Menu
What's new
Troll Kingdom

This is a sample guest message. Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

Derangement - part 3A

The irony of the moment was overwhelming. Seeing these people consume this commercial entertainment as a canonical revolutionary tract to me underscored everything the Truther Movement was about. The 9/11 Truth Movement, no matter what its leaders claim, isn't a grassroots phenomenon. It didn't grow out of a local dispute at a factory or in the fields of an avocado plantation. It wasn't a reaction to an injustice suffered by a specific person in some specific place. Instead it was something that a group of people constructed by assembling bits and pieced plucked surgically from a mass-media landscape -TV news reports, newspaper articles, Internet sites. The conspiracy is not something anyone in the movement even claims to have seen with his own eyes. It is something deduced from the very sources the movement is telling its followers to reject.
 
This has always been one of the key features of the 9/11 Truth Movement. When the left finally found something to revolt over, it turned out to be something entirely fictional, something that not a single person had seen with his own eyes, or felt directly in his bank account, in his workplace, in his home. No one here was revolting over the corrupt medical insurance system, the disappearance of the manufacturing economy, the exploding prison population, the predatory credit industry, the takeover of electoral politics by financial interests. None of the people in this room were bound together by a common problem. What they had in common was a similar response to a national media phenomenon. At some level, this wasn't even a movement -it was a demographic.
 
Anyway, the meeting continued. Although the point of the Q&A session was supposed to be a discussion of the movie, the movie had seemingly been forgotten minutes after it ended. and the activity we were now engaging in involved circling the room and giving each individual a chance to vent his or her personal insane theory of reality. On the side of the hall opposite me was a young man with a shaved head. Angry Bald Guy's theory was that the Bush family had been involved in these kinds of world domination plots for centuries. He seemed to be frustrated that no one was focusing on this.

"This Bush crime family, they're hardcore gangsters!" he said.

"Mmm, yes," said Geoff, nodding.

I could see that this est-style nodding of Geoff's was only making Angry Bald Guy angrier. His eyes screamed, Stop nodding, you dick! "I just think," he said, "I just think we have to do something!"

"Well, said Geoff, "that's what we're doing. We're educating people."

"No, I mean besides that!" snapped Angry Bald Guy.

Geoff nodded. "Well, I hear you," he said. "But at this stage, I think that we're best served by just getting the message out. Making sure people see these DVD's I think that we're really accomplishing something here."

I sighed. If there's one thing you can always count on, it's that a lefty political activist will always find a way to convince himself that he's changing the world by watching a movie.
 
Some weeks later I went with a friend to a meeting of the Houston chapter of the same Meetup group, at a Churchill-themed bar called the Black Lab. My friend "Frank" was actually a reclusive, salt-and-pepper haired musician who by a factor of at least twenty was a more dedicated neurotic/misanthrope than even I was. I'd convinced him to help me try to make a 9/11-themed dramatic movie, recruiting the local Truthers to take part. The idea there would ostensibly have been to harvest on film the comedy of Truthers trying to think up a 9/11-themed movie plot, which with any luck would have been pretentious and fantastical; there was always the danger that their creative ideas would have turned out to be brilliant and witty, but I thought it was worth the risk.

"It'll be like Spinal Tap, except no one will be acting," I said. He shrugged. Frank had suffered greatly at the hand of harebrained, poorly-thought-out projects of mine in the past -I still owe him money for work he and his girlfriend did on my now-defunct Buffalo newspaper- but he was bored and decided to give it a shot. Our movie project was stillborn, though; in Austin, none of the Houston Truthers wanted to do much more than sit around and talk about their plight.
 
At the Meetup, led by a laboriously, ponderously slow talker named Mark, the group was on its third monthly meeting and was still trying to decide how often to meet and where. A pale white guy in his late twenties or early thirties who I suspected would end up as the much-hated manager of a chain copy shop someday, Mark had strict rules about who could talk and when, and participants had to follow the rules to a tee or he would cut them off. It was decided at one point that we should list the group's goals; Mark had us go around the circle and offer our ideas for a statement of the group's purpose.

"Let me just say at the outset," he said, "that those of us who have the views that we do...Well, it can be very lonely, difficult socially, that is, to be a dissident in this day and age. So one of the goals of this group, I would say, is that it will provide all of us with a safe place where we can feel at home, comfortable being ourselves."

He looked around the room. I couldn't tell if everyone was embarrassed or whether they agreed with him.

"So I'm just going to write that here on the paper -safe place," he continued.

