The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [118]
The conference ended up being a succession of speakers culled from the upper ranks of the movement—speakers who included Dr. Bob Bowman, a former Florida congressional candidate, impeachment expert Dave Lindorff, the one-man conspiracy clearinghouse Webster Tarpley, journalist Barbara Honegger, and one of the loudest people I’ve ever seen, a heavyset, bespectacled “new media” wunderkind named Samuel Ettaro. One by one they got up there, and though some were more subdued than others, the whole scene quickly devolved into something far different from a conference on how best to end the war. It instead resembled a blogospheric version of the Westminster Kennel Club Show, in which each dog took the floor, ran in a circle, and showed off his credentials as a member of a triumphant new class of True Patriots.
The tone of the conference was strange. There was anger there, but more real than the anger was a kind of joyful celebration of their collective status as subjects of the evil corporate-Bushite-royalist-Illuminati-Amerikan-military-industrial paradigm. Everything about America—fat, lazy, embarrassingly opulent America, the country of too much stuff, the country where life isn’t quite real enough for most of the people who live in it, and certainly not for these people—that America was depicted as a cruel, repressive Reich, an unceasing misery of crushed liberties for its aggrieved citizens, morally trailing far behind even such paradises as Iran. As such, every mention of any representative of the “system” drew riotous whoops and catcalls, like for instance when Ettaro held up a copy of his home-published magazine, Republic, a “resource for the modern patriot.”
“So take that Time magazine and that scumbag Rupert Murdoch and throw them in the garbage!” he shouted.
Cheers all around. Ettaro went on:
“We have the distribution that we need to beat the mainstream media,” he shouted. “And nothing short of someone taking me out is going to stop that from happening!”
Jesus Christ, I thought. Who would bother to take this guy out?
Later in the day Bowman took the stage for the second time—some of the “stars” of the event got tedious second and even third go-arounds at the lectern—and offered his take on what his inauguration speech would be like if he were elected president. He assumed an air of almost inexpressible solemnity as he promised to deliver an America in which “policemen, nurses, and poets can afford a decent house…an America free of terrorism because it is no longer feared and hated.”
I thought making sure poets could afford houses was a strange cause to be fighting for, but whatever. Bowman put his hand over his breast. “Like Brother Malcolm,” he said, “I have been to the mountaintop.”
Bowman was white and looked like an insurance salesman, but it is a distinguishing feature of the 9/11 Truth crowd that everyone gets to act like a repressed minority of sorts, so the Brother Malcolm thing passed without comment. Later, he indulged in a lot of syrupy imagery:
“So keep the dream alive,” he said. “Drop your own pebbles in the pond, and make your own waves…”
The day was filled with metaphorical pebbles and waves and trees and towers and bonds that tie and dogs that bark and other such flowery images. One speaker commented that “for every thousand people hacking at the branches, there’s one hacking at the root,” before pausing to try to figure out which one he was supposed to be. A second said that “we’ve started to put another crack in the Liberty Bell, because it needs ringing.” That one had me puzzled for almost ten minutes. And still another