The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [2]
The people, of course, soon recognized that they had been egregiously lied to by their executive and by their supposed allies in the Fourth Estate and began to seek out the real explanation for what had happened.
On the right, huge masses of Christians began to understand that New York had been attacked as divine retribution for America’s acquiescence in the effort to allow homosexuals to marry.
On the left, they had a different explanation. According to the more educated, sophisticated set of Americans, the Americans who knew how to appreciate The Wire or a good Coen brothers film and who in their informed secular worldview felt smugly superior to those half-baked mystical crackpots on the religious right, Islamic terrorism was actually a clever cover story. The actual culprit in 9/11 was none other than our own president, George W. Bush, who had effected a brilliant diversion in bombing Manhattan using Saudi patsies with links to Sunni Islamic radicals, in order to start a war against the nonreligious Iraqi state of Saddam Hussein. Naturally.
From bin Laden’s point of view, the whole situation had to be immensely frustrating. He pulls off the crime of the century, of the millennium perhaps, and the victim America turns out to be so wrapped up in its own intramural bullshit that it can’t even give him credit for it. America turned out to be, in a way, psychologically immune to attack; its government was too corrupt to fight back, and its people were too crazy to comprehend their position in the world. We were a nation gone completely mad, blind to everything outside our borders, with our effective institutions co-opted by crooks and thieves and our citizens piddling away the last days of their influence reading sacred tracts and spinning absurd theories about the grassy knoll, WTC 7, and the international Masonic conspiracy.
In all of this it seemed to me that what we were living through was the last stage of the American empire. Historians consistently describe similar phenomena in past centuries of human experience. When the Bolsheviks finally broke through the gates of the Winter Palace, they discovered tsarists inside obsessed with tarot cards; when the barbarians finally stormed Rome in its last days, they found the upper class paralyzed by lethargy and inaction and addicted to the ramblings of fortune-tellers. This, too, seemed to be the fate of America, viciously attacked by a serious enemy but unable to grasp the significance of this attack, instead fleeing for consolation to the various corners of its own vast media landscape, in particular seeking solace in the Internet, an escapist paradise for the informationally overwhelmed.
Trained for decades to be little more than good consumers, we had become a nation of reality shoppers, mixing and matching news items to fit our own self-created identities, rejoicing in the idea that reality was not an absolute but a choice, something we select to fit our own conception not of the world but of ourselves. We are Christians, therefore all world events have a Christian explanation; we hate George Bush, therefore Bush is the cause of it all.
And directly feeding into this madness was the actual, real failure of our own governmental system, reflected in a chilling new electoral trend. After two consecutive bitterly negative presidential elections and many years of what was turning into a highly deflating military adventure in Iraq, the American public had reached new levels of disgust with the very concept of elections. People no longer voted for candidates they liked or were excited by; they voted against candidates they hated. At protests and marches, the ruling emotions were disgust and rage; the lack of idealism, and especially the lack