The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [108]
This enthusiastic belief in the pure, almost mathematical precision of the conspiracy, with its unshakable faith in the unthinking, automatic participation of these long lists of faceless members of the cultural establishment, all coldly eager to get in on the killing of thousands of innocent Americans—it freaked me out. Among other things it seemed like an almost perfect mirror image of the Christian extremists on the other side of the political spectrum, who similarly believed in the same childlike, unquestioning sort of way in the satanic inhumanity of liberals and nonbelievers. Jim Fetzer believing the army to be full of soldiers willing to rain fuselage parts on Washington was no different from Matt Hagee believing the world scientific community to be teeming with men and women anxious to impose government-mandated abortions on the planet as a means of controlling the population. It was hard to imagine how either of these people managed to keep calm as they walked the streets, knowing they might at any time be sharing the sidewalk with some veins-in-his-teeth member of the Godless Man-Eating Conspiracy.
Or was it me? Was I losing my mind? To make absolutely sure, I spent much of November 2006 calling structural engineers and architects and pestering them with questions about 9/11. Most of the ones I spoke to seemed ready to reach through the phone and snap my neck in half for even bothering them with the dreaded “controlled demolition” theory. “Let me ask you a question,” hissed Mir Ali, a professor at the University of Illinois School of Architecture. “If you get sick and you need an operation, where do you go? Do you go to a restaurant? A bicycle store?”
“Um…,” I said.
“It’s the same with this,” he snapped. “How many of these people are structural engineers? How many? You people, always you are calling me!”
“But I’m not one of—”
From there he veered off into a long tangent about the fireproofing in buildings, and from there into a rant about fire in a building consuming oxygen and creating a vacuum. “The air outside the building wants to rush in, do you understand?”
“No,” I said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Well, then, how can you say you know what caused the building to collapse?”
“I didn’t,” I said. “I’m calling about someone else’s theory about—”
But he was off on another tangent by then, ranting angrily into the phone. I got similar responses from more than a dozen other engineers and architects, all of whom said that no one in the field took the controlled demolition theory seriously. “Oh, man, not this again,” said Matthys Levy, a Vermont-based engineer and author of Why Buildings Fall Down. “I’m not going to end up on the Internet again, am I?” An architect friend of mine helped out by asking me to look at my own problem logically. “The key thing you have to ask yourself is who the people in the movement are going to believe,” he said. “If you tell them you talked to ten of the country’s leading guys in the field, and they all told you the planes caused the collapses, will they believe you? If the answer is no, what are you going to do—talk to ten more?”
“That’s a good point,” I said.
“Just give it up, man,” he said. “This is an American controversy. No one ever gives up or admits they’re wrong. It