The dearth of posting is in part because i don’t want to get into a fruitless monomaniacal quest insisting that that this whole anthrax story reeks of bullshit disinformation, but ranking right up there with the weird insistence that there was some connection between the place where some of the anthrax letters were mailed, Ivins, and an allegedly obsession with a certain sorority (?!) there is this little fragment:
The documents disclose that authorities searched Ivins’ home on Nov. 2, 2007, taking 22 swabs of vacuum filters and radiators and seizing dozens of items. Among them were video cassettes, family photos, information about guns and a copy of “The Plague” by Albert Camus.
It’s all about superficial symbolism here.
Or maybe i’m getting this all wrong here. Maybe Camus is the new Salinger, in terms of sleeper agent signifiers. Let us not forget Bush’s alleged reading of Camus’ The Stranger. Investigate! Seize his papers immediately!
It’s even funnier to see that in The Plague, there is a character misreading Kafka’s The Trial as a mystery, as it addresses the FBI’s seizure of Ivin’s copy of The Plague directly. Do they have some rogue agent performing a meta-commentary on the investigation by leaking that detail?1
- Lemme admit that it’s been close to twenty years since i might have read The Plague, because a friend and i thought that it sounded cool and named a zine after it. I suspect that i did, but these things are tough for me to remember, thus all of the journals and blogs through the years. [↩]