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Derangement - part 1A

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 friends gathered their things and came outside. I walked with then 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.

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