The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [112]
“Thanks,” he said. “Yeah, I just wanted to say that I think it’s important for everybody to remember that what’s going on right now is that they’re provoking a war between the monotheists. They’re setting the Christians against the Moslems, so that they’ll wipe each other out. Then the Luciferians’ll move in.”
“Exactly,” shouted a woman on my side of the church. “It’s the Antichrist. It’s all in the Bible.”
“Hmm,” said Geoff. “I don’t know. That’s an interesting comment, though. I appreciate that. Anyone else?”
A redheaded man in his early forties in the back stood up. “I have one thing to add,” he said. “Listen, they’ve got the courts. They’ve got the media. We still have the Internet, but they’re looking for ways to take that away, too. I mean, they’ll take that away, eventually. What I’m saying is that we have to find a way to communicate after they take that away. We’ve got to be prepared!”
Light murmurs, applause.
“Okay, thanks,” said Geoff. “Preparation is good, I agree. Thank you.”
It went on like this for a while, then the Q&A broke up so that the group could watch a Truther film called Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime. The film was a hodgepodge of boilerplate 9/11 Truth assertions, i.e., that the 9/11 Commission investigation was a massive coverup, that the 9/11 hijackers had ties to the FBI and the Republican Party, that the Twin Towers were brought down by controlled demolitions and not by crashing airplanes, etc. It also had some new stuff in there, including a deft little tie-in to Jack Abramoff—according to the film, hijacker Mohamed Atta was seen on Abramoff’s floating casino in south Florida prior to the 9/11 attacks. There were also long clips culled from various dystopian films that were often shown as “background material” at Truther gatherings, the Truthers generally believing themselves to be living in a modern version of an Orwell/Huxley/Zamyatin totalitarian paradigm. Brazil, Dr. Strangelove, Starship Troopers, and especially The Matrix (Truthers often talk about the moment of conversion, when you see the truth about the towers, as being like “taking the red pill”) are often unironically recommended as “research material” in Truther gatherings.
The weird moment of Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime came when a lengthy segment of the movie Network came on the screen. This was the scene in which the secular ex-anchorman prophet Howard Beale, by now given his own show by the evil networks, implores his audience to abandon TV and get back to reality. “We deal in illusions, man, none of it is true!” he shouts. “But…you’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here!”
In the scene, Beale is shouting against a background of phony stained glass in the fake studio “temple” that the networks had designed as a set for his Mad Prophet of the Airwaves show.
The stained glass in the movie was a kind of visual joke—a symptom of the TV falseness that had already crept into Beale’s act, a symbol of how TV conquers the genuine dissident by assimilating him. Even as Howard Beale denounced television, he was, simply by virtue of being a staged act on television, part of the problem. “Turn off your television sets…!” Beale shouts. “Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I’m speaking right now! Turn them off!” Then Beale collapses, apparently dead, and the studio audience cheers as the show’s directors urge them on.
No one, of course, has turned his TV set off. This was supposed to be a very darkly ironic moment in the movie, but here it was, twenty years later, repackaged in a homemade Truther movie and shown in an actual church in southern Texas—the cinema stained glass appearing right in front of an actual dais—as unvarnished, earnest reality.
The irony of the moment was overwhelming. Seeing these people consume this commercial entertainment as a canonical revolutionary tract to me underscored everything the Truther Movement was about. The 9/11 Truth Movement, no matter what its leaders claim, isn’t a grassroots phenomenon. It didn’t grow out of a local dispute at