The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [72]
“Jesus,” I said into the phone. “I’m an establishment pseudo-hipster.”
“The funny thing about that,” my so-called friend answered, “is that you are.”
“Fuck you,” I said.
“Have fun at the meeting,” he said, hanging up.
After the call I sat in my room for a minute, sorting it all out. The timeline of this whole ugly business began when I wrote a somewhat half-assed column for the Rolling Stone Web site on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, talking about what America did and did not learn from that event. In that column I made an offhand comment about the 9/11 Truthers, calling them “clinically insane.”
It wasn’t something I’d put a lot of thought into, just something that was in the back of my mind. I’d run into the “movement” over and over again in my travels for the magazine in the previous year; outside Cindy Sheehan’s tent, among protesting Arab Americans in Dearborn, Michigan, at the site of a Kashmiri earthquake in Pakistan, at antiwar rallies in Washington. Each time I ran into talk about the towers being mined or felled by remote-controlled planes, I dismissed it as an anomaly. In fact, I had a mild ethical crisis over it when I covered the Cindy Sheehan story; because I was against the war and generally sympathetic to Sheehan’s cause, I didn’t want to have to mention in print that her supporters were abuzz with nut-job conspiracy theories accusing Bush of masterminding 9/11.
But the sheer numbers were so overwhelming—in one group of twenty Sheehan protesters I polled, there were fourteen who subscribed to some version of the Bush-did-it conspiracy theory—that I had no choice but to mention it in the piece.
It was the first time in my life that I felt forced to paint a negative portrait of a peace movement. It genuinely freaked me out when I eventually started to see my article linked up on a host of right-wing Web sites, used as ammunition against the antiwar crowd.
I ran into the same phenomenon several times after that. In Dearborn, where I went to interview Arab Americans who had organized to protest the Israel-Lebanon war, I was shocked to listen to well-educated, pious Lebanese Americans regurgitating 9/11 conspiracy theories like they were hard news. In particular there was a pair of college-educated sisters, Renee and Rannya Abdul-habi—both seriously religious young women who dressed in the hijab—who seemed fairly well informed about America’s Middle East policy but in outer space when it came to domestic politics. Renee, the older and more politically active sister, could not be budged from her conviction that Bush had bombed the Twin Towers and that no plane had hit the Pentagon.
What was interesting about the Dearborn trip was that when I arrived, virtually the entire community was abuzz about the arrests of a pair of young Arab American men, one of whom was unfortunately named Osama, who had been caught buying a large number of cell phones. The two boys, both of whom had been football stars at Dearborn High, had been immediately dubbed “terror suspects” in the big dailies and on television and tabbed the “Dearbornistan boy terrorists” by Detroit’s Ann Coulter wannabe, Debbie Schlussel. The charges were dropped a few days after the arrests, and no terror connection was ever uncovered, but the damage, as far as the community was concerned, had been done. To them, this was another example of mainstream media racism and deception, of the media carelessly seizing an opportunity to railroad an Arab without cause. It was pretty obvious to me that, because of incidents like this, the Arab American community in the Detroit area had long ago stopped paying attention to the “mainstream” news and understood most of what they saw on television to be an unbroken string of deceptions and manipulations.
But I only thought about that later on. At the time, I still thought the 9/11 conspiracy stuff was a weird aberration, your basic Clinton-era black-helicopter paranoia reconfigured to fit disaffected lefties of the terrorism age, so when I mentioned it in that 9/11 anniversary column, it was just to score a quick