The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [111]
“No,” he said. “That’s absurd.”
Then what did he mean?
“I think the Bush administration was anxious to protect its relationship with Saudi Arabia. I think they were covering up Saudi Arabian involvement,” he said. “Dating back many years the U.S. had an agreement to provide security to Saudi Arabia in exchange for a free flow of petroleum. They just weren’t ready to jeopardize that relationship. That’s what that was about.”
“Right,” I said. “Well…thanks.”
“No problem,” he said. “Who did you say you worked for again?”
“Um, well, usually I work for Rolling Stone, but not in this case,” I said. “I was just sort of curious.”
“I see,” he said nervously.
“You know, Senator, we met once,” I said. “In Orlando. I carried your luggage.”
“I see,” he said again.
“But the thing was, we never got to finish talking, because I was undercover and I had to revert back to my, uh, secret identity,” I said.
“Mm-hmm, ri-i-i-ght,” said the retired senator.
Graham couldn’t get off the phone fast enough after that. When he finally hung up, I sat in my room—I was in Texas by then, ensconced in my new life as a member of the Cornerstone Church—and suddenly it occurred to me that I had adopted all the characteristics of a 9/11 Truther. I was living almost full-time on the Internet, my personality had twisted in an extremely unpleasant missionary direction, and I was now more intimately familiar with names like Mahmoud Ahmad and Hani Hanjour than I was with the affairs of my own family. I used to think a lot about things like football in my spare time—now I was running over the historical details of 9/11 even as I went to sleep.
I started going to 9/11 Truther meetings under a pseudonym. My real self was under there somewhere, but it was becoming alarmingly easy for me to deal in these environments. Technically I was still what they would call a debunker or a “left gatekeeper,” a defender of the “official story,” but in a weird way I found myself in some of these gatherings getting legitimately impatient with the slow tactics of the movement. After all, I thought, if you really think that the government murdered three thousand Americans, shouldn’t you be doing more than holding sit-ins and organizing discussion groups? And so, at some of these meetings, I started to hear “Lee Smith”—my alter ego—calling for immediate action.
“We’ve got to call Henry Waxman!” I shouted at a meeting of the Austin Citizens for 9/11 Truth. “Now that the Democrats have Congress, he’s in charge of the Government Reform Committee. He’s got subpoena power. He can get the documents we need, the information they’ve been hiding from us!”
What the fuck am I talking about, I wondered. It also suddenly occurred to me that my “disguise” was incredibly stupid. I had shaved my head bald and put on a pair of thin pane glasses. I looked like Emma Thomspon in Wit, only with stubble.
“Anyway,” I said, eyes darting left and right, “I just think now is the time to act. We’ve got to get people together and hit Congress, let ’em know we’re here.”
The moderator, a soft, curly-headed teacherish type named Geoff—the kind of guy who would have been a perfect physical fit as an activities counselor at a substance abuse retreat, passing out volleyballs to upper-class drunks—stood at the lectern and scanned the crowd. “Okay, well, that’s certainly a good idea,” he said, mock-clapping. “We do have to organize. Anyone else have a comment or a question? Yes? You in the back?”
There were about twenty-five people in the small church where we were meeting, mostly middle-to upper-class whites but of varying ages. Most of the people had come alone, although there were a few pairs. Attire was solidly post-hippie/film school, lots of ruffled hair, black T-shirts, olive tones, goatees—a crowd you’d expect to see at a Werner Herzog film festival.
A microphone was passed to the man in the back. He looked older, I guessed mid-forties, largeish, dressed in work clothes. He grabbed