
national media is not the information-disbursing entity created by our
love for the First Amendment of the Constitution. Rather, the national
media is the propaganda wing of the status quo. The national media
tells us things in a certain way to keep our eyes on the ground, and to
keep us from questioning power too closely. When no other avenue is
available to control the masses, the national media simply refuses to
inform us at all.
We have seen this phenomenon many times in many places. How
many of us truly know the level of poverty that exists in America? How
many of us know the toll our sanctions in Iraq have taken on the civilian
populace of that country? How many of us know the number of dead
that were left at the hands of CIA-trained and armed murderers in
Nicaragua during the Reagan administration? How many of us truly
know the extent to which corporations run the government of this
country?
Were we told all the facts in unpolished newspaper prose, a howl of
outrage the likes of which has never before been heard would rise from
the throat of the American populace. This, more than anything, is the
reason we are left in our uninformed state of bliss. Were we to be truly
informed by the media outlets, so much would change so fast, and so
many of those who hold the power and the purse strings would be run
out of town on a rail, that the very nature of power in this country would
be shattered forever. Those who sup on the teat of the status quo want
nothing to do with this. Ergo, we are left in the dark.
Such a condition is beyond the concepts of Left or Right. Political
affiliation is mere window-dressing in the high apartments of true power
in America. One need only look at the corporate connections of Gore
and Bush, our last two presidential challengers, to know that party
politics doesn't matter a damn at the end of the day. Everything boils
down to the central question: who rules?
Not us, friends. Not when we are kept safe and uninformed. It is better
this way, when the tree-shakers are kept out of the loop.
The fact that Mr. Bozydaj's shooting rampage went completely
unreported by the national news media, an entity entrusted with
informing this vast nation about the truths that happen within its borders,
should shake your confidence in what we are told to its foundations. I
don't care for Mr. Bozydaj's views, and I despise anyone who would
attack police officers with an assault rifle. But, simply put, he happened.
We deserve to know.
If the news media can report on a consensual relationship between
adults for two years, they can report on Mr. Bozydaj. If the news media
can report on every school shooting, despite the real danger of inciting
copycat outrages, they can report on Mr. Bozydaj. And if they can
report the actions of Mr. Bozydaj, they can certainly report other
stories, as well.
We deserve to know who runs this country.
We deserve to know where we are at war, and who is dying.
We deserve to know where we have been at war, and whom we killed.
We deserve to know who is starving in our country, and why.
We deserve to know what happened in Florida.
We deserve to know many things we are never told of, or are lied to
about. When we are not told, we are deprived of the right and ability to
determine the course of this country, as is our purpose as citizens. We
all know the dangers of making uninformed decisions, having done so to
our woe many times in our daily lives.
How many decisions have we made in the name of this nation without
all the relevant facts in hand? How many more such decisions will we
make?
Too often, others do our thinking for us. The story of Mr. Bozydaj is just
one example of this phenomenon. If you love this country, fear in your
soul what other areas in the life of our country you are not allowed to
participate in, simply because someone else decided you didn't need to
know.
--
Best wishes
In any dispute between a citizen and the government, it is my instinct
to side with the citizen. I am against bureaucrats, policemen, wowsers,
snouters, smellers, uplifters, lawyers, bishops and all other sworn
enemies of the free man. I am against all efforts to make men virtuous
by law. I believe that the government, practically considered, is simply
a camorra of incompetent and mainly dishonest men, transiently licensed
to live by the labor of the rest of us. I am thus in favor of limiting
its powers as much as possible, even at the cost of considerable
inconvenience, and of giving every citizen, wise or foolish, right or
wrong, the right to criticize it freely, and to advocate changes in
its constitution and personnel...the very commonest of common men has
certain inalienable rights.
-H.L. Mencken, Autopsy, American Mercury, September 1927
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