The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [109]
Sadly, he was right, because I couldn’t give it up either. Instead of just ignoring the hate mail I was continuing to get, I started answering some, leading to several uncomfortably long exchanges with total strangers who seemed to have limitless amounts of time on their hands. I began to mark the passage of time by the tenor of the letters that came into my in-box every day. The Democrats’ midterm electoral victory, for instance, had its own species of letter. “Hey ‘dickwad,’” read one. “You still feeel [sic] that Loose Change has helped the republicans win votes? get a clue, fucking traitor-asshole.” I remember NFL week 5 of the 2006 season very well—an uninspiring Patriots-Dolphins game—because I spent half the day fending off a particularly infuriating letter-writer named Tim Woodill. The Woodill exchange drove me up a wall; the discussion kept going in circle after circle. The exchange is worth recalling because it shows how ridiculously far off into metaphorical hell these discussions can get. At one point, for instance, I kept asking him just to tell me what he thought happened on 9/11, but he refused.
“As for demanding that 9/11 Truth advocates furnish an affirmative theory of the crime,” he said, “that is a little like the police refusing to investigate the burglary of your house until you tell them who did it, how they got in and where they stashed the loot.”
Huh? No it isn’t, I said. It’s like asking police to say, “We think the burglar entered through the front window, raided the bedroom first, took a glass of milk from the kitchen, left through the garage, and fled on a bicycle.” In such a case, I said, “the evidence speaks—the front window ajar, the footprints leading up the stairs, the spilled milk on the floor, the milk droplets in the garage, the bicycle tracks in the woods.”
He wasn’t convinced. “Except in this case,” he shot back, “the police have cleaned up all the evidence, wont [sic] show you any of the crime scene photos and used their presence in your house to rifle through your personal possessions so that you have no idea what the burglar took and what the police may have confiscated themselves. Finally it turns out that the burglary suspect was an ex-cop who used to work for the guys investigating your case.”
I spent about twenty minutes staring at that passage, trying to make sense of it. Was Osama bin Laden the ex-cop? Which possessions was he talking about? I was beginning to feel like the metaphorical house we were talking about was actually this correspondence—was it the cops or the burglar who took out the trusses that held this metaphor together? I was still working it out when I saw the conclusion of his letter. “I guess I can understand why you don’t want to debate me on this,” he wrote. “We both know that in a straight debate I’d kick your ass.
“Regards, TJ Woodill.”
So ended about six thousand words of angry correspondence. I sat there with that curt farewell staring me in the face, eyes blank, not knowing what to do. Now I was losing my shit. I tried to avoid the computer for a few days, but soon enough I was back at it, debating with none other than Jason Bermas, coproducer of the seminal Internet documentary Loose Change. This correspondence lasted even longer and drove me even crazier. Loose Change, made by a couple of twentysomething kids from Jersey and featuring a catchy electronic soundtrack to go with an admittedly first-rate use of conspiracy-theory rhetorical innuendo, is a slick piece of shoestring-budget filmmaking, the kind of thing that should win a prize, if there were a prize to give out for best use of two thousand dollars to scramble the brains of mental fourteen-year-olds. But the movie is also a classic example of post-9/11 Internet journalism, where the fact-checking process is limited to finding a link, any link, however old, to support your story. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed like these guys had made one of the decade’s most influential films without making a single phone call to check a fact.
Before