WARS AND RUMORS OF WARS

After the tragedies of September 11, people were looking for answers. Why did this horrible thing happen? Could it have been prevented? Who was responsible? And in that search for answers, people, as they’re prone to do, came up with some pretty bizarre stuff. Thanks in part to the media’s seemingly endless hunger for stories about the attacks, and thanks in part to the Internet, the inevitable flood of rumors, hoaxes, and nut-ball conspiracy theories was able to spread faster than ever before.

Before the smoke had even cleared, that old warhorse Nostradamus was being trotted out to do his thing.In case you’re not familiar, Michel de Nostradamus was a sixteenth century physician and astrologer who wrote a seemingly endless stream of rambling verses that some claim to find prophetic. The so-called "prophecies" are written using a kaleidoscope of obscure imagery that make one wonder if maybe ol’ Michel had been getting into the pharmacy cabinet on his nights off. One e-mail widely circulated on September 12 quotes one of Nostradamus’ "quatrains" as stating:

Spooky, huh? Kind of sends chills up and down the spine, doesn’t it? Some people professed to see the attacks on the World Trade Center predicted in this quatrain, and who can blame them? After all, isn’t New York at latitude 45 degrees?

Well, no. First, New York City is at 41 degrees North, not 45; and second, the second part of the quote (the part about "the city of York") wasn’t written by Nostradamus at all. Nostradamus does mention a "great king of terror" coming from the sky "to bring back to life the great king of the Mongols." So, maybe instead of looking for Osama bin Laden, we should be looking for the resurrection of Kublai Khan.

Then there was the Wingdings rumor. Wingdings is a font used in some Microsoft word-processing programs that changes letters into strings of random symbols.(Frankly, the usefulness of this feature has always been beyond me.)Soon the word got around that if you typed a the letters "NYC" in MS Word and changed it to the Wingdings font, you got a picture of a skull and crossbones, a Star of David, and a thumbs up symbol. This supposedly indicated some sort of coded anti-Semitic message buried in a word-processing program. The rumor made an even more bizarre leap after September 11, when the message began to circulate that if you typed in "Q33NY" and converted it to Wingdings, you got: a plane, two towers, a skull and crossbones, and the star of David. No one, however, can come up with an explanation of what connection "Q33" has with any of the flights, at least not a coherent one. I’m no apologist for Microsoft, but I’m pretty sure Bill Gates’ hands are clean on this one.

Oddest of all were the photographs widely circulated on the ‘net and in some tabloids. One was a picture of a guy standing on the observation deck of the WTC with an airliner looming in the background behind him. Another purported to show the face of Satan in the smoke pouring from the building. Suffice it to say that it has become clear that the first photo was a clever and rather tasteless fake (the observation deck wasn’t even open at the time of the attack. Also, the "doomed guy" is wearing a parka and a ski hat when it was 81 degrees at the time the building was struck). As for the second picture, the one of the Prince of Darkness laughing through the smoke—well, give me a few minutes and a yellow pen, and I could probably outline a picture of George Dubbya Bush in a cloud of smoke.

In these times of grief and uncertainty, people are looking for some logical and coherent explanation for what has happened. But some people reach so far for that explanation that they veer right over the line into utter lunacy while conjuring their worst fears from the depth of their psyches. The best advice I can give at this point is: don’t believe everything you read and don’t believe more than half of what you see.

COPYRIGHT 2001 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.