The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [107]
When I first came up with this plan in the middle of the night some weeks back, it seemed to make literary sense. Having this strange born-again imposter disappear back to the Holy Land by means of some absurd and weirdly banal maybe-miracle seemed like the correct play here, come-dically. But that was in a vacuum, dealing not with real people but with uncomplicated Christian villains. But most of these people were just plain sad, and pulling this kind of stunt was turning out to be meaner than even I was willing to be. Listening to Laurie tell her terrible story, I was beginning to wish I’d kept my sleeve rolled down.
“Do you think it’s a sign?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Maybe it means Jesus is coming,” she said, a tear falling down her cheek.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Because I’m ready,” she said, sniffling. “Are you ready?”
Jesus, I thought. This is awful.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” she said, smiling. “With things in this world so bad, at least we Christians are ready for the next one.”
She dabbed her eyes with a napkin. This was too much. I got up to go to the bathroom, splashed my face with water, took a deep breath, then came back. Stopping in front of our table, I smiled. In front of Laurie, on the check pad, were a pair of paper fortune-cookie fortunes, surrounded by a mess of yellow crumblets. Laurie had been unable to resist eating the forbidden cookies.
When I sat back down, she saw me glance at the pile.
“I didn’t read the fortunes,” she said quickly, wiping her mouth. “Honest. I just ate the cookies.”
“That’s alright with me,” I said. “Seriously.”
“It’s alright?”
“Sure,” I said. “I think so.”
She didn’t sound convinced. A few minutes later, we got up and left the restaurant. My time in Texas was up.
TWELVE
Conspiracy Interlude III,
or
The Derangement of the Peace Movement
AFTER MY INCIDENT in the diner with Nico Haupt and the other Truthers, I was, for quite some time, obsessed with the movement. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I would stay up late at night surfing Truther sites and trying to wrap my head around some of the theories. I found myself trying to put myself in the shoes of someone like University of Minnesota professor emeritus Jim Fetzer, a onetime leader of the movement (and head of the Scholars for 9/11 Truth) who among other things was the guy who came up with the theory about conspirators dropping 757 parts onto the Pentagon lawn from a circling C-130. I wondered where exactly a philosophy professor from Duluth imagined people like Dick Cheney and George W. Bush would go to find soldiers willing to lean out of a massive cargo plane midflight and drop huge chunks of metal onto a crowded crime scene. Clearly he thought this was not much of a problem, logistically speaking.
Another writer, a noted JFK conspiracist named Jim Marrs, speculated that former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean was an obvious choice to head the massive coverup exercise known as the 9/11 Commission because he sat on the Council on Foreign Relations, a “secret society,” as Marrs called it. He wrote this matter-of-factly, as if could be taken for granted that groups like these were little more than tightly knit bureaucratic communities of like-minded assassins. I then saw this assertion repeated religiously all over the Web—Kean naturally led the coverup, he was in the CFR, after all.
Gradually it began to dawn on me that very large numbers of people, perhaps millions,*8 had no problem accepting the idea that a milquetoast career pol like Tom Kean would just casually salute and say “Jawohl!” when asked to cover up the biggest mass murder in American history—just because he sits on the