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Derangement - Intro

The Plagiarist

The Plagiarist

copypasty
It all came together for me one day when I tried to imagine the whole thing from the point of view of Osama bin Laden. Here he had gone through all the trouble of attacking New York City, and how did the victim nation respond?
 
Well, its government responded by counterattacking the wrong country and passing a whole lot of insane laws that had nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism; its president responded by encouraging its citizens to by Chevys and go on vacations. Then, when it came time to ask why the attack had happened, the president announced that it had happened because the terrorists, well, those folks hated our freedom. Examining this rationale, the mainstream press did not denounce Bush's reasoning as the preposterous horseshit it was, but instead tripped over themselves en masse in a desperate attempt to find new ways to compare their leader to Winston Churchill. Months later, bin Laden himself had been forgotten, and the country move on to denouncing the real enemy, culminating in the banning of French fries from the congressional cafeteria.
 
The people, of course, soon recognized that they had been egregiously lie to by their executive and by their supposed allies in the Fourth Estate and began to seek out the real explanation for what had happened.
 
On the right, huge masses of Christians began to understand that New York had been attacked as divine retribution for America's acquiescence in the effort to allow homosexuals to marry.
 
On the left, they had a different explanation. According to the more educated, sophisticated set of Americans, the Americans who knew how to appreciate The Wire or a good Coen brothers film and who in their informed secular worldview felt smugly superior to those half-baked mystical crackpots on the religious right, Islamic terrorism was actually a clever cover story. The actual culprit in 9/11 was none other than our own president, George W. Bush, who had effected a brilliant diversion in bombing Manhattan using Saudi patsies with links to Sunni Islamic radicals, in order to start a war against the nonreligious Iraqi state of Saddam Hussein. Naturally.
 
From bin Laden's point of view, the whole situation had to be immensely frustrating. He pulls off the crime of the century, of the millennium perhaps, and the victim America turns out to be so wrapped up in its own intramural bullshit that it can't even give him credit for it. America turned out to be, in a way, psychologically immune to attack; its government was too corrupt to fight back, and its people were to crazy to comprehend their position in the world. We were a nation gone completely mad, blind to everything else outside our borders, with our effective institutions co-opted by crooks and thieves and our citizens piddling away the last days of their influence reading sacred tracts and spinning absurd theories about the grassy knoll, WTC 7, and the international Masonic conspiracy.
 
In all of this it seemed to me that what we were living through was the last stage of the American empire. Historians consistently describe similar phenomena in past centuries of human experience. When the Bolsheviks finally broke through the gates of the Winter Palace, they discovered tsarists inside obsessed with tarot cards; when the barbarians finally stormed Rome in the last days, they found the upper class paralyzed by lethargy and inaction and addicted to the ramblings of fortune-tellers. This, too, seemed to be the fate of America, viciously attacked by a serious enemy but unable to grasp the significance of this attack, instead fleeing for consolation to the various corners of its own vast media landscape, in particular seeking solace in the Internet, an escapist paradise for the informationally overwhelmed.
 
Trained for decades to be little more than good consumers, we had become a nation of reality shoppers, mixing and matching news items to fit our own self-described identities, rejoicing in the idea that reality was not an absolute but a choice, something we select to fit our own conception not of the world but of ourselves. We are Christians, therefore all world events have a Christian explanation; we hate George Bush, therefore Bush is the cause of it all.
 
And directly feeding into this madness was the actual, real failure of our own governmental system, reflected in a chilling new electoral trend. After two consecutive bitterly negative presidential elections and many years of what was turning into a highly deflating military adventure in Iraq, the American public had reached new levels of disgust with the very concept of elections. People no longer voted for candidates they liked or were excited by; they voted against candidates they hated. At protests and marches, the ruling emotions were disgust and rage, the lack of idealism, and especially the lack of any sense of brotherhood or common purpose with the other side (i.e., liberals and conservatives unable to imagine a productive future with each other, or even to see themselves as citizens of the same country), was striking. Politicians, with their automated speeches and with canned blather about "hope" and "change" and "taking the country back" were now not only not to be believed by most ordinary people, but actively despised.
 
A parallel phenomenon was a growing lack of faith in the mainstream media on both sides of the spectrum. Conservatives and liberals alike accepted unquestioningly the proposition that the stories put out by network news broadcasts and major daily newspapers amounted to little more than a stream of untrammeled, insidious deceptions.
 
In the 2006 senatorial primary contest between the Jimmy Stewart-esque do-gooder millionaire Ned Lamont and the archetypal Washington whore Joe Lieberman, the fault lines were outlined with crystal clarity: the "People" boosted Lamont with blogs and YouTube broadcasts, while the entrenched political mainstream circled the wagons around Lieberman, with the major news mags and dailies blasting the blogger phenomenon and the likes of asshole New York Times columnist David Brooks ascribing the antimedia bias to "moral manias" and a "Liberal Inquisition."
 
On the right, similar fault lines were appearing. Whereas before conservative anger toward the "liberal media" had been usefully directed against the Democratic Party by Republican strategists, the failure of the Iraq war and also growing disillusionment on the part of Christians who had supported George W. Bush led more and more of these voters to seek out their own enthusiasms. For the first time I started to see and hear people at Republican events who sounded very much like the dissidents on the fringes of American liberalism. The Ron Paul supporters who began to collect around the rallies of assembly-line establishment-blowhard candidates like Mitt Romney were almost indistinguishable from the followers of liberal candidates like Dennis Kucinich; they were similarly against the war, similarly against the conspiracy of business interests that dominated Washington, similarly fed up with standard-issue campaign stumpery. At these events I heard some of the same theories about "peak oil" and the nefarious influence of institutions like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission that dominated 9/11 Truth rallies. But they weren't liberals. They were ex-Dittoheads and dropouts from the Republican revolution.
 
