Truthers

I’ve been thinking this morning of something that happened nearly twenty years ago, and I’m trying to figure out why. It has something to do with the presidential debate that took place last night, which I had the good sense to almost entirely miss but caught enough of, and read enough about, to be disturbed. What that connection is is what I’m trying to figure out.

In 2006 I gave a talk at a conference on 9/11 at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Before the conference, I’d seen the names of a well-known pair of 9/11 Truthers on the online program and emailed the organizers to ask that my name be removed from it so that I wouldn’t be associated with their brand of “found the one engineer in the entire world who will argue that Jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to bring down a skyscraper, plus nobody saw the plane hit the Pentagon, so 9/11 was an inside job” conspiracy theorizing. I had no plans to call them out at the conference until one of them (I’m not naming them because, honestly, fuck them) approached the microphone at a lunchtime open forum/general meeting to share the good word of 9/11 Trutherism, which was met by Canadian politeness, American apathy, and maybe some agreement, I don’t know.

I stepped up to the microphone and addressed myself to the graduate students in the room while ignoring the man who’d just spoken. I said some things about how there was plenty of reason for suspicion of the American government, including the failure of the Bush administration to heed intelligence warnings about such an attack, but that giving time and attention to people like the man who just spoke is a bad idea, as trying to approach the truth with intellectual integrity is a big part of the business we were in. I sat down vibrating with an anger that came not just from an abstract defense of intellectual values but also from my experience of living in downtown Manhattan in September 2001, trekking home from work in the Bronx when the trains started to shut down, emerging to see military vehicles in the middle of 42nd Street, running from hospital to hospital looking for my brother-in-law, who worked in the towers and was not to be found, seeing and smelling the Towers’ smoke from my apartment window for weeks. After I sat down, I was thanked by a few people and ignored by the subjects of my remarks, as I expected.

Reliving this memory at my desk eighteen years later, my body is telling me that the feeling of wanting to confront people who say untrue things is the connection between this remembered moment and last night. While a lot of the chatter this morning is from rightfully anxious people on the left responding to Biden’s performance by saying he needs to let someone else run, what I’m sitting with right now is the feeling of having someone lie to your face. Whether the liar in this kind of situation knows that they’re lies or has convinced himself that they’re true may be of interest, but it’s less important in the end than the fact that he’s saying them as if they’re true and that nobody is saying anything. This isn’t an intellectual realization for me, and I suspect for many–it’s a feeling in your chest. It’s like that feeling you had when you were a kid and somebody cheated in a game, or stole your toy, or said something you knew wasn’t true and nobody challenged them. It’s the feeling that something obviously wrong is happening and that people are letting it happen. It makes you wonder if people care or if the world is a place where wrong things just happen.

Fifty-seven-year-old me knows that the world is a place where wrong things just happen, but he also believes that it is also a place where something can sometimes be done about them if people pay attention to them, if people point them out, call out their wrongness, ask others to notice and address the wrong things. Many of us believe this. What we think is wrong, and right, is what divides us, and arguments over what’s right and what’s wrong are what politics is. But it’s also people who don’t seem to care about right and wrong and just want to be in charge. We’ve all known those people since we were kids. Standing up to them, to the kids who did wrong things and didn’t care because they wanted to be in charge–we called them bullies then and should do so now–can make you unpopular. It doesn’t make you feel better. But you do it out of self-defense and you do it because someone has to or the world is only a place where wrong things happen.

I understand that people are anxious, and they absolutely have a right to be, about the health of the president and about the danger of his opponent winning in November. But what I’m feeling this morning is the wrongness of Trump’s lies, as baldfaced as they’ve ever been, things that everybody knows are lies. And I’m wishing people would talk about that, would stand up to the bully who lied to us last night and to all the second-tier bullies in his gang, standing next to him on the playground, defending his lies. Otherwise what kind of world is this?