by Matt Taibbi
I sighed. “You think they knocked down the towers and you want me to prove to you that Bush and his crew are corrupt?”
“Ver eez your evidence, you bastard!” he shouted.
“Well, there was the Jack Abramoff thing—”
“Bullshit!” Haupt screamed. “No proof!”
This was really getting weird. “He was convicted,” I said. “Is that good enough for you?”
“Lies!” he screamed.
“Nico,” Les whispered. “He was convicted.”
“The evidence! Give me the evidence!”
At another point, when I tried to tell him that the issue of my being “paid off” was moot, since I write my online column for free, he just kept screaming, not letting me get a word in edgewise.
“Now it eez my turn to talk! You will listen! Vat about zee war games?” he screamed.
I looked around the table with a pleading expression. “Hey, can you get this guy to shut up?” I asked.
“Nico, please…,” said Les consolingly.
Nico ignored him and just kept screaming.
“You are a traitor to zee Constitution!” he bellowed, sticking a finger less than an inch from my nose. “An enemy of zee state!”
Hearing this German accuse me of being a traitor to the United States moved me immediately from stunned bemusement to genuine anger. “Stop spitting on me,” I said.
Haupt kept screaming. Bits of food matter—from some previous meal, apparently, since he had not eaten here—were showering my sport coat.
“Hey, stop spitting,” I said. “I’m not kidding.”
“I vill spit on you all I like!” he shouted. “Go ahead, stop me! You vant to hit me? Hit me! Go ahead, hit me! Zen I vill have a story! Go ahead, hit me!”
Haupt was about two inches from my face. The whole restaurant was now staring. The manager of the diner, who had threatened to call the police early on in the confrontation, was now reduced to watching out of mere curiosity; there was nothing left for him to do but let this scene play itself out. The shower of spittle continued to rain on me as a torrent of incomprehensible accusations flowed from somewhere in the middle of Haupt’s beard: “Controlled demolitions…war games…commission…traitors!” I couldn’t even make out the individual words. Every cell in my body ached to twist his head off and roll it down Columbus Avenue, but I knew this was a bad solution.
“Okay,” I said finally. “Let’s go outside. You’re not going to play nice, we’ll just have to do this.”
I went outside. Haupt, I could see through the window, stayed in his chair and smiled faintly, looking at the others for approval. For several minutes he refused to come out. I sighed. I was thirty-six years old, with an expensive dentist, and the prospect of getting into a fight with a deranged German conspiracy theorist on the corner of West Fifty-seventh Street suddenly seemed a more than unusually ridiculous way to spend an afternoon. I was actually relieved when Haupt slipped out the door and slithered uptown, away from me.
AFTER HAUPT LEFT, Les and his friends gathered their things and came outside. I walked with them to the subway.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” Les said. “He doesn’t represent us.”
Les was a nice guy. So were all his friends, actually. There was something very sad about the whole thing. On the way to the subway, we talked more about 9/11 Truth. I kept trying to explain my point, which was that there was no concrete evidence that the government had committed the attacks, and that if they wanted to be taken seriously, they had to come up with something solid. Moreover, instead of entertaining dozens of theories simultaneously, what real investigators do is follow the evidence and try to actually come up with a single theory of the crime. Narrow the field of view, not expand it. And part of that process involves asking why the alleged conspirators would do what the Truthers accuse them of doing. Why fly a plane into the towers and blow them up? Why crash a plane in the middle of Pennsylvania? Why shoot a missile at the Pentagon and say it was a plane? And so on.
“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 ads were a huge hit and the irony age was officially born.
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 to check its silverware case every time the president finished giving a televised speech. Nixon’s fall coincided with the CIA hearings and the awful revelations of all manner of crazed government behavior—exploding cigars for Castro, foot powder planted by the CIA to make the dictator’s beard fall out. Northwoods. Gulf of Tonkin. By the middle of the decade, America knew: not only was its president a crook, but its government was a criminal enterprise, a potential suspect in any heinous unsolved crime. Who killed JFK, MLK, Malcolm X? Who conspired to assassinate Salvador Allende? You knew who the first suspect was.
This was too much for people to handle. After Carter, with his dreary, not-always-convincing attempts at honesty, America decided that even if it knew its president was a fraud, it could live with him, so long as he was a skilled fraud. To the rescue came Ronald Reagan, whose virtue was that he told lies that were enjoyable, uplifting. Reagan was the first president who was rewarded at the polls for the quality of his fictions. He shared this trait with Bill Clinton, a bullshitter of Shakespearean dimensions who carried America all the way through the nineties with an orgiastic smile on his face. We knew Clinton was a liar and a pussy-killer, but we didn’t mind. Two-hundred-fifty-odd years after “I cannot tell a lie,” Clinton’s reign defined presidential truth as a statement that was legally defensible in theory and also vetted by the best and most expensive lawyers on the planet, i.e., “I did not have sex with that woman.”
