The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [78]
The weird thing was that the new post-Isuzu ironic ads coexisted with ads of the same-old-bullshit genre. You had Joe Isuzu talking about using his trucks to haul two-thousand-pound cheeseburgers alongside cola ads that showed ordinary people looking like they were about to have huge heaving orgasms at the sight of a cold Coke, or be magically transformed into swimwear models after a couple of Diet Pepsis. You had open lies that were celebrated as such, veiled lies meant to be taken seriously, and then the ads would end and the news would come on and you would be presented with President Ronald Reagan—as skilled and telegenic a liar as politics has ever seen, Joe Isuzu’s perfect Dostoyevskian double—getting up on TV and on the one hand lying through his teeth about Iran-Contra, and then on the other hand comparing Daniel Ortega to “that fellow from Isuzu.”
Somehow, ordinary people were supposed to keep track of all this, make their own sense of it. Decades after Watergate, Vietnam, and the Kennedy assassination, Americans were forced to rummage for objective reality in a sea of the most confusing and diabolical web of bullshit ever created by human minds—a false media tableau created mainly as a medium to sell products, a medium in which even the content of the “news” was affected by commercial considerations. I’ll leave it to someone else to break down all the different species of lies that by the early twenty-first-century Americans swallowed as a matter of routine—the preposterous laugh tracks in sitcoms, the parade of perfect-looking models used to sell products to the obese, the endless soap operas about the rich and the beautiful cruising the OC in Testarossas, marketed to a country in which 10 percent of the population lacks enough to eat.
It all got to be too much. Our political campaigns were reduced to an absurd joke, hollow image contests in which adult political commentators worried publicly about which candidate broke a sweat or looked at his watch during debates. In the late Clinton years government ground to a halt for almost two years in an utterly ridiculous and interminable national debate over a blowjob. The national press then stood by and did nothing while the country elected to the most powerful office on earth a man barely capable of reading—and if you ask me it was that set of circumstances, the outrageous presidential election of 2000 between a dingbat and a bore that was sold to the American people as a heroic clash of serious and qualified ideological opposites, that more than anything trained the population to dismiss as unserious anything the national media subsequently had to say about 9/11.
Thinking back now about 9/11—what were people supposed to think? It took about ten minutes after the towers fell for the lies to start. Well, actually it was about ten days. It was around then, on September 20, from the U.S. Capitol, that President Bush addressed the nation and offered this famous tidbit:
Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber—a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.
Bush’s famous explanation for 9/11 was a new low in American politics. It was a lie, obviously, but it wasn’t even a good lie. We were watching, live, the last stage of a fifty-year decline in the performance standards of the White House’s propaganda professionals. Once upon a time, in the days of FDR and Truman and Ike, the president was like a cross between Superman and God, the descendant of George Washington, who could not lie. Then Kennedy was shot and the Warren Commission came along (bringing with it a whole cottage industry of Kennedy mudslinging) and we learned that if the president was not a liar exactly, he was sure getting a lot of pussy that he never told us about. Then came Nixon and Watergate, and by the mid-seventies America learned