by Matt Taibbi
And yet, sure enough, after the Democrats buckled that spring and voted to give Bush his money for the war, the spokespeople for the peace activism community could be seen everywhere giving excuses for the Democrats. Woodhouse himself was outspoken in that regard. “We’re disappointed that the war drags on with no end in sight,” he told Reuters, “but realize Democratic leaders can only accomplish what they have the votes for.”
Joel went on to tell me a story about having seen a notice that Barack Obama had been invited to speak at a conference for the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a notorious conservative action group dedicated to passing conservative laws in the state legislatures. Joel and his group quickly issued a press release calling for Obama to denounce ALEC, one of the most regressive organizations in the country. Instead, they got a slew of e-mails from the Obama campaign.
“They were all asking me, ‘Hey, why didn’t you just call us first, before you went to the press? We could have cleared this up.’ And my answer was, one, I don’t work for you. That’s not how this works. Two, if you don’t like ALEC, take advantage of the situation. Use this as an opportunity to tell people about ALEC, denounce them. But the point is, we see this all the time. Everybody acts like they’re on the same team. Nobody is really advocating. And worse, there’s this pervasive sense that if you challenge power, you’ll lose your ability to get hired by the right people down the road. Like me, I’ll never get hired by Obama now, but so what? But that’s why their people were so surprised that we blindsided them. They’re not used to it. That’s the attitude within the Democratic Party. There’s no ideology at all. It’s all about power—nothing more.”
The Democrats’ error was in believing that people wouldn’t notice this basic truth about their priorities. They were wrong on that score. In fact, a Quinnipiac poll taken around that time found the approval rating of Congress had fallen to 23 percent. Other polls saw the number plummet to the teens. The rating of the Democratic Congress was even lower than Bush’s, and it was not hard to see why. Bush was wrong and insane, but he stood for something. It was a fucked-up something, but it was something. The Democrats stood for nothing; they viewed their own constituents as problems to be handled, and even casual voters were beginning to see this.
Around that same time, there was a surprising piece of news from noted peace activism icon Cindy Sheehan, the so-called war mom who’d gained notoriety by holding a sit-in against the war at Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. Sheehan announced that she was leaving the organized peace movement, among other things because she was frustrated by the attacks she’d received from the left once she began criticizing the Democratic Party for its ineffectual opposition to the war.
“Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on,” she said. She went on:
People of the world look on us Americans as jokes because we allow our political leaders so much murderous latitude, and if we don’t find alternatives to this corrupt “two” party system our representative republic will die and be replaced with what we are rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland.
And right at the time Sheehan left the orbit of the Democratic Party, she made another announcement: she was supporting the 9/11 Truth Movement. “It does look to me like a controlled demolition,” she said. “I do see some very high-profile people saying it was an inside job.”
After Sheehan made her announcement, you started to see a change in the 9/11 Truther rhetoric. Suddenly they were selling themselves as the true peace movement. Now we were being told that understanding the truth about 9/11 was the key to righting all the wrongs of American politics, including the war. An end-the-war conference, “in honor of” Cindy Sheehan, was scheduled for the Fourth of July at Independence Hall in Philly.
I went to the conference feeling glum. The whole situation made me uncomfortable. I was raised in the cradle of American liberalism, in the touchy-feely schools of Massachusetts and New York, and for better or worse my whole view of humanity has been colored by twenty years of the politics of the liberal arts world, pseudo-Marxian indoctrination with a touch of noblesse oblige. Hard as I try to get these concepts out of my head, terms like “the people” and “the ruling class” are always in my thinking, and in the case of 9/11 Truth and the peace movement, it was now very hard for me to avoid the simplistic notion of a voiceless subject population abandoned by its political parent class, i.e., “the people” cut loose by the Democratic Party.
All along I couldn’t help but see the Truther movement as a symptom of a society whose political institutions had simply stopped addressing the needs of its citizens. When people can’t trust the media, and don’t have real political choices, and are denied access to the decision-making process, and can’t even be sure that their votes are being counted—when even their activist advocates are lunching with the Man in fancy restaurants in Georgetown—they will eventually act out on their own. And when they do, who can blame them if the cause they choose to pursue is a little bit crazy?
That was what I was thinking as I headed down to Philly for the peace conference. Against the backdrop of the continued carnage in Iraq and the Democrats’ cynical maneuverings vis-à-vis the war, I felt embarrassed to be attending in the guise of a defender of the “official story.” I decided to lay low, stay out of their way—I kept reminding myself that these people were victims of a broken culture, that it wasn’t their fault, there was nothing to be done about it. It was sad, but it wasn’t evil.
Then the conference began.
