Noreen Gosch: "If this is it, we're in the final days"

"A fellow in New York City went to his door and asked him about his mother in Iowa and he slammed the door on him," he says. "He wouldn't talk about it at all."

Those of you who entered the looking glass on the Gannon/Gosch story may have seen the bizarre, facile, uninformed and predictable piece in the Des Moines Register a few days ago: "Is he Johnny Gosch?" Bizarre because it strikes a debunking tone of bloggers say the kwayziest things, without actually debunking anything; facile because it's not only cribbed from websites, but omits the substance of their arguments; uninformed because it describes Operation MOCKINGBIRD as merely the "theory" of Net paranoiacs; and predictable because the Register has a lot of its own ass to cover regarding its treatment of the story over the years.

So thank you, Tim Schmitt and Pointblank Des Moines, for sparing us the attitude, and doing some actual journalism with this cover story, "Death of a Conspiracy: Johnny Gosch, Jeff Gannon, Hunter Thompson and the unraveling of a troubling tale." (Note: I suggest you grab this while you can, it doesn't appear to be a permanent link. It's attributed to the "cover," and the cover story will likely change with the next issue.)

This is a terrific job of laying out a complicated and credulity-bending case in context. (Paul Bishop, Rusty Nelson, and even Craig Spence get name-checked.) I don't know how tempted Schmitt was to poke the ribs of his readers, and prejudice their judgement with grandstanding eye rolls. It certainly was too much to resist for the Register's Erin Crawford. But Schmitt clearly sees the difficult wisdom in Noreen Gosch's advice, and indeed repeats it twice: "Just because you don't want to believe something is true, that doesn't mean it's not true."

From the start, it's evident Schmitt is heading for deeper waters:

Anyone who has heard the theories surrounding Johnny Gosch's disappearance on Sept. 5, 1982 (and who in Iowa has not?), knows they are difficult to accept. If there are Satanic pedophiles working in the top levels of government and law enforcement selling kids on the black market and forcing them into prostitution, pornography, extortion and things far worse, it's easier as a human being to simply believe that such things could not be true.

But they could be.

"But they could be" may not look like much, but when considering the treatment of such material in the mainstream - even the alternative mainstream - this is, in fact, a radical concession. And it may be all the concession required to create a crack in the consensus reality.

You know what Leonard Cohen says about cracks? "That's how the light gets in."


Er...about that next issue....

I've just seen this, thanks to a heads-up from the Tyranny Response Unit:

The alternative weekly paper that published the Gannon/Gosch piece closed its doors the day the story came out and will not print another issue. The paper will apparently be printing under the name of another alt-type weekly paper in town (cityview) but the writer of the Pointblank piece - the managing editor - was fired. Apparently, the company that owns the new paper is owned by Michael Gartner, a high-powered individual in Des Moines who owns the Minor league baseball team in that town, oversees a state board that disburses funds to big business, and was a former writer for the Des Moines Register and Tribune who once won a Pulitzer. He was also once president of NBC news, but was forced to leave after the debacle when they blew up trucks with rockets to make them look like they exploded on impact.

Are you thinking yet that some people are very afraid of this story?