The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [113]
This has always been one of the key features of the 9/11 Truth Movement. When the left finally found something to revolt over, it turned out to be something entirely fictional, something that not a single person had seen with his own eyes, or felt directly in his bank account, in his workplace, in his home. No one here was revolting over the corrupt medical insurance system, the disappearance of the manufacturing economy, the exploding prison population, the predatory credit industry, the takeover of electoral politics by financial interests. None of the people in this room were bound together by a common problem. What they had in common was a similar response to a national media phenomenon. At some level, this wasn’t even a movement—it was a demographic.
Anyway, the meeting continued. Although the point of the Q&A session was supposed to be a discussion of the movie, the movie had seemingly been forgotten minutes after it ended, and the activity we were now engaging in involved circling the room and giving each individual a chance to vent his or her own personal insane theory of reality. On the side of the hall opposite me was a young man with a shaved head. Angry Bald Guy’s theory was that the Bush family had been involved in these kinds of world domination plots for centuries. He seemed to be frustrated that no one was focusing on this.
“This Bush crime family, they’re hardcore gangsters!” he said.
“Mmm, yes,” said Geoff, nodding.
I could see that this est-style nodding of Geoff’s was only making Angry Bald Guy angrier. His eyes screamed, Stop nodding, you dick! “I just think,” he said, “I just think we have to do something!”
“Well,” said Geoff, “that’s what we’re doing. We’re educating people.”
“No, I mean besides that!” snapped Angry Bald Guy.
Geoff nodded. “Well, I hear you,” he said. “But at this stage, I think that we’re best served by just getting the message out. Making sure people see these DVDs. I think that we’re really accomplishing something here.”
I sighed. If there’s one thing you can always count on, it’s that a lefty political activist will find a way to convince himself that he’s changing the world by watching a movie.
Some weeks later I went with a friend to a meeting of the Houston chapter of the same Meetup group, at a Churchill-themed bar called the Black Lab. My friend “Frank” was actually a reclusive, salt-and-pepper-haired musician who by a factor of at least twenty was a more dedicated neurotic/misanthrope than even I was. I’d convinced him to help me try to make a 9/11-themed dramatic movie, recruiting the local Truthers to take part. The idea there would ostensibly have been to harvest on film the comedy of Truthers trying to think up a 9/11-themed movie plot, which with any luck would have been pretentious and fantastical; there was always the danger that their creative ideas would have turned out to be brilliant and witty, but I thought it was worth the risk
“It’ll be like Spinal Tap, except no one will be acting,” I said. He shrugged. Frank had suffered greatly at the hand of harebrained, poorly thought-out projects of mine in the past—I still owe him money for work he and his girlfriend did on my now-defunct Buffalo newspaper—but he was bored and decided to give it a shot. Our movie project was stillborn, though; just as in Austin, none of the Houston Truthers wanted to do much more than sit around and talk about their plight.
At the Meetup, led by a laboriously, ponderously slow talker named Mark, the group was on its third monthly meeting and was still trying