It was held in a meeting room on the second floor of the Independence Visitor Center downtown. It was a biggish hall, and within a short time after the conference began it was packed to the gills with activists, bloggers, and panelists. The sheer numbers alone testified to what everyone already knew, which is that the movement was rapidly growing and becoming more mainstream. Every day there were new celebrity converts. Rosie O’Donnell. Charlie Sheen (who was said to be in negotiations with Mark Cuban to distribute Loose Change). Even blink-182 rock star Tom DeLonge had signed on lately. Minnesota’s Keith Ellison, America’s only Muslim congressman, was comparing 9/11 to the Reichstag fire, and Bush to Hitler. There was even a video showing Michael Moore wondering aloud about the “strange explosions” in the towers on the morning of 9/11 circulating of late on YouTube. Moore in that video had also asked why the government hadn’t released more videos of the attack on the Pentagon, endearing himself to the movement.*9 And the most recent news was that Cindy Sheehan was even considering running against Nancy Pelosi in Pelosi’s district. Sheehan and Michael Moore were a powerful duo; 9/11 Truth was on the verge of becoming synonymous with mainstream liberalism.
The conference ended up being a succession of speakers culled from the upper ranks of the movement—speakers who included Dr. Bob Bowman, a former Florida congressional candidate, impeachment expert Dave Lindorff, the one-man conspiracy clearinghouse Webster Tarpley, journalist Barbara Honegger, and one of the loudest people I’ve ever seen, a heavyset, bespectacled “new media” wunderkind named Samuel Ettaro. One by one they got up there, and though some were more subdued than others, the whole scene quickly devolved into something far different from a conference on how best to end the war. It instead resembled a blogospheric version of the Westminster Kennel Club Show, in which each dog took the floor, ran in a circle, and showed off his credentials as a member of a triumphant new class of True Patriots.
The tone of the conference was strange. There was anger there, but more real than the anger was a kind of joyful celebration of their collective status as subjects of the evil corporate-Bushite-royalist-Illuminati-Amerikan-military-industrial paradigm. Everything about America—fat, lazy, embarrassingly opulent America, the country of too much stuff, the country where life isn’t quite real enough for most of the people who live in it, and certainly not for these people—that America was depicted as a cruel, repressive Reich, an unceasing misery of crushed libertie
s for its aggrieved citizens, morally trailing far behind even such paradises as Iran. As such, every mention of any representative of the “system” drew riotous whoops and catcalls, like for instance when Ettaro held up a copy of his home-published magazine, Republic, a “resource for the modern patriot.”
“So take that Time magazine and that scumbag Rupert Murdoch and throw them in the garbage!” he shouted.
Cheers all around. Ettaro went on:
“We have the distribution that we need to beat the mainstream media,” he shouted. “And nothing short of someone taking me out is going to stop that from happening!”
Jesus Christ, I thought. Who would bother to take this guy out?
Later in the day Bowman took the stage for the second time—some of the “stars” of the event got tedious second and even third go-arounds at the lectern—and offered his take on what his inauguration speech would be like if he were elected president. He assumed an air of almost inexpressible solemnity as he promised to deliver an America in which “policemen, nurses, and poets can afford a decent house…an America free of terrorism because it is no longer feared and hated.”
I thought making sure poets could afford houses was a strange cause to be fighting for, but whatever. Bowman put his hand over his breast. “Like Brother Malcolm,” he said, “I have been to the mountaintop.”
Bowman was white and looked like an insurance salesman, but it is a distinguishing feature of the 9/11 Truth crowd that everyone gets to act like a repressed minority of sorts, so the Brother Malcolm thing passed without comment. Later, he indulged in a lot of syrupy imagery:
“So keep the dream alive,” he said. “Drop your own pebbles in the pond, and make your own waves…”
The day was filled with metaphorical pebbles and waves and trees and towers and bonds that tie and dogs that bark and other such flowery images. One speaker commented that “for every thousand people hacking at the branches, there’s one hacking at the root,” before pausing to try to figure out which one he was supposed to be. A second said that “we’ve started to put another crack in the Liberty Bell, because it needs ringing.” That one had me puzzled for almost ten minutes. And still another noted that “we don’t wanna fight the machine, we wanna go around front and see who’s driving the machine.”
“And then fight him,” called out someone from the crowd.
“Right,” he said. “Right, right.”
Later on in the day the meeting spilled out onto the streets, where groups of protesters held up signs and chanted “9/11 was an inside job! 9/11 was an inside job!” at passersby on their way to Philly’s Independence Day parade. Then more chanters appeared on the balcony of the visitor center, which prompted security officers to show up and ask them to stop. Some time later, a woman ascended to the lectern and asked the people on the balcony to come inside, noting that they had promised the landlord of the property that they wouldn’t be hanging signs outside the building.
“Screw them!” someone in the crowd shouted. “They can’t keep us silent forever! We have our rights!”
“Well, actually, these aren’t the authorities,” the woman said. “They just own the building.”
“Well, still!” came the shout back.
As the day went on I sank deeper and deeper into my chair. Suddenly I understood. The People aren’t always victims in the historical narrative. Sometimes the People are preening, chest-puffing, ignorant assholes, too. And maybe the polls are right, and these people aren’t the minority—maybe, I thought as I looked around the packed room, I’m the minority. Maybe this is just how Americans like to roll. You can cut them out of the political deal, lie to them, exile them to some barren cultural landscape of shopping and TV and perpetual powerlessness, sell them a cheap dog-and-pony show for an election, and their way of fighting back will be to parade around like strippers in some amateur lunatic forum, dressing up in the garbs of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thomas Jefferson and César Chávez as they bang their silly heads against the wall, screaming about the Illuminati and holographic airplanes and the free-floating currency exchange.
