I should have said that the 2007 Media Reform conference was in Memphis. There were about 150 booths on the floor, and from the balcony upstairs you could look down on the floor and see that the 9/11 table was consistently among the top three in terms of onlookers. I cut off my ponytail and shaved my beard for the conference because it appeared that most of us looked like refugees from Woodstock Nation. I met Jonathan Simon there -- he was one of my heroes from the electoral integrity movement.
The Santa Cruz Truth Emergency conference was later. Ray McGovern left a coffee cup sitting at my table for about 20 minutes and then he came back and drank it down. There was a San Jose Real Estate guy who was making a real pest of himself because he said there was going to be a crash in the real estate market. I knew him from the impeachment movement and he was a real zealot. My association with him probably cost me the opportunity to hang out with Lenny Charles. Lenny was a mensch, and a great loss to the truth movement.
At the Santa Cruz conference I met Josh Mitteldorf, another one of my heroes from the electoral integrity movement. Recently he has co-authored a book on geriatric medicine with the son of Lynn Margulis and Carl Sagan.
What I remember most about that conference:
Barrie Zwicker declaring that "credibility is over-rated" over Kristina Borjesson's bitter objections.
A British space-alien advocate (Ian Crane) who said that the aliens' fabricated events always contain clues about their fabrication so the aliens can dismiss us all as morons. I remembered that when I learned that Allen Dulles was on the Warren Commission.
A prominent truther (David Kubiak) declaring that when corporations were first authorized in the early days of the USA, their charters were limited to 6 years, and when the charters came up for renewal, the corporation had to demonstrate that its activities were still in the public interest.
Confronting the winsome Annie Machon in the parking lot as I was leaving. I wasn't looking for her, I was headed to my car. But there she was. She brightened as I approached, expecting that I would praise her for speaking out. I said I was very disappointed in her that she had supported that hero janitor feller, because she was much too smart to believe his story for even a minute. She took a long two seconds to respond. She said: "Well we all have to live with our disappointments, don't we."
Many of the best and the brightest of the hippies were lured into spending their energies engaging in organic subsistence farming in the marginal farmlands of the USA, and thus removing themselves from effective activism.
9/11 may have had a similar effect.