well here's an actual column i wrote. too late to sell it, though.

Into the Mystic
By Crispin Sartwell    

     Whether Iran was within its rights to seize British sailors turns in part on whether they were in Iranian territorial waters. I propose to you that we will never know whether they were or not. This is because the only people with good information about this are governments, and the people telling us one way or another are government spokespersons.
     You are a chump if you believe the Iranians on this. And you are a chump if you believe the British.
    These people have only one commitment: they will tell you whatever it would serve their purposes to have you believe. Government, any government, has long ago transcended even the very question of the truth, and I imagine that government spokespersons think the concept quaint, or do not think about it at all.
     We are no more capable of believing a spokesman for the government of Iran or of Great Britain than they are capable of valuing or even discerning the truth. Obviously, these folks "have no credibility." But even that is merely cute or anachronistic. Truth long ago ceased to be a relevant idea in any statement of any government, and the spokespersons long ago ceased needing "credibility" or even operating in a world in which credibility can arise as a question.
     That's why all of this creates an interesting dilemma: since what they mean by 'truth' is 'what we want you to believe,' and since we all know this, they are in fact incapable of making anyone believe anything. Believing something is taking it to be true. So when these people start yapping, all we can really do is roll our eyes. Perhaps that becomes the actual goal: to bring everyone with them into the realm beyond truth and falsity, beyond belief.
     The government spokesperson is as incapable of lying as we are of believing him: the whole process has detached itself from the world entirely, and merely fails to refer: the press conference might as well be the twittering of little birds: it is in a perfectly literal sense entirely meaningless.
    In this case, these observations should be extended to the "statements" "made by" the sailors themselves. When in Iran, they echoed the Iranian line with apparent sincerity. When they got home, they said those statements had been made "under pressure."
     The first public statement "they" "made" on their return was a joint statement read out by a government spokesman. "'It goes without saying that we are extremely happy to be back home in the U.K. and reunited with our loved ones,'" the group said in a joint release read to reporters by Lt. Col. Andy Price, a marine spokesman. 'The welcome home we've enjoyed today is one none of us will ever forget. . . . We wish to thank everyone for their thoughts, kind words and prayers.'"
    It's difficult for fifteen people actually to write a statement. But with diligent compositional collaboration they managed to imitate both the form and content of official British propaganda, while at the same time expressing their deepest, most personal feelings.
     At their news conference the next day, they were still reading statements as various officials hovered. In short, in Iran and in England, governments put their hands up them and operated their mouths like Muppets.
     This has the effect of making perfectly nice average folks leave the earth completely and enter into the hallucinatory atmosphere of the state, where neither they nor we exist at all and there is no world to which words refer.
      Just one more application of what we might term the epistemic critique of state power: Alberto Gonzales. By the time he's done, we will never be able to know whether he lied or not about personally dismissing US Attorneys, or about the reasons they were dismissed: lost in a sea of apparently conflicting "statements," memory lapses and recoveries, we will simply have to throw up our hands. He will continue, or not.
     The question will not be about what was true, but whether a senator can force a resignation or whether Gonzales can hang on to power.
     The goal of the attack and of the damage control in such cases is not to find out the truth, or to lie; it is to make the question of lying or truth irrelevant, to transcend the world entirely and float free into the empyrean of pure power, where the question can't be about what is real, but only about who's in charge.