The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [117]
“Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on,” she said. She went on:
People of the world look on us Americans as jokes because we allow our political leaders so much murderous latitude, and if we don’t find alternatives to this corrupt “two” party system our representative republic will die and be replaced with what we are rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland.
And right at the time Sheehan left the orbit of the Democratic Party, she made another announcement: she was supporting the 9/11 Truth Movement. “It does look to me like a controlled demolition,” she said. “I do see some very high-profile people saying it was an inside job.”
After Sheehan made her announcement, you started to see a change in the 9/11 Truther rhetoric. Suddenly they were selling themselves as the true peace movement. Now we were being told that understanding the truth about 9/11 was the key to righting all the wrongs of American politics, including the war. An end-the-war conference, “in honor of” Cindy Sheehan, was scheduled for the Fourth of July at Independence Hall in Philly.
I went to the conference feeling glum. The whole situation made me uncomfortable. I was raised in the cradle of American liberalism, in the touchy-feely schools of Massachusetts and New York, and for better or worse my whole view of humanity has been colored by twenty years of the politics of the liberal arts world, pseudo-Marxian indoctrination with a touch of noblesse oblige. Hard as I try to get these concepts out of my head, terms like “the people” and “the ruling class” are always in my thinking, and in the case of 9/11 Truth and the peace movement, it was now very hard for me to avoid the simplistic notion of a voiceless subject population abandoned by its political parent class, i.e., “the people” cut loose by the Democratic Party.
All along I couldn’t help but see the Truther movement as a symptom of a society whose political institutions had simply stopped addressing the needs of its citizens. When people can’t trust the media, and don’t have real political choices, and are denied access to the decision-making process, and can’t even be sure that their votes are being counted—when even their activist advocates are lunching with the Man in fancy restaurants in Georgetown—they will eventually act out on their own. And when they do, who can blame them if the cause they choose to pursue is a little bit crazy?
That was what I was thinking as I headed down to Philly for the peace conference. Against the backdrop of the continued carnage in Iraq and the Democrats’ cynical maneuverings vis-à-vis the war, I felt embarrassed to be attending in the guise of a defender of the “official story.” I decided to lay low, stay out of their way—I kept reminding myself that these people were victims of a broken culture, that it wasn’t their fault, there was nothing to be done about it. It was sad, but it wasn’t evil.
Then the conference began.
It was held in a meeting room on the second floor of the Independence Visitor Center downtown. It was a biggish hall, and within a short time after the conference began it was packed to the gills with activists, bloggers, and panelists. The sheer numbers alone testified to what everyone already knew, which is that the movement was rapidly growing and becoming more mainstream. Every day there were new celebrity converts. Rosie O’Donnell. Charlie Sheen (who was said to be in negotiations with Mark Cuban to distribute Loose Change). Even blink-182 rock star Tom DeLonge had signed on lately. Minnesota’s Keith Ellison, America’s only Muslim congressman, was comparing 9/11 to the Reichstag fire, and Bush to Hitler. There was even a video showing Michael Moore wondering aloud about the “strange