The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [77]
“You’re too concentrated on the why,” said Les. “You have to concentrate on the what. And the what is a controlled demolition and a plane shot down in Pennsylvania.”
“But why would they shoot down that plane in Pennsylvania?” I asked. “What does that do for them?”
Another of Les’s friends, a long-haired guy named Mike, explained that the Shanksville plane, which was originally intended to hit the White House, had been delayed on the ground forty minutes by air traffic control. After the delay, he said, it would have been too obvious if they had just gone on and let it hit the White House. “That would have been just too unbelievable,” he said. “No one would have believed they wouldn’t have scrambled their air defenses for that long. So maybe they just shot the plane down to cover their mistake.”
I didn’t know where to start with that one. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you saying that they had control of the airline and the air force, but not air traffic control? They could control every step of the process, but they couldn’t keep air traffic control from delaying them forty minutes?”
“Actually,” said a third of Les’s friends, “if you read the transcripts, the people who come out looking the cleanest are the air traffic controllers.”
I sighed. “But—okay, never mind.”
“You’ll see,” Mike said. “I know a lot of people who started out like you. But sooner or later, they come around to the truth.”
I smiled and said nothing. A few minutes later we shook hands and they got on the subway, headed downtown.
HOW MANY LIES are too many? How much bullshit is the human organism designed to tolerate before it starts to malfunction? Is there a breaking point?
Mainstream American society has never been designed to confront difficult or dangerous truths. In fact, our mass media has corrupted the idea of objective truth so badly in the past five or six decades that it is now hard to tell when anyone is being serious about anything—the news, the movies, commercials, anything.
On the night after the diner incident I was watching television when I realized that this sort of thing was probably predictable. I was watching a “Can you hear me now?” Verizon commercial that featured a phony competitor to Verizon, with its own “Can you hear me now?” guy look-alike and a fake “support team” of cardboard figurines. My reaction to the commercial was a desire to decapitate everyone on-screen with a chainsaw—the healthy reaction, I think, to an intentional effort to dump obnoxious automated bullshit into my living room. But who has the energy to keep chainsawing all those heads off? How many lies can you fight off in a lifetime? Do they eventually creep into your head and spread the infection?
We probably took our first step into the danger zone back in the eighties with the notorious Joe Isuzu commercials, which were a clever attempt by Madison Avenue to capitalize on the American population’s growing awareness that the claims of most television advertisements were transparent bullshit.
The Isuzu ads were a stroke of genius. Just when America was starting to figure out that there never really were four out of five real dentists who recommended anything, along comes Joe Isuzu, this parody of a mercury-tongued pitchman who comes on TV with a wildly overdone serpentine smile, claiming that an Isuzu truck could hold “every book in the Library of Congress” or had “more seats than the Astrodome.” Isuzu was scoring honesty points, but the way they did it was by lying openly. The