Frank glared nervously at me. He had a bit of a panic-attack problem and I could tell this scene was moving him in that direction.
 
Meanwhile Mark motioned for the next person in line, a quietish student from the University of Houston, to offer his idea.

"Well, I think we have to create an entirely new system of media, completely reforming the existing system," he said. "Because the current system isn't telling us the truth, that's for sure."

"Damn right," said someone else at the table.

"Okay, good," said Mark. He spoke as he wrote: "Create new system of media."

Frank glared accusingly at me. I smiled.

"Sure, let's create a new system of media," I said, out loud. "Might as well start small, right?"

Everyone looked up at me; nobody laughed.
 
The group ended up split down the middle on the issue of whether or not to schedule an informal "hangout night." We did agree loosely to try to schedule a movie showing, though settling on an actual date proved too difficult. But the real thrust of the meeting seemed to be a battle for control of the group. Right from the start, Frank and I could see that Mark had a rival in John, an older fellow with a balding head and glasses. John seemed more knowledgeable about 9/11 issues than Mark and also ideologically purer -Mark, heretically, had even expressed doubts about the controlled demolition thesis at the beginning of the Meetup. And the two seemed to disagree about everything, how often to meet, what activities to plan, everything. I personally could feel the energy in the room drifting toward John, and maybe he could feel it, too, because at the end of the meeting he boldly came out with his strategy for the group.

"I think we should post on the message board more," he said, lightly tapping the table. "Have more discussions!"

Murmuring all around. The group liked that idea. Mark swallowed hard and wrote the idea down on his sheet of paper. Above him, a portrait of Churchill frowned blankly off into space.
 
Some days later we looked on the Meetup Web site. John had, indeed, been posting more, and so had some other members, including a mysterious new person named "Mauricio," who was posting quite a lot in semi-grammatical English. Mauricio's posts had titles like "Passport Cards to Go Hi-Tech In the United States" and "Official 9/11 Story on Life Support: The Truth is Taking Over." Inside the actual posts, Mauricio would simply retype in some piece of text from another site and then add a link to the rest of the story. None of his post had any replies. This was certainly "more posting," and it obviously irked Mark, who quickly rattled off a lengthy test about posting etiquette.

The letter included six general guidelines about posting, guidelines that included "Take some time putting your message together" and "Try to watch the grammar and spelling" and even "Communication is a 2-way street. If you want folks to read and respond to your messages, you should read and respond to other people's messages too." Frank found the post and read the guidelines to me out loud -we almost fell over laughing at number three:

"'Three. If you make more than 2 or 3 posts in a day, you are posting way above average,'" Frank read. He went on: "'You'd better have something extraordinarily important or people will just start ignoring you.'"

"Way above average?" I laughed. "There are only like six people on the board as it is!"
 
"No, it gets better," Frank said. "Listen to this: "I think it will benefit YOU as a message poster if you more-or-less follow these suggestions, because people will take you more seriously and are more likely to read what you post.'" He laughed. "And here's how he ends it: 'Again, just suggestions. Other folks might have different visions of how this message board should function. Take care. Have fun. Keep up the good work. Mark.' Have fun? Fun? What the fuck is wrong with these people? Do other people know about this?

"Dude, this is like 36 percent of America, according to recent polls," I said.

"Bullshit." He frowned nervously. "That can't be true. You're lying again."

I said I wasn't, but he refused to listen. He kept staring at the screen, muttering to himself. "Fun," he said. "Have fun. Jesus."

Back to the site: almost immediately, Mark's rival, John, posted a soothing letter to Mauricio, but it was too late. That was the end of Mauricio on that board. So much for a "safe place."
 
Soon after, Mark dropped out of the group and John took over. In a letter to me, Mark explained that he had become disillusioned with the movement. "My initial beliefs about conspiracy came from a general understanding of how the government operates and what kind of agenda it follows," he wrote. "And I believe strongly that these are the questions the 9/11 Truth Movement should focus on. We can argue for the rest of our lives about all the different theories about the towers' collapse, and the 'shocking proof' in the form of highly speculative interpretations of photos and videos, and while we struggle with that argument, the noose draws steadily tighter around the neck of American democracy."

So there! Mark didn't even sign his name -it was like he wasn't even talking to me, but to God, to the Fates. And with that, dramatically, this would-be leader was out of the movement. But there were more to take his place; the Meetup kept growing and growing. Months later, the numbers had doubled -but the group was still stuck trying to set up a movie night.


***
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top