The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [88]
“Did I ever tell you the story about my college roommate?” I said. “He was an environmentalist. Used to volunteer for the Sierra Club.”
“The what?” she said.
“The Sierra Club. It’s an environmentalist organization.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yuck.”
“Yeah, he was a real jerk,” I said. “Always telling people what to do, what kind of food to buy, complaining about their garbage, accusing them of polluting. Always complaining about the air not being clean enough and such, saying there were all these poisons in the air. Really silly stuff. But the really obnoxious thing was, he used to drink beer and pee all over the place when he got drunk.”
“That’s disgusting!” she said.
“It was awful,” I said. “He’d just walk into a room, whip it out, and start peeing all over the rug. He’d be like, I dare you to stop me! He even did it in class once. There was one time—you’re not going to believe this, but he even did it at a wedding. He was drunk and after yelling at everyone at the wedding about all the wrapping paper and all the trees they’d killed to make it, he just walked up to the wedding cake right during the part where the bride and groom were dancing, and he just unzipped his pants and peed all over this huge ten-layer wedding cake. Even the little wax statue of the newlyweds fell over. And even after that he was still telling us what jerks we were for polluting. He was really obnoxious.”
“He sounds like it,” she said.
“The thing is,” I went on, “after the wedding thing, we realized something was wrong with him. Psychologically wrong, that is. Eventually they had him committed. They sent him away to a mental institution. But he was still really badly behaved even there.”
Janine was looking over at the bowling alley. “I think you’re up,” she said.
“But apparently he got out of his room one night,” I continued, ignoring her. “Seriously, I just heard about this for the first time a few years ago, I had fallen out of touch with him. I heard he got out of his room at the institution and he went downstairs to the kitchen. And somehow he crushed both of his hands in the door of a walk-in freezer. Broke all the bones in both of his hands!”
“Um—”
“And the worst part is, they took him to a hospital to get fixed, but guess what happened? He got a staph infection in both hands. Eventually, they had to chop off both of his hands at the wrist. Amputate, that is. So now he’s walking around with no hands.”
I mimed a pair of stumps.
Janine looked at me and gasped. “That’s…wow. I guess he can’t pee on stuff anymore. Well, I mean, he can, but he can’t aim.”
“He can’t aim, that’s right,” I said thoughtfully as I look my turn. “It’s kind of funny, when you think about it, considering how he used to be. Obnoxious and all.”
“Yeah!” she said. “That’s such a wild story!”
“Anyway,” I said offhandedly, “he’s a Christian now.”
“Oh, well, that’s good!” said Janine.
“Yeah,” I said. “At least the story has a happy ending.”
She walked up to the lane and bowled. Right down the middle, pins flying.
“Strike!” she said, clapping.
TEN
Conspiracy Interlude II,
or
The Derangement of the American Left
THE 9/11 TRUTH MOVEMENT is not easily defined. The simplest definition of a Truther is probably someone who believes that the U.S. government shared some complicity, whether direct or indirect, in the 9/11 attack. In a broader sense, most Truthers believe the culprits to be a bund of neoconservatives that includes Bush, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz and is organizationally represented by groups like the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). These neocons first secured the White House by means legal and illegal (with the Florida fiasco of 2000 greatly aiding their rise to power) and then set into motion a plan to launch a series of wars in the Middle East, a plan that involved either covertly aiding or actively participating in the bombing of the World Trade Center.
Regarding the actual events of 9/11, the theories espoused by Truthers vary significantly.