The Ron Paul candidacy was an extreme example of outsider politics on the left and right merging; for the most part, the period covered in this book describes left and right retreats from the mainstream that traveled in opposite directions but were parallel in substance. Specifically, I spent time down in Texas with a group of churchgoers who were loyal to an apocalyptic theory of world events, one in which 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq ere part of an ongoing march toward a final battle between the forces of Satan and an army of God. At the same time, I found myself involved, at times involuntarily, with the 9/11 Truth Movement.
 
The similarities between both of these groups were striking and should be clear to anyone who reads this book. Both groups were and are defined primarily by an unshakable belief in the inhumanity of their enemies on the other side; the Christians seldom distinguished between Islamic terrorism and, say, Al Gore-style environmentalism, while the Truthers easily believed that reporters for the Washington Post, the president, and the front-line operators of NORAD were equally capable of murdering masses or ordinary New York financial-sector employees. Abandoned by the political center, both groups ascribed unblinkingly to a militant, us-against-them worldview, where only their own could be trusted. What made them distinctly American was that, while actually the victims of an obvious, unhidden conspiracy of corrupt political power, they chose to battle bugbears that were completely idiotic, fanciful, and imaginary. At a time when the country desperately needed its citizens to man up and seize control of their common destiny, they instead crawled into alleys and feverishly jacked themselves off in frenzies of panicked narcissism. Time and again during the research for this book, I encountered people who acted not like engaged citizens looking for solutions to real problems, but like frightened adolescents, unaccustomed to the burdens of political power, who saw in the vacuum of government competence an opportunity not to take control of their lives, but to step in and replace the buffoons above with buffoon acts of their own. They made elaborate speeches to no one in particular as though cameras were on them, they dressed in Washington and Jefferson costumes, they primped and preened like they were revolutionaries, modern-day Patrick Henrys and Thomas Paines. And they got nothing done.
 
I was struck particularly by a meeting of 9/11 Truthers in Austin, Texas, in which a "discussion" of what to do about the conspiracy in Washington devolved into a speech-making session. A group of twenty-five to thirty Truthers filed into a little church on the outskirts of town and, led by a breezy, est-counselorish moderator who enforced tolerance for the viewpoints of all, each participant got up and offered his or her own individual angry theory about the nature of the conspiracy. Some blamed the royals, others the bankers, others the Trilateral Commission, all blamed decades of Bush family iniquity, and one woman even talked about a conspiracy to hide the discovery of alien technologies at Area 51; everyone make his or her speech, and then the meeting was over with nothing accomplished except a decision to have another meeting.
 
It turns out that we've been split up and atomized for so long that real grassroots politics isn't really possible; we don't respond to problems as communities but as demographics. In the same way that we shop for cars and choose television programs, we pick our means of political protest. We scan the media landscape for the thing that appeals to us and we buy into it. That it is the same media landscape these new dissidents often reject as a false and misleading tableau dominated by corrupt interests turns out not to be problematic for many. In some cases, like that of those Christians I spend time with in San Antonio, the trusted new figure, a preacher named John Hagee, turns out to be every bit the establishment Washington insider these would-be religious revolutionaries think they're fleeing from. In other cases, like that of the 9/11 Truthers, the radical canonical revolutionary tracts end up including thoroughly commercial mainstream entertainments like V for Vendetta and The Matrix (at different times I would hear both radical conservatives and liberals describe their political awakenings using the phrase "taking the red pill").
 
In short, what sounds on the surface like radical politics turns out to be just another fracturing of the media picture, on that ultimately will result in new groups of captive audiences that, if experience is any guide, will ultimately be assimilated and electorally coddled by a political mainstream in reality bent on ignoring both sides. For now, however, the situation going into the 2008 election looks something like this: we have a population more disgusted than ever with our political system, one inclined to distrust the result no matter who wins the White House --and should the national election end up being a contest between a pair of full-of-shit establishment conservatives, it will only confirm the worst fears of both sides and result in an even further bonkerization of the population.
 
Gone will be the good old days of neat blue-state / red-state hatred --a nicely symmetrical storyline that has always appealed to the Crossfire / American Gladiators sports-coverage mentality of the commercial media. In its place, at least temporarily, will be a chaos of lunatic enthusiasms and dead-end political movements to nowhere, with calls for invasions of Babylon and, on the other side, congressional investigations into nonexistent conspiracies. Meanwhile, Boeing, General Motors, and Ford will officially become Chinese companies, and OPEC will begin trading in the euro after American garrisons in Baghdad and Kabul fall to invaders armed with nineteenth-century weapons.
 
That's one possible future, anyway, suggested by the lunatic present. Of course, the thing about America is that you never know. We have a history of rising to the occasion, but the theory of this book is that history eventually stops repeating itself, and what better time for that to happen than after a massive, nationally televised attack that most of an entire country apparently missed the point of? When a people can no longer agree even on the basic objective facts of their political existence, the equation changes; real decisions, even in the approximate direction of righteousness, eventually become impossible.
 
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