So America went from being a place where the president set the standard for truth and forthrightness to being a place where the president was expected to lie always, and at all times. But the one thing throughout this period that Americans could always depend on, even after Nixon and the collapse of public faith in the president’s morals, was that the lies the American president told would always be the very best lies that science, computerized research, and Washington’s most devious spooks could produce. Our president may lie, but he will lie effectively and spectacularly, with all the epic stagecraft and lighting and special effects available to the White House publicity apparatus. He is never a hack, never a half-assed, off-the-cuff, squirming, my-dog-ate-my-homework sort of liar. Or at least he wasn’t until George W. Bush came around.
“They hate our freedoms” was possibly the dumbest, most insulting piece of bullshit ever to escape the lips of an American president. As an explanation for the appalling tragedy of 9/11, which was the culmination of decades of escalating tension between the Arab world and the West, it was insufficient even as a calculated effort to snow an uneducated public—it was too stupid even to hold up as that. And yet when he said it, Bush was not savaged by the mainstream media for blowing off the biggest security question of our time. The Washington press corps did not line up to pelt him with mushy pineapples for insulting their intelligence. Instead, he was cheered as a hero by members of both parties and virtually all the country’s commercial media, which engaged in a kind of frantic race to see who could more enthusiastically compare Bush’s speechmaking to that of Winston Churchill. Worse still, the mainstream media followed Bush’s lead by coming up with its own, more verbose, versions of Bush’s analysis.
“THEY HATE OUR FREEDOMS” was only one of a number of preposterous lies mainstream society was expected to embrace after 9/11. The Iraq invasion and the reasons for it were only the most obvious. By 2003 or 2004 any American with even half a brain could only assess the performance of his government via a careful weighing of its various lies and contradictions. An educated person understood that the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) business was a canard and that there had to be some other reason for the invasion of Iraq; indeed, even in the weeks before the war began, commentators across the country were already judging (and in some cases supporting) the war plan based entirely on what they guessed the real reasons for the invasion were. A classic example was Tom Friedman of the New York Times, who even as he boosted the war never took the WMD business seriously, imagining instead that Iraq had always been a kind of geopolitical Hail Mary, designed to transform the region.
But President Bush was a man on a mission. He had been convinced by a tiny group of advisers that throwing “the long bomb”—attempting to transform the most dangerous Arab state—is a geopolitical game-changer.
It is not a good sign when even your supporters don’t even bother to take your cover story seriously. And yet that was the position the Bush administration was in by 2003–4. No one except his most dug-in Republican loyalists took anything his people said or did at face value. When the administration submitted its “Clear Skies” plan to Congress, who among us didn’t automatically know that it was a giveaway to polluters? Or that “Healthy Forests” was somehow going to result in more trees being cut down? America by the early years of this century was a confusing kaleidoscope of transparent, inv
idious bullshit, a place where politicians hired consultants to teach them to “straight talk,” where debates were decided by inadvertent coughs and smiles and elections were resolved via competing smear campaigns, and where network news programs—subsidized by advertisements for bogus alchemist potions like Enzyte that supposedly made your dick grow by magic—could feature as a lead story newly released photos of the Tom Cruise love child, at a time when young American men and women were dying every day in the deserts of the Middle East.
The message of all of this was that Americans were now supposed to make their own sense of the world. There was no dependable authority left to turn to, no life raft in the increasingly perilous informational sea. This coincided with an age when Americans now needed to understand more of the world than ever before. A factory worker in suburban Ohio now needed to understand the cultures of places like Bangalore and Beijing if he wanted to know why he’d lost his job. Which, incidentally, he probably had. Now broke, or under severe financial pressure, with no community leaders, no community, no news he can trust, Joe American has to turn on the Internet and tell himself a story that makes sense to him.
What story is he going to tell?
NINE
PEAK EXPERIENCE
THERE WAS a weird scene at Bible study on an otherwise uneventful evening. A new guy had joined the group, let’s call him Ron. Ron was overjoyed to be in the group. He had the glow of a person hitting an early peak in his Christian experience, although he was still very much a person to be pitied; he’d had a family tragedy many years before. But throughout the Bible-study session he kept raising his hand and making it plain to everyone how thrilled he was to be here with all of us.
“You know,” he said, “we all of us are in the Body of Christ, not just here in San Antonio but all over the country, and I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to be here sharing this time with all of you. I feel such love in my heart and I can really feel the spirit of the Lord in here tonight. I can even feel it on my skin!”