The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [92]
But none of that even matters nearly as much as what 9/11 Truth says about the mental state of the population. The whole narrative of the movement is so completely and utterly retarded, it boggles the mind. It’s like something cooked up by a bunch of teenagers raised on texting, TV, and Sports Illustrated who just saw V for Vendetta for the first time and decided to write a Penguin History of the World on the strength of it. A genius on the order of a Mozart or a Shakespeare would be hard-pressed to dream up the awesome comedy that is the alleged plot from the point of view of the plotters. If there was such a conspiracy, remember, something like the following conversation would have had to have taken place:
April 1999, World Trade Center building 7, New York, NY. A secret meeting of the Project for the New American Century. In attendance are Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Irv Kristol, and…others. Cheney, standing at the head of the table and glaring downward, addresses the group:
CHENEY: Gentlemen, we stand at a crossroads.
KRISTOL (whispering to Feith): I love it when we stand at a crossroads!
FEITH (giggling): Me too. But I never know what to wear.
CHENEY: Do you assholes mind?
KRISTOL: Sorry, Dick.
FEITH: Me too.
CHENEY: Okay. (clears throat) As I was saying, gentlemen, we stand at a crossroads…
KRISTOL (in Bill Murray fashion, mimicking suspense-movie soundtrack): Dunh-dunh-dunh!
FEITH: Dunh-dunh-dunh! Dunh…duh-duh-dunh!
CHENEY: Oh, for fuck’s sake.
KRISTOL (laughing): Okay, seriously, Dick, I’m sorry.
FEITH (still laughing): Duh-duh-duh…
KRISTOL: Shhh!
FEITH: Okay, okay. (to Cheney) No, it’s okay, Dick, you can go on.
CHENEY: You’re sure? No more jokes to make? Guys want to do your goddamn Katharine Hepburn impersonations or something?
KRISTOL (channeling On Golden Pond): Come on, Norman! Hurry up! The loons, the loons!
FEITH (whispering): Shut up, for Christ’s sake! (to Cheney) Our lips are sealed, Dick. Honest.
CHENEY: Okay. Jesus. As I was saying, I think we all know about Marion King Hubbert’s projections about the future of oil reserves. We all know the deal: in every oil field there comes a time when half of the field’s reachable oil has been extracted. After that point, exploitation becomes more and more expensive; as time goes on, it requires more and more energy just to extract one barrel of oil. Eventually, oil extraction becomes uneconomic, which is to say it requires a barrel of oil’s worth of energy to extract a barrel of oil. When that time comes, gentlemen, our oil-based empire is fucked. And the clock begins ticking in that direction once we pass that halfway point with the world’s oil reserves. Once oil “peaks,” America—an empire whose power is based almost entirely upon its oil dominance—will officially be on the decline.
FEITH: Yeah. And it doesn’t help that the only reason the dollar is worth more than the peso is that OPEC still trades in dollars.
CHENEY: Exactly. Without oil, we’re like Bangladesh with fat people. And here’s the problem: that fail-safe point is upon us. I think we all know that oil production in the lower forty-eight states peaked in 1970, that Alaskan oil production peaked in 1988, Russia around the same time. Saudi Arabia may be just years from peaking, and in any case our political situation there is tenuous at best. Our guys at Halliburton now estimate that worldwide oil and gas production from existing reserves is declining by about 4 to 6 percent every year.
WOLFOWITZ: So what’s your point? We’re all old anyway. Who cares what happens twenty years from now?
CHENEY: The point, Paul, is that the American empire as we know it will collapse within twenty to thirty years unless we find massive new supplies of oil and find them fast. By 2010 we’re going to need to find fifty million additional barrels of oil per day. And there’s only one place where we can get that much oil…
KRISTOL: Sweden!
FEITH: Of course. Let’s invade! I hate those speed skaters anyway.
CHENEY: No, you