Or they’ll pray for Israel and the speedy arrival of the battle of Armageddon, when those lunatics on the opposite side will be cast into the fires of Hell.
THIRTEEN
THE END
SATURDAY, APRIL 28, Radio City Music Hall, New York City. I’m at the NFL draft, slouching in a chair in the press section, trying to sleep off a headache. Unfortunately the media affairs people have dicked me around and left me without an assigned space, so I have no desk and no place to put my computer. Which is only fair, I guess, since I’m not really covering this thing—I just decided to come out of sheer boredom. But the NFL press office doesn’t know that, so I’m feeling kind of shafted.
I may not have a desk, but at least I have a good seat near the front. A nice comfortable place to sleep. But as I close my eyes, I feel a finger tap me on the shoulder.
“Excuse me,” a voice says. “Can we get through?”
I look up. A pale, thin-shouldered bald man with a tawny mustache, a dead ringer for eighties pseudo-icon Gerald McRaney of the old Simon and Simon series, is trying to step past me and sneak through my row of seats with his preteen son. I frown. Fans and their goddamn kids, violating the sanctity of the press section—this country really is going to hell!
“Well?” the guy says.
Simon is glaring at me. His kid is bouncing up and down, like he has to pee. Sighing, I raise my hands in surrender.
“Right. Sorry,” I say, getting up and letting them through.
The kid, as he walks past, steps on a corner of my computer bag. I hear an ugly crunching sound as he walks away.
A few minutes later I’m booting up my computer to make sure it isn’t ruined. The Windows screen pops on, and everything seems fine, but I’m still pissed.
“Don’t they have security at this place?” I mumble to a writer for NFL.com who’s been sitting behind me with his girlfriend.
“What, what do you mean?” he says.
“That asshole fan who just walked past,” I said. “His kid just stepped on my computer. Didn’t even turn around.”
“Dude, that was Brad Childress,” the writer says. “Coach of the Vikings.”
I pause in my seat.
“No shit,” I say finally.
“Yeah, no shit,” he says. “You sure you’re a sportswriter?”
“Of course,” I say. “And I knew that was Brad Childress. I was just fucking with you.”
“Whatever.”
The NFL.com guy goes back to talking to his girlfriend. Stealthily, I get up and sneak down to the buffet. The spread is deli sandwiches, warm tortellini salad, ricotta-filled mini cannolis, macadamia white-chocolate cookies, Krispy Kremes, mineral water, and coffee. A pair of ESPN cameramen are ahead of me in line. One grabs a cannoli, holds it up, and motions to the other:
“Dude, if it’s not catered—it’s not journalism!”
“Right-on to that!” the other guy says, stuffing his face.
I dump a pile of cookies and donuts into a napkin, fold it up, and sneak back up to the press section. By now they’ve found me a desk next to a tired-looking young guy who works for the Giants Web site. I plug in, cue up the Red Sox–Yankees game on the Internet, and start stuffing cookies into my face.
A few hours later I’m still glued to the same spot, covered in crumbs and in full bloat, an off-duty media pig in a state of unabashed psychic regression, watching grimly as a parade of no-necked, clumsily tailored 250-pound black jocks get auctioned off to their new corporate masters. A mechanized boom cam swings across the Radio City floor and stops queerly in front of my seat; I bat the crumbs off my face and give a lazy wave at it. It occurs to me to wonder if anyone back in Texas is watching. What would they think? What possible sense could they make of their quiet fellow Christian Matt Collins sitting behind Mel Kiper, Jr., at the NFL draft in New York, a big brown press badge around his neck and cookie bits all
over his face? It was an ugly thought and I tried to put it out of my mind.
“Hey,” a voice next to me asks. “Who was that who just went?”
It’s the Giants guy, back from the bathroom.
“Anderson,” I say. “Jamaal Anderson. A defensive end.”
“Where out of?”
“Arkansas, I think,” I say.
“An-der-son,” he mumbles, typing the name in. “Okay, Miami on the clock…”
I frown, pick up my cell phone, and start dialing, feeling guilty all of a sudden. After a few rings, a voice answers.
“Thank you for calling John Hagee Ministries,” the voice says. “All of our prayer partners are currently assisting others. You may have called at a peak period. However, your call will be answered in the order it was received…”
“So, who do the Fins take?” Giants guy asks, interrupting.
“It’s gotta be Quinn,” I say, my ear still pressed to the phone. “They need a quarterback. Shit, they had Joey Harrington starting games for them last year. You’ve got to at least try to win, you know?”
“Yeah,” he says. “But the thing about Miami is, when everything’s on the line, you can always count on them to fuck things up.”
“Yeah, I—hello?”
A chirpy female voice crackles over the phone.