Able Danger is fiction, but was inspired in large part Vox Pop. First and foremost Vox Pop is a place to bring your laptop, surf the internet, drink insanely strong fair trade coffee, peruse the bookshelves for books that didn’t seem to appear anywhere else that posed and answered questions I had been wondering why weren’t be answered in the mainstream media, and ultimately where I could meet the community I lived in. Vox Pop is one of those rare businesses with soul.
When I discovered that the owner of the store, Sander Hicks, wrote a 9/11 conspiracy book called ‘The Big Wedding,” my initial reaction was, the same as I imagine most of America’s would still be, I thought, ‘What a kook! He’s wasting his time writing about conspiracy theories?’ It was only because I was such a fan of the cafe itself that I read his book. And that’s when I fell down the rabbit hole. It’s a short book, and it’s entertaining, but it’s a dense big-picture-read chock full of political and personal intrigue. ‘Gonzo Journalism’ is how I first heard it described, It was so well written and well documented that I spent the next year reading and researching 9/11.
Once again, the movie is fiction. The Able Danger story line is right out of a Dashiell Hammett novel. But the Vox Pop Cafe/Bookstore is real. The Big Wedding is a real book. The idea was to make a hero out of the man I initially considered a cook, to place his maverick investigative journalism into the context of a Sam Spade adventure. He is the modern day Don Quixote taking on windmill-dragon of our collective understanding of truth as determined by the corporate oligarchies that control mainstream media. If there was a Vox Pop in every community, I think things would be a bit different ’round here.
August 2nd, 2008 at 12:40 pm
careful what you write about guys… they will search your laptops:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25960741/
July 2nd, 2010 at 9:49 pm
[...] says, Once again, the movie is fiction. The Able Danger story line is right out of a Dashiell Hammett [...]